The Australian Journal of Psychology, 1990, 42, 87-111.
(With a post-publication addendum following the original article)
BOOK REVIEW
Enemies of freedom: Understanding Right-wing authoritarianism By R. Altemeyer. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1988. Hardbound. 407 pp. $22.95
It is presumably only a minor distinction but it is nonetheless the case that Australia is home to all three academics who regularly write on the topic of authoritarianism. Aside from these three (K. Rigby, J.J. Ray and P.C.L. Heaven) there are only authors who contribute one or two publications on the topic and then fall silent. It seems therefore very appropriate that the latest book on authoritarianism should be reviewed in this journal.
As it happens, the book concerned invites extreme derision from an Australian point of view. It shows no awareness of anything that the Australian authors have long been debating. Where the Australian authors have long been struggling with what should be deemed "authoritarian" Altemeyer even fails to comprehend what is meant by "Right-wing". He trots out a definition that may owe something to dictionaries but which shows no current political awareness whatsoever. He equates it with the basic lexical definition of "conservatism" -- in summary form "rejection of change". In other words, figures like Brezhnev and Li Peng are Rightists and Margaret Thatcher is a Leftist!
Such theoretical incompetence is hard to believe. The fact that those who are traditionally in politics called "conservatives" have long opposed extensions of State power, control and intervention whereas Leftists want to extend State power, control and intervention is quite lost on Altemeyer. Only when State interventionism was all the rage was it literally "conservative" to oppose it. Now that it is not, the literal meaning of the term "conservative" applies best to Leftists -- something which many journalists have noticed but which Altemeyer has not.
The foundation for this theoretical incompetence would seem to be Altemeyer's determination to read as little as possible on his topic before sitting down to write. Not one of the papers by Rigby is cited by Altemeyer and Heaven is cited once only because he once used Altemeyer's scale. Of my more than 100 papers on the topic only three are cited -- two of which used Altemeyer's scale. Even Altemeyer, however, seems embarrassed by his failure to use so many of my papers. He seems to be trying to excuse himself by giving a critique of just one of my papers -- the paper in which I introduced my "Directiveness" scale for the measurement of authoritarianism (Ray, 1976). He starts out by asserting that in that paper I made the mistake of claiming that Milgram used students as subjects and Psychology Department staff as the authority figure. That is not true. What I said was that the "tradition of research" emanating from Milgram's work was so characterized. In other words, Milgram's successors were less rigorous than Milgram. So even when he is trying to score (surely trivial) points, Altemeyer still cannot get it right. He then goes on to make some criticisms of my Directiveness scale and concludes that my work is therefore to be dismissed as irrelevant. He neglects to let his readers know that I also found that the first form of the Directiveness scale had faults and that he is criticizing the Mark I version of a scale that is now in its Mark VI form! He does seem quite desperate to avoid the need for reading anything.
Is this because his own research is so superior? Far from it. His RWA (Right-wing authoritarianism) scale looked to me suspiciously like an ordinary conservatism scale so in Ray (1985) I used a random community sample to correlate it both with a well-validated measure of authoritarian personality and with two fairly orthodox scales of conservatism, one of which was balanced to control out any influence of authoritarianism (i.e. Left-authoritarian and Right-authoritarian items were included in equal numbers). Altemeyer's RWA scale correlated overwhelmingly with both conservatism scales but not at all with the authoritarianism scale. In other words, Altemeyer's naivety about the concept of conservatism has simply caused him to reinvent it under another name! Altemeyer mentions this finding in his present book but rejects it on the grounds that I devised the conservatism scales. I suppose that I could with equal coherence reject the RWA scale solely because Altemeyer devised it.
Given Altemeyer's theoretical deficiencies, it should come as no surprise that his book arrives at the ultimate anti-climax. His alleged scale of Right-wing authoritarianism is, by Altemeyer's own admission, an almost complete failure at predicting anything Right-wing! Scores on it are roughly normally distributed so it should discriminate well but in fact it is a virtually complete failure at predicting political candidate preference. The form of conservatism it measures is essentially non-political. The basis for Altemeyer's claim that his work explains Right-wing authoritarianism (rather than non-political conservatism) is, therefore, a considerable mystery.
J.J. Ray
University of N.S.W.
REFERENCES
Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.
Ray, J.J. (1985) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.
POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDUM
I should have mentioned above that there is another Canadian study that is everything which Altemeyer's work is not -- the study by Sutherland & Tanenbaum (1980). This was a remarkably rigorous study that used a large Canadian general population sample and applied to it scales that distinguished carefully between the various supposed "components" of authoritarianism. It may be noted from their Table III that high and low scorers of their measure of "General Obedience" (excerpted from the F scale) were virtually identical in political party orientation -- both being on average very much at the political centre in fact.
I did not above give the exact reference to the failure of the RWA scale to predict vote. My reference was to p. 239 of Enemies of Freedom -- where Altemeyer makes the bald statement that "Right-wing authoritarians show little preference in general for any political party". So in what sense are the statements in the scale "right-wing" if right-wingers are no more likely to endorse them than Leftists are? Altemeyer is like a character in "Alice in Wonderland" where words can mean anything that he says they mean.
Even Altemeyer however seems eventually to have become perturbed after the decline and fall of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe enabled use of his RWA scale there. Studies in the East such as those by Altemeyer & Kamenshikov (1991), McFarland, Ageyev and Abalakina-Paap (1992) and Hamilton, Sanders & McKearney (1995) showed that high RWA scores were associated with support for Communism!! So an alleged "Rightist" scale went from being non-political to being a measure of Leftism! If you took it at face-value, it showed Communists were Rightists! -- the absurdity of which I was not slow to point out at the time (Ray, 1992).
After that, Altemeyer more or less gave up his original claim and engaged in a bit of historical revisionism. He said (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 218) that when he "began talking about right-wing authoritarianism, I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived established authorities in one's life". It is true that he did originally define what he was measuring in something like that way (in detail, he defined it as a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness) but what was new, unusual or "brazen" about such a conceptualization defies imagination. The concept of submission to established authority was, for instance, part of the old Adorno et al (1950) work. What WAS brazen was Altemeyer's claim that what he was measuring was characteristic of the political Right. But it is precisely the "Right-wing" claim that he now seems to have dropped and the RWA scale is now said to measure simply submission to authority.
