Altemeyer's Right Wing Authoritarianism Scale

Bob Altemeyer is a retired Professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba. In 1981 he defined the right-wing authoritarian personality and produced the RWA measurement scale, and a subsequent scale for the curiously related left-wing authoritarian scale.

Altemeyer defined the right-wing authoritarian personality as a person who:

1. is naturally submissive to authority figures that they consider to be legitimate,
2. acts aggressively in the name of said authority figures, and/or
3. is very conventional (i.e. conformist) in thought and behavior.

The LWA is not the opposite as some might assume, with differences described below.

Right-wing authoritarian personality - Wikipedia

In psychology, the right-wing authoritarian (RWA) is a personality type that describes somebody who is highly submissive to their authority figures, acts aggressively in the name of said authorities, and is conformist in thought and behavior.[1] The prevalence of this personality type in a population varies from culture to culture, as a person's upbringing and education play a strong role in determining whether somebody develops this sort of personality.[2]

The right-wing authoritarian personality was defined by Bob Altemeyer as a refinement of the research of Theodor Adorno. Adorno was the first to propose the existence of an authoritarian personality as part of an attempt to explain the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, but his theory fell into disfavor because it was based on Freudian pseudo-science. Altemeyer nonetheless felt that Adorno was on to something, and so developed a more scientifically rigorous theory.

The RWA scale was designed to measure authoritarianism in North America. It has proven to be similarly reliable in English-speaking countries such as Australia, but less so in other countries such as France due to cultural differences and translation issues.[3]


Tracking Down the Elusive Left-Wing Authoritarian

Left-wing authoritarians
"... Social scientists generally report that right-wing authoritarians are conformists who obey established authorities, adhere to conventional social norms, and are hostile to people who flout both. Using such tests, they have argued that conservatives have a higher need for structure, lower attributional complexity, lower openness to experience, and higher perceptions of threat than do liberals—basically, that conservatives are mentally and socially rigid.

"Now a new study in the journal Political Psychology claims that left-wing authoritarianism is no mere shadow. "I became interested in left-wing authoritarianism in particular because some people have said it isn't a very real or likely phenomenon—and yet I know people I would describe as left-wing authoritarians," the study's lead author, University of Montana social psychologist Lucian Conway, tells PsyPost. "So I was curious to figure that out." The researchers set out to test the authoritarianism symmetry hypothesis, which "suggests that the same processes that create authoritarianism in right-wing persons also operate in left-wing persons in essentially equal degrees."

"Conway and his colleagues created a Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA) scale by rewriting the RWA to be targeted toward acceptance of liberal authoritarian leaders. For example, an item from the standard RWA scale reads: "It's always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubts in people's minds." In the LWA scale, this was adapted to read: "It's always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in science with respect to issues like global warming and evolution than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubts in people's minds."

"The researchers then administered their new LWA scale to several hundred college students and to several hundred other people recruited via Mechanical Turk. Participants filled out questionnaires on their political and ideological predilections, measuring among other things their prejudices about religious and racial minorities, their tendency toward dogmatism, and the strength of their convictions."

-----------
When the researchers analyzed their results they found the results were consistent with the authoritarianism symmetry hypothesis.

____________________________________

The wiki article is somewhat lengthy, likely prompting some to respond with tl;dr. Regrettable for them.

The Right-Wing quesetionaire can be found online and each of the 22 questions are scaled from -4 through neutral 0 to +4, with the lowest possible score a 20 and the highest possible, 180. I took the test and tipped the scale with a 76. Altemeyer reported his introductory psychology students at the U of Manitoba averaged 75.

What's your score? http://www.panojohnson.com/automatons/rwa-scale.xhtml

 

I swing a bit more to the right than what's being reported on the thread by others who have taken the test, but I sort of expected that. I'm comfortable with who I am. Carry on, good people.

 

What's your score, Rick? 179?