Tag Archives: liberal

I originally posted the following information and commentary onto my Facebook wall…

“Politically Correct”

Tracking Down the Elusive Left-Wing Authoritarian:
http://reason.com/blog/2018/03/08/tracking-down-the-elusive-leftwing-autho

(Ronald Bailey) In The Authoritarian Specter, the Harvard social scientist Robert Altemeyer asked, “Is the ‘authoritarian on the left’ like the Loch Ness Monster: an occasional shadow, but no monster?”

Altemeyer is the man who in 1981 devised the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale, a test widely used to measure this personality and ideological variable. 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.

(Read entire article here…)

My Commentary: They not only exist, but often score higher on the authoritarian scale than their conservative counterparts.