Even that claim, however, seems ambitious. In a general population survey, Heaven (1984) found that the peer-rated behaviours that the RWA scale significantly predicted were submissiveness (r = 0.22) and authoritarianism (0.20) but the very low level of the correlations may be noted. More importantly, however, there is evidence showing that there is no such thing as a consistent or overall attitude to authority -- not even to conventional authority (Ray, 1972; Ray & Lovejoy, 1990). People are discriminating about what authority they will accept and when they will accept it. So "acceptance of conventional authority" is now clearly a "unicorn" concept -- i.e. there turns out to be no reality there to correspond the words. But anybody who talked to committed U.S. conservatives about the U.S. Supreme Court in late 2003 would soon get an idea of how little respect conservatives have for THAT major example of conventional authority! James Lindgren has also drawn together some U.S. public opinion poll data showing that respect for authority among the public at large is anything but monolithic.
It may also be noted that, despite all the evidence to the contrary and Altemeyer's own backdown, the RWA scale still seems to be referred to by all its users as measuring something "Right-wing". As I have pointed out at some length elsewhere (Ray, 1987) psychologists hold to their prejudices so rigidly that they rarely let little things like evidence disturb them.
Altemeyer did however have still more to contribute in his role as the clown of political psychology. He then went on to develop a scale of Left-Wing Authoritarianism -- the LWA scale. When he tested it on over two thousand people however, he could not find one single high-scorer on it! The LWA scale did not detect a single Left-wing authoritarian! Again he himself proved that his scale was not valid -- unless of course one is so totally one-eyed as to accept that there ARE no Left-wing authoritarians. If you are as good at waving magic wands as Altemeyer is, you might perhaps be able to claim that no such thing as Communism has ever existed, I guess.
ALTEMEYER ON RELIGION
Unsurprisingly, Altemeyer does not seem to have had much success at getting papers published in the journal literature. In fact I could find only one of them online. So I thought it might be useful for me to append here a few comments on that article.
His paper is about religion and does seem to show the usual Leftist hostility to religion (Islam excepted, of course). He concerns himself with the now hoary question of whether or not religious people are racially prejudiced. The answer of course does to a large degree depend on how you define "religious". But generally, psychological research -- such as mine -- has found no association between orthodox Christian beliefs and racial prejudice. That does not suit religion-hating Leftists at all, however -- as "racist" is one of their handiest terms of abuse. So we find Altemeyer riding to the rescue with a paper headed "Authoritarianism, Religious Fundamentalism, Quest, and Prejudice"
Again in this paper Altemeyer relies heavily on his Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale. As the very name of it implies, it contains a "mixed bag" of statements. Many are worded in a very aggressive and punitive ("authoritarian") way but there are also in the scale statements such as: "National anthems, flags and glorification of one's country should all be de-emphasized to promote the brotherhood of all men" (from p. 305 of Altemeyer's 1981 book). Now how many conservatives would agree with that statement? Very few, I suspect. So agreeing with the aggressive and hostile statements of the RWA scale can get you a high score on it but just rejecting characteristically Leftist statements can also get you a high score on it. So whether any given correlation with the scale arises from its conservative character or its authoritarian character is simply unknowable.
So Altemeyer's failure to recognize that simply being conservative could lead you to get elevated scores on his RWA scale leads him to lots of apparently profound conclusions that are in fact much more parsimoniously (simply) interpreted. For instance, he concludes: "people raised in no religion are apt to be the least authoritarian [conservative] respondents". But all that that finding really tells us is that modern-day North American Christians tend to be conservative. Big news! In a similar vein he supports his assertion that high scorers on his RWA scale [conservatives] are characterized by "deplorable behavior" by showing that they were more supportive of Republican President Richard Nixon and were more opposed to Communists and more dubious about homosexuality. Again: Big news
Anyway, Altemeyer's whole approach in this article is again so silly and naive that it does not deserve a full critique so I will simply move on to a few remarks on what he says about religion and racism. His first interesting statement is this one: "For example, in a study of 533 University of Manitoba students tested in the fall of 1987 by Altemeyer, the RWA Scale correlated .48 with a measure of acceptance of Christian beliefs, the Christian Orthodoxy (CO) Scale ( Fullerton & Hunsberger, 1982). It also correlated .41 with a measure of prejudice against most of the minorities mentioned a few paragraphs ago. But CO scores correlated precisely .00 with prejudice". In other words, Altemeyer found what I found 15 year before him (not that he mentions my work) -- that orthodox Christian beliefs have ZERO correlation with racial prejudice.
That pesky finding did not defeat him, though. He went back to the drawing board and came up with his own measure of religious belief -- a "Religious Fundamentalism" (RF) scale, which was essentially a set of statements that were very dogmatic about the truth of religion. And he went on to show (Phew!) that that scale DID show a small (.30) correlation with racial prejudice. But here's the kicker: Altemeyer's scale of religious belief deliberately EXCLUDED all specifically Christian statements of belief! Even an atheist with a passionate belief in flying saucers could get a high score on it! There is a later study by Ken Deeks here which also used Altemeyer's scales and that study confirms that high scorers on Altemeyer's RF scale (but not Christians) tended to be simple-minded. So once again poor old Alty tried to fudge his data and failed. All he has really shown is that racial prejudice (but not Christianity) tends to be simple-minded.
It may finally be worth noting that my earlier study used a measure of religious dogmatism too (which I called the "religiocentrism" scale) but my scale was specifically Christian in content. And guess what? It too showed NO correlation with ethnic prejudice. So it was only by taking the Christianity out of religion that Altemeyer could show that religious people were bigots. What a laugh! Only too typical of Leftist psychology, however.
REFERENCES
Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.
Altemeyer, R. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Altemeyer, R. & Kamenshikov, A. (1991) Impressions of American and Soviet behaviour: RWA changes in a mirror. South African J. Psychology 21, 255-260.
Hamilton, V. L., Sanders, J., & McKearney, S. J. (1995). Orientations toward authority in an authoritarian state: Moscow in 1990. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 356-365
Heaven P. C. L. (1984) Predicting authoritarian behaviour: analysis of three measures. Personality & Individual Differences, 5, 251-253.
