I would point out some differences, however. First, the early childhood explanations of adult authoritarianism have always been way ahead of the data—and in some cases were trotted out in spite of the data. (See pp. 33-49 of my 1981 book, Right-Wing Authoritarianism for a critique of some of this literature). It now appears that adult authoritarianism begins to coalesce as an organized set of attitudes during adolescence, where (to be sure) it sometimes follows the furrow plowed by the parents. But it also can take off in quite a different direction depending on the child’s experiences in life.
In particular, the connection between receiving corporal punishment in childhood and becoming an authoritarian has always been a wandering stereotype searching for evidence. I have looked several times for an association between students’ RWA scale scores and their accounts, or their parents’ accounts, of how often they were struck when growing up. The correlations usually turned up, but were always weak. (less than .20; see pages 260-265 of Right-Wing Authoritarianism). In 2000 and 2001 I revisited the issue asking nearly 1000 students how they had been punished when younger. Virtually all of them (92%) reported having been struck at least once, with the average being five times. Again high RWAs tended to have received more spankings than the rest of the sample, but only modestly so. I don’t know of anyone who has found even a moderate connection between childhood physical punishment and adult RWA scores. (I also would not bet the farm on a big reliable difference emerging in how securely liberals versus conservatives were attached to their parents.)
Second, some of Lakoff’s explanation appears to apply (as we shall see later in this book) much more to authoritarian leaders than to authoritarian followers. His stress upon competition’s being a crucial ingredient (p. 68) in the conservative outlook well describes the leaders, but authoritarian followers seldom endorse this point of view.
Third, I believe the process of becoming a high RWA, or a low one, is more complicated than Lakoff’s model allows. Religion’s ability to sometimes independently pump up right-wing sentiments, and higher education’s ability to lower them get little play in Moral Politics, and the genetic possibilities are barely touched upon (pp. 134-135). Instead the focus remains on parental practice. But if you look at pages 73-74 of my 1996 book, The Authoritarian Specter (go ahead; I’ll wait) you’ll find that the correlation on the RWA scale between members of 299 pairs of same-sexed fraternal twins averaged .50. While this constitutes a sturdy relationship, far bigger than the things social scientists usually discover, it still leaves most of the individuals’ personal level of authoritarianism unexplained. And these pairs of people were born at the same time, raised at the same time by the same parents, went to the same schools and churches, had the same peer group, probably watched lots of TV together, and so on. (Identical twins raised together [N = 418 pairs] understandably correlated a hunkier .65 with each other.) Thus the origins of right-wing authoritarianism appear much more complicated than those advanced by the dichotomous, one-factor typology one might project from Lakoff’s model.
6 See if you can top this one. My local newspaper recently carried a story about a woman in a nearby city who wrote a letter to the editor criticizing the mayor and city council. She said the present council lacked initiative and acted too often in the interest of “boys with money and toys.” A few days later the pastor of the Pentecostal church she attends wrote her, saying her letter was an embarrassment because good Christians do not publicly criticize their leaders. He told her to find another church if she was not going to change her ways. (“ ‘Bad sheep’ raises ire of pastor,” Winnipeg Free Press, August 22, 2006, P. A6.)
7 The correlations between the first and second set of answers to the RWA scale were .62 over 12 years, .59 over 18 years, and .57 over 27 years. Since the RWA scale sports quite a high test-retest reliability, these numbers indicate the considerable extent to which these people changed after their 18th birthday. Roll over, Sigmund.
8 Here are two analgesics that parents can take for their aching psyches. When your kids start giving you action about what a tyrant you are, tell them you didn’t believe so much in submitting to authority until they came along. And when you do something dumb and your kids find out, you can at least wrap yourself in the warm blanket of realizing you have probably made your kids less authoritarian by displaying your incompetence. I know I did.
Chapter 3.
How Authoritarian Followers Think
We meet again. If you are keeping track of my promises, as we roll along together on the internet, I said in the Introduction that we would figure out why authoritarian followers think in the bizarre and perplexing way they so often do. The key to the puzzle springs from Chapter 2’s observation that, first and foremost, followers have mainly copied the beliefs of the authorities in their lives. They have not developed and thought through their ideas as much as most people have. Thus almost anything can be found in their heads if their authorities put it there, even stuff that contradicts other stuff. A filing cabinet or a computer can store quite inconsistent notions and never lose a minute of sleep over their contradiction. Similarly a high RWA can have all sorts of illogical, self-contradictory, and widely refuted ideas rattling around in various boxes in his brain, and never notice it.
So can everybody, of course, and my wife loves to catch inconsistencies in my reasoning when we’re having a friendly discussion about one of my personal failures. But research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and—to top it all off—a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic. These seven deadly shortfalls of authoritarian thinking eminently qualify them to follow a would-be dictator. As Hitler is reported to have said,“What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.”
1. Illogical Thinking
Sitting in the jury room of the Port Angeles, Washington court house in 1989, Mary Wegmann might have felt she had suddenly been transferred to a parallel universe in some Twilight Zone story. For certain fellow-jury members seemed to have attended a different trial than the one she had just witnessed. They could not remember some pieces of evidence, they invented evidence that did not exist, and they steadily made erroneous inferences from the material that everyone could agree on. Encountering my research as she was later developing her Ph.D. dissertation project, she suspected the people who “got it wrong” had been mainly high RWAs. So she recruited a sample of adults from the Clallam County jury list, and a group of students from Peninsula College and gave them various memory and inference tests. For example, they listened to a tape of two lawyers debating a school segregation case on a McNeil/Lehrer News Hour program. Wegmann found High RWAs indeed had more trouble remembering details of the material they’d encountered, and they made more incorrect inferences on a reasoning test than others usually did. Overall, the authoritarians had lots of trouble simply thinking straight.