Nicene Creed (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1982, 21, pp. 317-326), you’ll find the former correlations are much stronger. Item 16 does not measure time-honored, customary religious sentiment so much as it measures right-wing authoritarianism dressed up in sanctimonious clothes. The same is true of all the other religion items on the RWA scale—most of which came onto the RWA scale relatively recently as authoritarianism in North America increasingly became expressed in religious terms. Furthermore, these items all individually correlate with the authoritarian behaviors we shall be discussing in this chapter.
Unless you think that conservatives (as opposed to authoritarians) are inclined to follow leaders no matter what, pitch out the Constitution, attack whomever a government targets, and so on— which I do not think—this too indicates that the items are not revealing conservatism, but authoritarianism.
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8 The RWA scale is well-disguised. Personality tests are usually phrased in the first person (e.g., “I have strange thoughts while in the bathtub”) whereas attitude surveys typically are not (e.g., “Bath tubs should keep to ‘their place’ in a house”). So it is easy to pass off the RWA scale, a personality test, as yet another opinion survey. Most respondents think that it seeks “opinions about society” or has “something to do with morals.”
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9 For the same good reasons, it’s out of bounds to give the RWA scale to your loved ones, and unloved ones, to show them how “authoritarian they are.”
By the way, chances are you have relatively unauthoritarian attitudes. You see, authoritarian followers are not likely to be reading this book in the first place, especially if their leaders told them it was full of evil lies, or schluffed it off as “scientific jibberish.” (This is not exactly a book that an authoritarian leader would want his followers to read. Don’t expect it to be featured as a prime selection by the Authoritarian Book of the Month Club.) Still, the real test of how authoritarian or unauthoritarian we are comes from how we act in various situations. And that, we shall see at the end of this book, is a whole different ball game than answering a personality test.
I am, incidentally, taking a minor chance by letting you score your own personality test in this book. I conceivably could get kicked out of the American or Canadian Psychological Associations—if I belonged to them. And for good reason: people have a long history of over-valuing psychological test results—which I have tried to warn you about. A good example of this popped up on the internet right after John Dean’s book, Conservatives Without Conscience, was published. Almost immediately a thread was begun on the Daily KOS site by someone who had Googled “authoritarianism” and found (s/he thought) the research program summarized in Dean’s book. S/he described the theory and also placed the personality test at the heart of this program right in the posting. Tons of people immediately jumped in, talking about how low they had scored on the test, how relieved they were that they weren’t an authoritarian, and how the theory and the attitudes mentioned on the test seemed so amazingly true and reminded them of “definite authoritarians” they knew.
Trouble was, they got the wrong research program and the wrong test. People were basing their analysis on a theory and scale developed during the 1940s, which has long been discredited and abandoned by almost all of the researchers in the field. So (1) Don’t pay much attention to your score on the RWA scale, and (2) Realize how easy it is to perceive connections that aren’t really there.
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10 One thing we haven’t discussed is why half of the statements on the RWA scale (and any good personality test) are worded in sort of the “opposite way” such that you have to disagree with them to look authoritarian. The answer, it turns out, is quite important if you care about doing meaningful research with surveys or if you want to be a critical consumer of surveys. People tend to say “Yes” or “Agree” when they (1) don’t understand a statement, (2) don’t have an opinion, or (3) (Horror!) don’t care about your survey. It’s similar to what happens to me when I’m walking down the street, and an acquaintance on the other side yells something at me. If I didn’t hear clearly what he said (an increasingly likely event, I confess) I’ll often just smile and nod and continue on my way. Now this may prove idiotic. Maybe the person yelled, “Bob, you’re walking on wet cement!” But I didn’t know what he said; I assumed it was just a greeting, so I smiled and nodded and moved on. Well sometimes people just smile and nod and move on when they’re answering surveys.
Political party pollsters know this, and that’s why they word their surveys so that agreement will make their side look good, as in, “Do you think the governor is doing a good job?” If 50 percent of the public truly thinks so, the poll may well show 65 percent like the gov. But the trouble is, on some personality tests you can get so much smiling and nodding that people who are normal but indifferent will score abnormally high, invalidating the results. So it’s wise to balance a scale so that a person has to disagree half the time to get a high score. Balancing doesn’t stop the nodding and noodling, but meaningless agreement with the negatives cancels out the meaningless agreement with the positives and keeps the total score in the middle of the scale, where it can’t do much harm.
(Beware: the last paragraph was the “fun part” of this note, so you can imagine what the rest is going to be like!) “Smiling and nodding” was at the heart of the hairy mess that early research on authoritarianism got itself into. All of the items on the first “big” authoritarian follower measure, something called the F (for Fascism) scale which came out of that 1940s research program mentioned in the previous note, were worded such that the authoritarian answer was to agree. So its scores could have been seriously affected by “yea-saying.” But other researchers said, “Maybe ‘yea-saying’ is itself part of being a compliant authoritarian follower. Let’s get some authoritarian followers and find out.” “Uh, how are we going to get them?” “Let’s use the F scale to identify them!” “But that’s what we’re trying to decide about!”
Many researchers were swamped by this dog-chases-its-own-tail whirlpool of reasoning until the mess was eventually straightened out by a carefully balanced version of the F scale. It showed that the original version was massively contaminated by response sets. These studies led to the development of the RWA scale, which was built from the ground up to control yea-saying, and studies with the RWA scale have made it clear that authoritarian followers do tend to agree more, in general, with statements on surveys than most people do. It is part of their generally compliant nature. It only took me about twenty years to get all this untangled, and would you believe it, some people still think fixated researchers have no fun!
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11 What is a “high RWA”? When I am writing a scientific report of my research I call the 25% of a sample who scored highest on the RWA scale “High RWAs” with a capital-H. Similarly I call the 25% who scored lowest “Low RWAs,” and my computer runs wondrous statistical tests comparing Highs with Lows. But in this book where I’m describing results, not documenting them, I’ll use “high RWAs” more loosely to simply mean the people in a study who score relatively highly on the RWA scale, and “low RWAs” will mean those who score relatively low on the test.
If I’ve made myself at all clear here, you’ll know that I am comparing relative differences in a sample. I am not talking about types of individuals, the way you might say Aunt Barbara is an extrovert while Uncle Jim is an introvert. High and low RWAs are different from one another but not opposites. It’s a matter of degree, not a hard cut, “100% versus 0%” distinction.
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12 (As always, reading this note is purely voluntary and in this particular case may even be a sign of madness.) We need to talk about generalizations, don’t we. All of the findings I shall be presenting in this book are generalizations-with-exceptions, which means that whatever the issue, some high RWAs acted the way low RWAs typically did, and some lows acted like highs usually did. That’s the stuff that the social sciences crank out, journal article after journal article: general truths, but hardly perfect ones.
Some generalizations have so many exceptions that you wonder why they’re worth the bother; a lot of