McFarland, S. G., Ageyev, V. S., & Abalakina-Paap, M. A. (1992). Authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 1004-1010
Ray, J.J. (1972) The measurement of political deference: Some Australian data. British Journal of Political Science 2, 244-251.
Ray, J.J. (1987) Intolerance of ambiguity among psychologists: A comment on Maier & Lavrakas. Sex Roles 16, 559-562.
Ray, J.J.(1992) Defining authoritarianism: A comment on Duckitt & Foster, Altemeyer & Kamenshikov and Meloen. South African J. Psychology, 22, 178-179.
Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1990) Does attitude to authority exist? Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 765-769.
Sutherland, S.L. & Tanenbaum, E.J. (1980) Submissive authoritarians: Need we fear the fearful toadie? Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology, 17 (1), 1-23.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Monday, October 17, 2005
Australian J. Psychology, 1983, 35, 267-268
Book Review
Right-Wing Authoritarianism
By Robert A. Altemeyer
Winnipeg, Canada, University of Manitoba Press.
1981. ix + 352. C$30.00.
Review by John Ray
(Sociology, University of New South Wales)
This book has attracted reviews in North America which might well be called ecstatic. It does do well what it sets out to do. To add a little balance, however, one of its previously unremarked limitations might be referred to. In a rather humourous preface, the author makes a considerable point of how long it took him to get the book into print. One might therefore reasonably ask whether it was significantly undated during this period. A glance at the references in the back of the book suggests not. There are a very large number of references to the psychological literature for 1972, a few for 1973, fewer for 1974 and very few indeed after that. The inference from this would seem to be that the book was written in 1973 and 1974, is pretty complete up to 1972 and was very little altered after that. It is therefore much less up to date in its coverage of the relevant literature than its publication date might suggest.
One of the more remarkable features of the book is the saga it relates of the almost heroic efforts Altemeyer made to balance the F scale. He seems to have carried out over many years literally dozens of studies devoted to testing reversed forms of F scale items. In the end he did find 14 items that correlated well with the original items they were derived from and used these to make up a final version of a balanced F scale. He found that his positively and negatively scored items, after all his efforts still were non-significantly correlated. Bathos indeed! He concludes from his failure that acquiescence is indeed a large component of what the F scale measures. One wonders what he will make out of it when he discovers that someone else did finally succeed in producing a satisfactory balanced F scale (Ray, 1972, 1979).
Like most North American authors, Altemeyer seems to know little about the literature outside North America. He does however have the grace to acknowledge this in one of his footnotes. He does at least seem to be aware of the work of Wilson (1973) -- unlike most of his North American colleagues. He makes the interesting point about Wilson's C-scale that its reliability is usually high only because it has such a large number of items (50). He points out that the C-scale's internal consistency (as measured by mean inter-item correlations) is actually quite low and is thus consistent with the scale being quite multi-factorial.
What are Altemeyer's conclusions on the validity of the 'F' scale? He finds that it has predictive success in only two areas. To quote:
After demolishing the F scale, Altemeyer proceeds to develop his own new scale of Right-wing authoritarianism (the RWA scale) and test its correlates. His scale, needless to say, was balanced against acquiescence from the beginning. In the end, however, the only conclusion he seems able to come to firmly about the genesis of Right-wing authoritarianism is that Right-wing authoritarians have generally learnt their Right-wing authoritarianism from their Right-wing authoritarian parents. He rejects the Berkeley view of authoritarianism formed as a response to parental harshness.
It is an enjoyable book and is well worth reading: Some account of work in the field more recent than that covered by Altemeyer can be found in Ray & Lovejoy (1983).
References
Ray, J.J. (1972) A new balanced F scale -- And its relation to social class. Australian Psychologist 7, 155-166.
Ray, J.J. (1979) A short balanced F scale. Journal of Social Psychology, 109, 309-310.
Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1983). The behavioral validity of some recent measures of authoritarianism. Journal of Social Psychology, 120, 91-99.
Wilson, G.D. (1973) The psychology of conservatism. London: Academic Press.
POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDUM
In the above review I was not critical of Altemeyer's claim to have produced a new measure of "Right-wing authoritarianism" because I had not at that time tested the claim for myself. When I did test the claim, however, I found it to be not supported. See below:
Ray, J.J. (1985) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.
For a review of Altemeyer's second book on the subject see:
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Australian Journal of Psychology, 42, 87-111.
FINIS
Book Review
Right-Wing Authoritarianism
By Robert A. Altemeyer
Winnipeg, Canada, University of Manitoba Press.
1981. ix + 352. C$30.00.
Review by John Ray
(Sociology, University of New South Wales)
This book has attracted reviews in North America which might well be called ecstatic. It does do well what it sets out to do. To add a little balance, however, one of its previously unremarked limitations might be referred to. In a rather humourous preface, the author makes a considerable point of how long it took him to get the book into print. One might therefore reasonably ask whether it was significantly undated during this period. A glance at the references in the back of the book suggests not. There are a very large number of references to the psychological literature for 1972, a few for 1973, fewer for 1974 and very few indeed after that. The inference from this would seem to be that the book was written in 1973 and 1974, is pretty complete up to 1972 and was very little altered after that. It is therefore much less up to date in its coverage of the relevant literature than its publication date might suggest.
One of the more remarkable features of the book is the saga it relates of the almost heroic efforts Altemeyer made to balance the F scale. He seems to have carried out over many years literally dozens of studies devoted to testing reversed forms of F scale items. In the end he did find 14 items that correlated well with the original items they were derived from and used these to make up a final version of a balanced F scale. He found that his positively and negatively scored items, after all his efforts still were non-significantly correlated. Bathos indeed! He concludes from his failure that acquiescence is indeed a large component of what the F scale measures. One wonders what he will make out of it when he discovers that someone else did finally succeed in producing a satisfactory balanced F scale (Ray, 1972, 1979).
Like most North American authors, Altemeyer seems to know little about the literature outside North America. He does however have the grace to acknowledge this in one of his footnotes. He does at least seem to be aware of the work of Wilson (1973) -- unlike most of his North American colleagues. He makes the interesting point about Wilson's C-scale that its reliability is usually high only because it has such a large number of items (50). He points out that the C-scale's internal consistency (as measured by mean inter-item correlations) is actually quite low and is thus consistent with the scale being quite multi-factorial.
