The Authoritarians

advantage of others, made people afraid of him, overpowered others, got away with doing something wrong, or beat somebody to the punch. All of these actions may in turn have been predicated by a “tooth and claw” outlook that he learned from (say) his parents. Or that outlook may just serve as a rationalization for being amoral, unsympathetic, and exploitive because acting this way often pays off. Psychologists talk about the “Law of Effect,” which says you learn to do what works. Being unscrupulous works for social dominators.

Students’ social dominance scores correlate only weakly with their parents’ scores (about .25), so it seems unlikely they learned “Life is a jungle”the same way some high RWA students learned “You are a Baptist”as they grew up. Whatever the parental influence might be, it’s usually strongest between fathers and sons-implicating the Y chromosome, or a lot of cultural shaping on the roles of males.

As I said when we were wondering where authoritarian followers come from, we’d be foolish to dismiss the genetic possibilities here. In most animal species social dominance determines who will reproduce and who will not, (i.e., whose genes will be passed on and whose won’t). So some people may just be born with a greater tendency to try to intimidate and dominate others. If these attempts pay off, these “natural bullies” will be on their way. Others may have the genes but not the “muscle” or the smarts to carry it off. Others may become social dominators strictly through their experiences. Research someday will say, I suspect.

An Experiment Combining Social Dominators and Right-Wing Authoritarians

What happens when social dominators and authoritarian followers meet and begin interacting, not in a coffee shop, but in some sort of structured activity? Imagine you are the General Manager in the Chemical Division of a large multi-national corporation. Your division makes a product called “It’s So Clean” in a plant in France. Unfortunately, manufacturing “It’s So Clean” produces an “it’s so dirty” toxic by-product which you have been storing in cheap containers that, again unfortunately, degrade rather quickly. Your corporation has thus been contaminating the ground water with a poisonous chemical, and various ministries of the French government are suing your pants off because—and this is most, most unfortunate—the cheap containers you have been using turn out to be illegal in France. In fact they are illegal in all of the industrialized world because, duh, they quickly spring a leak!

Your division can get better, legal containers that would add 44% to the waste management costs of making “It’s So Clean,” or it can move to Argentina. Why Argentina? Because, you are told in this exercise, the government there will let you use your leaking containers, and will give you tax breaks as well if you re-locate. Also, your labor costs will go down because wages are low in Argentina and the workers don’t expect benefits or pensions. So what are you going to do?

You don’t make this decision by yourself. There’s another manager from your division, an Operations Officer who is lower on the totem pole than you, and you two are going to talk over the situation. And you yourself, the person who is amazingly reading a book on a computer monitor, don’t have to make any decision at all because you’re just reading a book, right? But many pairs of female students at the Universities of Waterloo and Guelph in Ontario had to hash out this problem as part of a psychology experiment, and decide where “It’s So Clean” should be manufactured.

Some of the women were chosen for this experiment and maneuvered into being the higher-up General Manager because they had scored rather highly (for women) on the Social Dominance Orientation scale. For comparative purposes, other women were recruited and put in the General Manager position because they had scored pretty low in dominance. No matter what, the part of the lower-ranking Operations Officer was played by a confederate who basically did the “Smithers thing” and went along with whatever the boss wanted. And you know what? High social dominators were about three times as likely as low social dominators to move the operation—lock, stock, and leaking barrels—to Argentina where they would poison the groundwater and take advantage of the tax breaks and cheap labor. (Heck, they weren’t going to have to drink the water.)

Given what we know about social dominators, that figures, doesn’t it? All right, let’s do the experiment in a different way. This time the confederate plays the role of the superior General Manager, and she’s “Montgomery Burns” and wants to move the operation to Argentina. Real subjects get to be the underling this time, and they can go along with the boss or try to get the boss to do, in my opinion, the right thing. Some of the real subjects scored highly on the RWA scale. They are thus, we believe almost to the point of dogmatism, authoritarian followers as a group. Other real subjects were recruited because they cranked out low RWA scores; we don’t expect them to be very submissive to authority.

And guess what. The high RWAs went along with the unethical decision a lot more than the low RWAs did. In fact they liked it, they said in private afterwards, it was the right thing to do, and they gave their boss a high rating. The less authoritarian students did not like the boss’s decision and said so, and they did not like the boss either. The confederate who played the role of boss, who never knew whether an underling was a high or low RWA, rated each subject on how compliant the subject had been. High RWAs were judged significantly more compliant than the low RWAs were.

Well that figures too, right? But maybe all we’ve found is another example of how high RWAs put dollars ahead of the environment. So let’s do the experiment one more time, only we won’t use confederates at all. Instead we’ll pair up two female students, both real subjects, one of whom is a high social dominator, while the other is a high RWA—our two kinds of authoritarians. Half the time we’ll arrange things so that the social dominator is the boss, and the authoritarian follower is the underling. But in the other pairs of subjects, we’ll declare the high RWA the boss, and the social dominator has to be the underling. Now, where is that plant going to go? The pairs were much more likely to reach an unethical decision and head Down Argentina Way when a social dominator was boss and the high RWA was the underling.

This is now called the “lethal union” in this field of research. ^[7] When social dominators are in the driver’s seat, and right-wing authoritarians stand at their beck and call, unethical things appear much more likely to happen. True, sufficiently skilled social dominators served by dedicated followers can make the trains run on time. But you have to worry about what the trains may be hauling when dominators call the shots and high RWAs do the shooting. The trains may be loaded with people crammed into boxcars heading for death camps.

And of course this lethal union is likely to develop in the real world. Authoritarian followers don’t usually try to become leaders. Instead they happily play subservient roles, and can be expected to especially enjoy working for social dominators, who will (you can bet your bottom dollar) take firm control of things, and who share many of the followers’ values and attitudes. The “connection” connects between these two opposites because they attract each other like the north and south poles of two magnets. The two can then become locked in a cyclonic death spiral that can take a whole nation down with them.

Double Highs: The Dominating Authoritarian Personality

In the “It’s So Clean” experiment just described, the high social dominators were not also high RWAs. They were just ordinary social dominators, the sort we’ve been talking about so far in this chapter, who we know seldom score highly on the RWA scale because there’s just a small correlation between RWA and Social Dominance scores. But you’ll recall that at the beginning of this chapter I said this small relationship is stuffed with significance. It’s time for me to put up or shut up.

The small correlation exists because 5 to 10 percent of my samples score highly on both tests. I call these folks “Double Highs,” and while you only find them by the handful, they are a fascinating group to study.^[8] For starters, they win the gold medal in the Prejudice Olympics, whether you’re talking about prejudice against racial and ethnic minorities, hostility toward homosexuals, or men-who-hate-women-who-wantto-control-