Mostly Harmless: Right-Wing Authoritarians

In the wake of WWII social scientists tried to make sense of something that most people would have considered unthinkable, the horrors of the holocaust. Most people would think of high-ranking Nazi officers, say a commander of a concentration camp as moral monsters. However, this turned out to be an illusion on closer inspection. These people, who claimed that they had merely followed orders, were mostly faithful husbands, caring fathers, and churchgoing followers of norms. Researchers had expected to find lots of psychopathic traits in them, but the shocking realisation was that these people were “normal” people. The traits that emerged for the followers of authoritarian regimes were basically the very same traits that characterise socially (rather than economically) conservative people: traditional family values, patriotism, and conformity to norms. The scale for right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) was pretty much a personality test that measured conservative traits, such as pro-choice and anti-gay rights.

Conservatives, many of whom hold high moral standards, aren’t bad people, they are mostly harmless. What makes them dangerous is exactly their preoccupation with norms. The people tried in the Nuremberg trials did not have a previous criminal record, but they certainly didn’t think it was wrong to remove “deviant” people from society either. They probably even considered it honourable to prosecute homosexuals and people belonging to ethnic minorities. And it is here, how good, law-abiding people can become bad people: fear of outgroups and dislike of diversity.  “Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.” wrote Howard Zinn. And I have no doubt that it was people high in RWA who burned the witches in the 16th and 17th centuries out of fear of difference and stupidity.

The researcher who has most closely come to be associated with RWA is Bob Altemeyer. His book The Authoritarians, which I can’t recommend highly enough,  is available for download for free from his website:  https://theauthoritarians.org/options-for-downloading-authoritarian-nightmare/

Bob Altemeyer found that people with high RWA are characterised by three traits:

• Submissiveness to strong leaders
• Aggression towards outgroups and deviants
• Conventionalism

So, people high in RWA would agree with the following statement:

What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil, protect us from immigrants and take us back to our true path, which includes religious and traditional family values that everyone should follow.

People low in RWA would agree with the following statement, on the other hand:

There is nothing wrong with immigration, homosexuality, nudism, abortion and a woman going to work while her husband is taking paternity leave.

Anybody reading Altemeyer’s book before 2016 may have predicted Trump’s victory in the presidential election and will understand why Trumpism hasn’t gone even though Trump himself is most likely history. One of the most illuminating passages in his book is the following about the cold war and the kind of people who maintained it for so long:

As soon as Gorbachev lifted the restraints on doing psychological research in the Soviet Union an acquaintance of mine, Andre Kamenshikov, administered a survey to students at Moscow State University with the same freedom that western researchers take for granted. The students answered the RWA scale and as well a series of questions about who was the “good guy” and who was the “bad guy” in the Cold War. For example, did the USSR start the arms race, or the USA? Would the United States launch a sneak nuclear attack on the Soviet Union if it knew it could do so without retaliation? Would the USSR do that to the United States? Does the Soviet Union have the right to invade a neighbor who looks like it might become allied with the United States? Does the USA have that right when one of its neighbors starts cozying up to the USSR? At the same time Andre was doing his study, I asked the same questions at three different American universities. We found that in both countries the high RWAs believed their government’s version of the Cold War more than most people did. Their officials wore the white hats, the authoritarian followers believed, and the other guys were dirty rotten warmongers. And that’s most interesting, because it means the most cock-sure belligerents in the populations on each side of the Cold War, the ones who hated and blamed each other the most, were in fact the same people, psychologically. If they had grown up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, they probably would have believed the leaders they presently despised, and despised the leaders they now trusted. [...] High RWAs in the USSR turned out to be mainly members of the Communist Party. So psychologically they were right-wing authoritarian followers, even though we would say they were, as Communists, extreme political and economic left wingers.

This is quite something, the very same people who were most eager to go on witch hunts for communists in the USA were very similar psychologically to the people who were most eager to obtain communist party membership in the USSR. Wow!  That’s a tragicomedy. What was going on???

I have been arguing that people can be divided roughly into four evolutionary types based on subsistence: hunting, gatherer, farming and herding. If our ancestors practised farming, natural selection would have produced something very similar to RWA. Early farmers had a hierarchical-bureaucratic organisation that foragers and pastoralists lacked, they couldn’t easily relocate in the face of external adversity, and therefore required strong leadership. Being similar and conformist also made it easy to distinguish between friend and foe. Farmer types would therefore have an evolutionary programming of maximum in-group loyalty and maximum out-group distrust and have a high degree of what Michele Gelfand calls “tightness”.

The vast majority of people alive now are farmer types as they created the conditions for high reproductive rates (foragers have only one child in four years vs two for farmers). Not all farmer types are very high in RWA, life circumstances play just as important role as genetics. Of course, farmer types enjoy a certain degree of freedom as well but are the first to yearn for law, order and a strong ruler when the going gets tough. It’s an evolutionary instinct that currently many populist politicians all over the western world are appealing to. Farmer types become dangerous when they fall into this trap and vote for undemocratic populist leaders, thus undermining the very foundations of democracy.

Farmer types are mostly really nice and friendly people who most people wouldn't mind having as neighbours. However, it’s important to be aware of our evolutionary tendencies, in order to avoid the pitfalls of human history. Witchhunts and fascism should remain just history and not repeat themselves.

For more on the different evolutionary temperaments check out my book Different Kinds of Minds: The Evolution of Us