What are Altemeyer's conclusions on the validity of the 'F' scale? He finds that it has predictive success in only two areas. To quote:
"What can we make of the test's very limited success at predicting (a) hostility toward certain targets, and (b) conservative political sentiment? These findings might be insightful if we know more about them, but as matters stand now, there is a perfectly straightforward interpretation of them: they may just be due to those items on the F Scale whose content reflects (respectively) aggressive and conventional sentiments. Thus the studies on aggression listed in Table 4 may carry no more psychological significance than the fact that people who indicate on the F Scale that they are particularly hostile toward sex criminals, disrespectful youth, rebellious youth, and homosexuals are also aggressive on other measures against these and similarly unconventional individuals. That should not knock anyone off his horse. A major failing of the research we have just reviewed is that nearly all of the investigators who found positive results failed to determine if these results were attributable to the scale as a whole or mainly to subsets of items with rather obvious connections to the criterion."
After demolishing the F scale, Altemeyer proceeds to develop his own new scale of Right-wing authoritarianism (the RWA scale) and test its correlates. His scale, needless to say, was balanced against acquiescence from the beginning. In the end, however, the only conclusion he seems able to come to firmly about the genesis of Right-wing authoritarianism is that Right-wing authoritarians have generally learnt their Right-wing authoritarianism from their Right-wing authoritarian parents. He rejects the Berkeley view of authoritarianism formed as a response to parental harshness.
It is an enjoyable book and is well worth reading: Some account of work in the field more recent than that covered by Altemeyer can be found in Ray & Lovejoy (1983).
References
Ray, J.J. (1972) A new balanced F scale -- And its relation to social class. Australian Psychologist 7, 155-166.
Ray, J.J. (1979) A short balanced F scale. Journal of Social Psychology, 109, 309-310.
Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1983). The behavioral validity of some recent measures of authoritarianism. Journal of Social Psychology, 120, 91-99.
Wilson, G.D. (1973) The psychology of conservatism. London: Academic Press.
POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDUM
In the above review I was not critical of Altemeyer's claim to have produced a new measure of "Right-wing authoritarianism" because I had not at that time tested the claim for myself. When I did test the claim, however, I found it to be not supported. See below:
Ray, J.J. (1985) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.
For a review of Altemeyer's second book on the subject see:
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Australian Journal of Psychology, 42, 87-111.
FINIS
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Personality & Individual Differences, 1987, 8 (5), 771-772.
Books on authoritarianism seem generally to be very popular. Two of them have achieved the status of classics (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford, 1950; Rokeach, 1960) and a more recently published one (Altemeyer, 1981) received initial reviews bordering on the rapturous (e.g. Goldberg, 1982). Perhaps unfortunately, however, the third book mentioned devotes roughly half its pages to an, at times, scathing demolition of the first book mentioned. Popularity is evidently not tied to consensus. In the circumstances it seems fair to ask if Altemeyer (1981) is much of an improvement on Adorno et al. (1950). Does the popularity of the topic mean that our knowledge of it is advancing?
For a start, let it be acknowledged that the first part of Altemeyer's book is quite uncontroversial. His demolition of the work and findings of Adorno et al. (1950) could be repeated from the works of a hundred other authors from Christie and Jahoda (1954) onwards. Altemeyer is remarkable only perhaps for bringing together in one publication so much that is damaging to the Adorno et al. (1950) account. Even here, however, McKinney (1973) may be argued to have done more.
The important question becomes then one of how much Altemeyer has himself accomplished. Has he been able to construct as well as to destroy? It will be argued here that he has constructed very little.
Altemeyer's efforts to construct an alternative account of authoritarianism are, however, quite extensive and might well persuade the casual reader. A brief account of what he proposes is therefore in order.
Most notable of all is that Altemeyer completely sidesteps the important question of the relationship between ideology and authoritarianism. He claims that he is interested in only Right-wing authoritarianism and has virtually nothing to say about either Leftist authoritarianism or authoritarianism in general. This attempted sidestep does seem to be the major source of problems for his account of things. He does of course make some mention of the problem. He 'doubts' (p. 151) that there is any such thing as authoritarianism on the Left. Lenin, Stalin and their heirs among the more 'revolutionary' student Left of contemporary democratic society may be nasty types but they are not authoritarian in Altemeyer's view. In this respect Altemeyer would seem to be at one with Adorno et al. (1950). The California authors, however, did make at least some initial attempt to define authoritarianism and conservatism separately. Altemeyer's only definition of 'Right-wing' appears to be two lines on p. 152. This must be some sort of record for treating briefly such a large topic. Altemeyer's definition of the construct that does interest him, however (i.e. his definition of 'Right-wing authoritarianism') is a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness. The first two elements are surely little more than versions of support for the status quo and, as such, amount to a definition of conservatism more than anything else, while the last could be seen as a reference to the fact that conservatives are more likely to favour military preparedness and wars of various sorts. It would seem that Altemeyer's slighting of the literature on conservatism has simply led him to reinvent the concept. When Altemeyer says, therefore, that Lenin and Stalin are not authoritarian in his sense, he is simply saying that they are not conservative.
In constructing his own measure of authoritarianism (the RWA scale), therefore, Altemeyer could clearly have learnt at least one thing from the work of Adorno et al. (1950). They employed throughout their work separate measures of authoritarianism and conservatism. They could therefore present it as an important empirical finding that the two tended to correlate highly. It has been shown elsewhere (Ray, 1973), in a work that Altemeyer does allude to, that the Adorno procedure was something of a charade but, far from improving on the Adorno procedure, Altemeyer simply ignores the problem. As a result, one has to ask why the RWA scale should not be regarded as just another conservatism scale? It certainly reads like any number of conservatism scales that have been used over the years and from its item content alone it would certainly seem to have no obvious claim to be a particularly authoritarian sort of conservatism scale. One must, as a consequence, ask for validity studies. Does Altemeyer present evidence that, despite appearances, the RWA scale does in fact predict authoritarianism particularly well?
