2005). See also George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 33. (Lakoff’s work is fascinating, and his credentials are strong, but his book really provides no documentation. He does provide a laundry list of references at the back of the book, but it is impossible to tell where his material comes from. It appears he speaks largely ex cathedra. Since there was no way to examine his sources, I found I could not use his material. I was unsuccessful in my efforts to contact him, with my e-mail resulting only in my being added to the mailing list of his foundation.)
T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Bruswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sandford, in collaboration with Betty Aron, Maria Hertz Levinson, and William Morrow, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1950), v.
Alan Wolfe, “‘The Authoritarian Personality’ Revisited,” Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 52 (October 7, 2005), B-12.
Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 8.
Bob Altemeyer is an American scholar who went to Canada to teach psychology at the University of Manitoba, where for several decades he has been a relentless researcher. An article written for Political Psychology described Altemeyer’s work since the 1970s as “convincing [other] scholars (in Canada and beyond) of the fruitfulness of [his] endeavors,” for he has undertaken literally “hundreds of experiments in the past three decades,” achieving “admirable robustness in terms of [his work’s] reliability and validity.” Paul Nesbitt-Larking, “Political Psychology in Canada,” Political Psychology, vol. 25, no. 1 (2004), 97, 106–7. The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology reported that Altemeyer’s work “powerfully predicts a wide range of political, social, ideological, and intergroup phenomena.” David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Because Altemeyer’s work is critically insightful to understanding contemporary conservatism, it is regrettable that the principal audience for his extensive writing is composed of other psychologists and social scientists. In an effort to translate his findings, I asked him many questions over an extended period that he was kind enough to answer. Any mistakes in presenting his work are mine, not his.
A person being tested is typically asked to indicate the extent to which he or she agrees or disagrees with each statement by being given the following options: very strongly disagree (-4), strongly disagree (-3), moderately disagree (-2), and slightly disagree (-1), and corresponding positive values for agreement (ranging from +1 to +4). If the respondent feels neutral about a statement, he or she can give an answer that has no value—a zero. If he or she strongly agrees with part of a statement (+3), but slightly disagrees with another part of the statement (-1), the respondent would be in moderate agreement (+2) after doing the math.
Stanley Feldman, “Enforcing Social Conformity: A Theory of Authoritarianism,” Political Psychology, vol. 24, no. 1 (2003), 41, 44.
“In a detailed review of the research…[it has been] shown that authoritarianism is consistently associated with right-wing but not left-wing ideology.” Feldman, “Enforcing Social Conformity: A Theory of Authoritarianism,” 42.
“A large array of studies…document high correlations between Authoritarianism and Conservatism.” Gerard Saucier, “Isms and the Structure of Social Attitudes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 78, no. 2(2000), 366–67.
Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 296.
Markus Kemmelmeier, “Authoritarianism and Candidate Support in the U.S. Presidential Elections of 1996 and 2000,” Journal of Social Psychology (April 2004), 218.
Bob Altemeyer, “The Other ‘Authoritarian Personality.’” In John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology (New York: Psychology Press, 2004), 88.
Sears et al., eds. Oxford Handbook, 577.
Bob Altemeyer, “Highly Dominating, Highly Authoritarian Personalities,” Journal of Social