In his quite extensive range of studies with the RWA scale, what Altemeyer seems to have shown is that high scorers have parents who are high scorers and that they tend to accept their parents' religion. They tend to accept or approve of the sort of government activity that liberals criticize and are more punitive towards criminals but not towards Jews. They are more obedient in the Milgram situation at intermediate levels of punishment but not at a dangerous level of punishment (the level Altemeyer refers to as 'big red'). They show a weak tendency towards racist attitudes but not towards discriminatory behaviour. All these seem to be things that could equally well be said of conservatives. For instance, there is an occasional weak association between some scales of conservatism and some scales of racist attitudes (Ray, 1972, Ray & Lovejoy, 1986) but attitudes of any sort are generally poor predictors of racist behaviour (Ray, 1971). Conservatives have also been shown to be more punitive (Boshier and Rae, 1975) but this is probably only to the extent of supporting a general community norm of high punitiveness -- particularly towards criminals (Ray, 1985b). Approval for conventional sources of authority has also been long known as an important element of conservatism (Ray, 1973; Rigby and Rump, 1979).
Even from his own work, therefore, it seems unlikely that Altemeyer has succeeded in studying authoritarianism at all. The picture on the cover of Altemeyer's book appears to be intended to convey the impression that Right-wing authoritarians are rather insane and obsessed people but there is in fact nothing in Altemeyer's findings and research that would support such a characterization. The characterization may nonetheless be true so it may be asked whether there is anything outside Altemeyer's own work that would support his conclusions.
Perhaps because it is early days yet, there appear to be only two published studies which used the Altmeyer RWA scale. In the first; Ray (1985a) applied the RWA scale to a general population sample in conjunction with another authoritarianism scale and another conservatism scale. The conservatism scale was one that had been especially counterbalanced to preclude it from measuring any component of authoritarianism. It was found that the RWA scale correlated very highly with the non-authoritarian conservatism scale and not at all with the authoritarianism scale. In concurrent validity terms, therefore, the RWA scale emerges as a measure of conservatism only. In a second study, Heaven (1984) correlated the RWA scales with peer-ratings of attributes important in the authoritarianism literature. With his student sample Heaven found that the RWA scale failed to yield significant predictions of any of the authoritarianism-related attributes. With his community sample, Heaven found that the RWA scale significantly predicted submissiveness (r = 0.22), authoritarianism (0.20) and conservatism (0.51). Although significant, the first two correlations are quite low so again we must conclude that the RWA scale is above all a measure of conservatism. By contrast, Heaven found that the Ray (1976) Directiveness scale (another measure of authoritarianism) correlated 0.34 with dominance, 0.23 with aggression and not at all with conservatism. A non-ideological scale of authoritarianism is therefore at least possible. In ignoring this possibility, Altemeyer seems to have failed to do anything at all that could confidently be called research into authoritarianism.
As a final note, it should perhaps be pointed out that even as a literature review the Altemeyer book is severely deficient. Although it was published in 1981, a glance at the references reveals that there is a plenitude of references up to 1972 but comparatively few thereafter. In his preface, Altemeyer does admit that it took him a long time to get his book published so it would seem that he completed the book in about 1973 and revised it very little while it was going from publisher to publisher. It is therefore much less up to date than its publication year might suggest. No substitute for the Altemeyer book that is more satisfactory in this respect comes immediately to mind but a partial substitute may perhaps be found in Ray (1984).
J. J. RAY
REFERENCES
Adorno T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik E., Levinson D. J. and Sanford R. N. (950) The Authoritarian Personality. Harper, New York.
Altemeyer R. A. (1981) Right-wing Authoritarianism. University of Manitoba Press, Winnipeg.
Boshier R. and Rae C. (1975) Punishing criminals: a study of the relationship between conservatism and punitiveness. Australian & New Zealand J. Criminology, 8, 37-45.
Christie R. and Jahoda M. (1954) Studies in the Scope and Method of the `Authoritarian Personality'. Free Press, Glenco, IL.
Goldberg L. R. (1982) Facets of fascism. J. Personality Assess. 46, 181-182.
Heaven P. C. L. (1984) Predicting authoritarian behaviour: analysis of three measures. Personality & Individual Differences, 5, 251-253.
McKinney D. W. (1973) The Authoritarian Personality Studies. Mouton, The Hague.
Ray, J.J. (1971) Ethnocentrism: Attitudes and behaviour. Australian Quarterly, 43, 89-97.
Ray, J.J. (1972) Militarism, authoritarianism, neuroticism and anti-social behavior. Journal of Conflict Resolution 16, 319-340.
Ray, J.J. (1973) Conservatism, authoritarianism and related variables: A review and an empirical study. Ch. 2 in: G.D. Wilson (Ed.) The psychology of conservatism London: Academic Press.
Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.
Ray, J.J. (1984) Alternatives to the F scale in the measurement of authoritarianism: A catalog. Journal of Social Psychology, 122, 105-119.
Ray, J.J. (1985a) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.
Ray, J.J. (1985b) The punitive personality. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 329-334.
Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1986). The generality of racial prejudice. Journal of Social Psychology, 126, 563-564.
Rigby K. and Rump E. E. (1979) The generality of attitude to authority. Hum. Relat. 32, 469-487.
Rokeach M. (1960) The Open and Closed Mind. Basic Books, New York.
POST-PUBLICATION UPDATE
Altemeyer's later work is reviewed as under. The quality has not improved.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Australian Journal of Psychology, 42, 87-111.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Letter to the editor about Altemeyer's Enemies of Freedom. In: Canadian Psychology, 31, 392-393.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 763-764.
Ray, J.J.(1992) Defining authoritarianism: A comment on Duckitt & Foster, Altemeyer & Kamenshikov and Meloen. South African J. Psychology, 22, 178-179.
FINIS
SPECIAL REVIEW
R. A. ALTEMEYER
Right-wing Authoritarianism. University of Manitoba Press, Winnipeg (1981)
Books on authoritarianism seem generally to be very popular. Two of them have achieved the status of classics (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford, 1950; Rokeach, 1960) and a more recently published one (Altemeyer, 1981) received initial reviews bordering on the rapturous (e.g. Goldberg, 1982). Perhaps unfortunately, however, the third book mentioned devotes roughly half its pages to an, at times, scathing demolition of the first book mentioned. Popularity is evidently not tied to consensus. In the circumstances it seems fair to ask if Altemeyer (1981) is much of an improvement on Adorno et al. (1950). Does the popularity of the topic mean that our knowledge of it is advancing?
For a start, let it be acknowledged that the first part of Altemeyer's book is quite uncontroversial. His demolition of the work and findings of Adorno et al. (1950) could be repeated from the works of a hundred other authors from Christie and Jahoda (1954) onwards. Altemeyer is remarkable only perhaps for bringing together in one publication so much that is damaging to the Adorno et al. (1950) account. Even here, however, McKinney (1973) may be argued to have done more.
The important question becomes then one of how much Altemeyer has himself accomplished. Has he been able to construct as well as to destroy? It will be argued here that he has constructed very little.
Altemeyer's efforts to construct an alternative account of authoritarianism are, however, quite extensive and might well persuade the casual reader. A brief account of what he proposes is therefore in order.
Most notable of all is that Altemeyer completely sidesteps the important question of the relationship between ideology and authoritarianism. He claims that he is interested in only Right-wing authoritarianism and has virtually nothing to say about either Leftist authoritarianism or authoritarianism in general. This attempted sidestep does seem to be the major source of problems for his account of things. He does of course make some mention of the problem. He 'doubts' (p. 151) that there is any such thing as authoritarianism on the Left. Lenin, Stalin and their heirs among the more 'revolutionary' student Left of contemporary democratic society may be nasty types but they are not authoritarian in Altemeyer's view. In this respect Altemeyer would seem to be at one with Adorno et al. (1950). The California authors, however, did make at least some initial attempt to define authoritarianism and conservatism separately. Altemeyer's only definition of 'Right-wing' appears to be two lines on p. 152. This must be some sort of record for treating briefly such a large topic. Altemeyer's definition of the construct that does interest him, however (i.e. his definition of 'Right-wing authoritarianism') is a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness. The first two elements are surely little more than versions of support for the status quo and, as such, amount to a definition of conservatism more than anything else, while the last could be seen as a reference to the fact that conservatives are more likely to favour military preparedness and wars of various sorts. It would seem that Altemeyer's slighting of the literature on conservatism has simply led him to reinvent the concept. When Altemeyer says, therefore, that Lenin and Stalin are not authoritarian in his sense, he is simply saying that they are not conservative.
In constructing his own measure of authoritarianism (the RWA scale), therefore, Altemeyer could clearly have learnt at least one thing from the work of Adorno et al. (1950). They employed throughout their work separate measures of authoritarianism and conservatism. They could therefore present it as an important empirical finding that the two tended to correlate highly. It has been shown elsewhere (Ray, 1973), in a work that Altemeyer does allude to, that the Adorno procedure was something of a charade but, far from improving on the Adorno procedure, Altemeyer simply ignores the problem. As a result, one has to ask why the RWA scale should not be regarded as just another conservatism scale? It certainly reads like any number of conservatism scales that have been used over the years and from its item content alone it would certainly seem to have no obvious claim to be a particularly authoritarian sort of conservatism scale. One must, as a consequence, ask for validity studies. Does Altemeyer present evidence that, despite appearances, the RWA scale does in fact predict authoritarianism particularly well?
In his quite extensive range of studies with the RWA scale, what Altemeyer seems to have shown is that high scorers have parents who are high scorers and that they tend to accept their parents' religion. They tend to accept or approve of the sort of government activity that liberals criticize and are more punitive towards criminals but not towards Jews. They are more obedient in the Milgram situation at intermediate levels of punishment but not at a dangerous level of punishment (the level Altemeyer refers to as 'big red'). They show a weak tendency towards racist attitudes but not towards discriminatory behaviour. All these seem to be things that could equally well be said of conservatives. For instance, there is an occasional weak association between some scales of conservatism and some scales of racist attitudes (Ray, 1972, Ray & Lovejoy, 1986) but attitudes of any sort are generally poor predictors of racist behaviour (Ray, 1971). Conservatives have also been shown to be more punitive (Boshier and Rae, 1975) but this is probably only to the extent of supporting a general community norm of high punitiveness -- particularly towards criminals (Ray, 1985b). Approval for conventional sources of authority has also been long known as an important element of conservatism (Ray, 1973; Rigby and Rump, 1979).
Even from his own work, therefore, it seems unlikely that Altemeyer has succeeded in studying authoritarianism at all. The picture on the cover of Altemeyer's book appears to be intended to convey the impression that Right-wing authoritarians are rather insane and obsessed people but there is in fact nothing in Altemeyer's findings and research that would support such a characterization. The characterization may nonetheless be true so it may be asked whether there is anything outside Altemeyer's own work that would support his conclusions.
Perhaps because it is early days yet, there appear to be only two published studies which used the Altmeyer RWA scale. In the first; Ray (1985a) applied the RWA scale to a general population sample in conjunction with another authoritarianism scale and another conservatism scale. The conservatism scale was one that had been especially counterbalanced to preclude it from measuring any component of authoritarianism. It was found that the RWA scale correlated very highly with the non-authoritarian conservatism scale and not at all with the authoritarianism scale. In concurrent validity terms, therefore, the RWA scale emerges as a measure of conservatism only. In a second study, Heaven (1984) correlated the RWA scales with peer-ratings of attributes important in the authoritarianism literature. With his student sample Heaven found that the RWA scale failed to yield significant predictions of any of the authoritarianism-related attributes. With his community sample, Heaven found that the RWA scale significantly predicted submissiveness (r = 0.22), authoritarianism (0.20) and conservatism (0.51). Although significant, the first two correlations are quite low so again we must conclude that the RWA scale is above all a measure of conservatism. By contrast, Heaven found that the Ray (1976) Directiveness scale (another measure of authoritarianism) correlated 0.34 with dominance, 0.23 with aggression and not at all with conservatism. A non-ideological scale of authoritarianism is therefore at least possible. In ignoring this possibility, Altemeyer seems to have failed to do anything at all that could confidently be called research into authoritarianism.
As a final note, it should perhaps be pointed out that even as a literature review the Altemeyer book is severely deficient. Although it was published in 1981, a glance at the references reveals that there is a plenitude of references up to 1972 but comparatively few thereafter. In his preface, Altemeyer does admit that it took him a long time to get his book published so it would seem that he completed the book in about 1973 and revised it very little while it was going from publisher to publisher. It is therefore much less up to date than its publication year might suggest. No substitute for the Altemeyer book that is more satisfactory in this respect comes immediately to mind but a partial substitute may perhaps be found in Ray (1984).
J. J. RAY
REFERENCES
Adorno T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik E., Levinson D. J. and Sanford R. N. (950) The Authoritarian Personality. Harper, New York.
Altemeyer R. A. (1981) Right-wing Authoritarianism. University of Manitoba Press, Winnipeg.
Boshier R. and Rae C. (1975) Punishing criminals: a study of the relationship between conservatism and punitiveness. Australian & New Zealand J. Criminology, 8, 37-45.
Christie R. and Jahoda M. (1954) Studies in the Scope and Method of the `Authoritarian Personality'. Free Press, Glenco, IL.
Goldberg L. R. (1982) Facets of fascism. J. Personality Assess. 46, 181-182.
Heaven P. C. L. (1984) Predicting authoritarian behaviour: analysis of three measures. Personality & Individual Differences, 5, 251-253.
McKinney D. W. (1973) The Authoritarian Personality Studies. Mouton, The Hague.
Ray, J.J. (1971) Ethnocentrism: Attitudes and behaviour. Australian Quarterly, 43, 89-97.
Ray, J.J. (1972) Militarism, authoritarianism, neuroticism and anti-social behavior. Journal of Conflict Resolution 16, 319-340.
Ray, J.J. (1973) Conservatism, authoritarianism and related variables: A review and an empirical study. Ch. 2 in: G.D. Wilson (Ed.) The psychology of conservatism London: Academic Press.
Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.
Ray, J.J. (1984) Alternatives to the F scale in the measurement of authoritarianism: A catalog. Journal of Social Psychology, 122, 105-119.
Ray, J.J. (1985a) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.
Ray, J.J. (1985b) The punitive personality. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 329-334.
Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1986). The generality of racial prejudice. Journal of Social Psychology, 126, 563-564.
Rigby K. and Rump E. E. (1979) The generality of attitude to authority. Hum. Relat. 32, 469-487.
Rokeach M. (1960) The Open and Closed Mind. Basic Books, New York.
POST-PUBLICATION UPDATE
Altemeyer's later work is reviewed as under. The quality has not improved.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Australian Journal of Psychology, 42, 87-111.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Letter to the editor about Altemeyer's Enemies of Freedom. In: Canadian Psychology, 31, 392-393.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 763-764.
Ray, J.J.(1992) Defining authoritarianism: A comment on Duckitt & Foster, Altemeyer & Kamenshikov and Meloen. South African J. Psychology, 22, 178-179.
FINIS
Thursday, October 13, 2005
This article was written in 1989 for academic journal publication but was not accepted
The American Academy for the Advancement of Science recently gave this book its prize for Behavioral Science research. So while the book is a distinguished candidate for review it might also seem that any review is really superrogatory. Surely the book is simply an excellent treatment of its topic and that is that.
None of us are immune from human folly, however, and it is with some regret that I here have to submit that the award of this prize was misguided. As an example of a concerted, systematic and persistent research exploration of a particular set of ideas the book is indeed outstanding. Where it falls short is in an apparent deficiency of historical and theoretical background. Altemeyer writes as if no-one before him has had much useful to say on the topics of ideology or authoritarianism and he accordingly very largely ignores what can only be described as two vast literatures. In his earlier book (Altemeyer, 1981) he did review the literature on authoritarianism up to about 1972 or 1973 fairly comprehensively but the present book makes no attempt to update that review. So most of what has been written on his topic over the last 20 years is effectively ignored by him.
This might not matter much in some circumstances. One does sometimes despair of the quality of much psychological writing and perhaps little advance in thinking has been made in recent years. Perhaps a great mind could leap over recent meanderings and present fresh new insights that radically advance all our thinking. There is nothing like that in Altemeyer's work, however.
To take one major example: One would think that any book on Right- wing authoritarianism would give very careful and extensive consideration to what was meant by "Right-wing" and "authoritarian". As I have previously pointed out on several occasions (e.g. Ray, 1985 & 1987), in his first book Altemeyer (1981) failed entirely to consider what was meant by "Right-wing". As a result of ignoring what went before in this matter, he ended up "rediscovering" the concept. His definition of "Right-wing authoritarianism" was very close to many traditional political definitions of "conservatism" (Ray, 1973 & 1987).& By his own inadvertent confession he was studying conservatism rather than anything else. This was confirmed by the strong resemblance of his RWA scale to an ordinary conservatism scale and by the fact that the RWA scale correlated very highly with other conservatism scales and not at all with a behaviorally valid measure of authoritarianism (Ray, 1985). In short, Altemeyer's a-historical approach to his topic simply caused him to re-invent the wheel. In his latest work, however, Altemeyer shows little sign of having learned from this. He dismisses in a few words any thought that he might "only" be studying conservatism and offers a definition of conservatism that reflects something of the basic lexical meaning of the word but which shows little awareness of contemporary politics. He identifies Right-wing politics with "conservatism" in the sense of opposition to change. That attitude to change is now (and perhaps always was) a quite inadequate criterion of who is on the Right or Left he totally ignores. That Rightists like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were and are great advocates of change (generally back to something like a former state of affairs) is ignored by Altemeyer. He also ignores that the most ferocious enemies of change are not to be found anywhere in the West but rather in the Communist countries (Brahm, 1982). Stalin, Brezhnev, Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng have been the great enemies of change and defenders of their status quo for their peoples in our times. So Communists are Rightists and Margaret Thatcher is a Leftist according to Altemeyer's definitions.
What Altemeyer appears not to know and which any course in modern political history might have taught him is that those described as "conservatives" politically have long opposed the extension of State power while Leftists have justified it for assisting the poor. Historians of the British Conservative party find only skepticism and pragmatism as enduring characteristics of Conservative thought (Norton & Aughey, 1981; Feiling, 1953). Such skepticism has tended to lead to both suspicion of social innovations and suspicion of big government as a solution to problems but it has certainly not led to any rejection of change for its own sake. When an experiment has clearly failed (such as State ownership of industry) conservative pragmatism finds no difficulty in abandoning it. In an era when extending State power was all the rage opposition to it could be calumnied as motivated only by dislike of any change. Political "Conservatives", of course always denied that charge vigorously and in fact have always clearly believed in "progress". For instance the major "conservative" political party in Altemeyer's own country (Canada) calls itself the "Progressive Conservative" party. It is that very belief in progress that now tends to bring "conservatives" into conflict with environmentalists so that it is they (the "conservatives") who promote change while the environmentalists oppose it. The obvious lesson is that we all now seem to have no alternative to accepting what the "conservatives" have always claimed: That it is your attitude to State power that determines where you stand on the Right-Left divide. "Conservatives" (Reagan, Thatcher) want limited State power, influence and intervention while Leftists (Stalin, Brezhnev, Li Peng) want a lot of it. Altemeyer, however, shows no awareness that this debate ever took place.
Even outside the political literature, one of the major writers on conservatism in the psychology literature was aware at least as long ago as 1978 of the highly conditional relationship between dictionary- type conservatism and Rightism (Wilson, 1978) but it was obviously too much to expect that Altemeyer would keep up with the work of the major writers in his own field.
It is perhaps therefore fitting that Altemeyer's political unawareness seems to have ended up causing him to fail in predicting political stances. By his own admission, his scale of "Right-wing authoritarianism" gives almost no prediction of actual political choices (as in who votes for what candidate). He has indeed studied conservatism -- but not conservatism of any politically relevant kind. The fact that those who are politically tagged as "conservatives" are not in fact conservative in Altemeyer's simple sense meant that his enterprise was completely undermined from the start. So in the end his own research confirmed what greater political sophistication might have predicted: That what he studied has no current party-political relevance.
It might finally be noted that Altemeyer's apparent lack of background seems to be to a degree self-inflicted. Although I have had over a hundred papers on authoritarianism and conservatism published over the years, Altemeyer cites only three of them. Altemeyer seems to have felt some need to justify this. His "explanation" took the form of an attack on just one of my papers, one in which I presented the first version of my "Directiveness" scale (designed to measure authoritarianism). As a first version of a scale it was not difficult to find fault with -- and Altemeyer proceeded to find fault. What he failed to mention to his readers, however, is that I agree with such criticisms. The scale would not be in its Mark VI version by now if I did not. Altemeyer seems to think there is some relevance in criticizing the Mark I version of a scale that is now in Mark VI form! In the same attack Altemeyer also says that I think that Milgram's experiments used students as subjects and Psychology Department faculty as authority figures. I said no such thing. I said that the "tradition of research" emanating from Milgram's work was so characterized. In other words, Milgram's successors tend to be less rigorous than Milgram. Altemeyer's attempts to denigrate my work are then quite shallow. It is hard, therefore, to avoid the impression that Altemeyer was simply looking for anything which might justify his failure to consider ideas other than his own.
REFERENCES
Altemeyer, R. (1981)Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: Univ. Manitoba Press.
Ray, J.J. (1973) Conservatism, authoritarianism and related variables: A review and an empirical study. Ch. 2 in: G.D. Wilson (Ed.) The psychology of conservatism London: Academic Press.
Ray, J.J. (1985) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.
Ray, J.J. (1987) Special review of "Right-wing authoritarianism" by R.A. Altemeyer. Personality & Indiv. Diffs. 8, 771-772.
NOTE:
Published reviews of the book can be found as under:
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Australian Journal of Psychology, 42, 87-111.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Letter to the editor about Altemeyer's Enemies of Freedom. In: Canadian Psychology, 31, 392-393.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 763-764.
FINIS
BOOK REVIEW: Enemies of freedom: Understanding Right-wing authoritarianism
BY: R. Altemeyer. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1988, Hardbound. 407 pages. $22.95
The American Academy for the Advancement of Science recently gave this book its prize for Behavioral Science research. So while the book is a distinguished candidate for review it might also seem that any review is really superrogatory. Surely the book is simply an excellent treatment of its topic and that is that.
None of us are immune from human folly, however, and it is with some regret that I here have to submit that the award of this prize was misguided. As an example of a concerted, systematic and persistent research exploration of a particular set of ideas the book is indeed outstanding. Where it falls short is in an apparent deficiency of historical and theoretical background. Altemeyer writes as if no-one before him has had much useful to say on the topics of ideology or authoritarianism and he accordingly very largely ignores what can only be described as two vast literatures. In his earlier book (Altemeyer, 1981) he did review the literature on authoritarianism up to about 1972 or 1973 fairly comprehensively but the present book makes no attempt to update that review. So most of what has been written on his topic over the last 20 years is effectively ignored by him.
This might not matter much in some circumstances. One does sometimes despair of the quality of much psychological writing and perhaps little advance in thinking has been made in recent years. Perhaps a great mind could leap over recent meanderings and present fresh new insights that radically advance all our thinking. There is nothing like that in Altemeyer's work, however.
To take one major example: One would think that any book on Right- wing authoritarianism would give very careful and extensive consideration to what was meant by "Right-wing" and "authoritarian". As I have previously pointed out on several occasions (e.g. Ray, 1985 & 1987), in his first book Altemeyer (1981) failed entirely to consider what was meant by "Right-wing". As a result of ignoring what went before in this matter, he ended up "rediscovering" the concept. His definition of "Right-wing authoritarianism" was very close to many traditional political definitions of "conservatism" (Ray, 1973 & 1987).& By his own inadvertent confession he was studying conservatism rather than anything else. This was confirmed by the strong resemblance of his RWA scale to an ordinary conservatism scale and by the fact that the RWA scale correlated very highly with other conservatism scales and not at all with a behaviorally valid measure of authoritarianism (Ray, 1985). In short, Altemeyer's a-historical approach to his topic simply caused him to re-invent the wheel. In his latest work, however, Altemeyer shows little sign of having learned from this. He dismisses in a few words any thought that he might "only" be studying conservatism and offers a definition of conservatism that reflects something of the basic lexical meaning of the word but which shows little awareness of contemporary politics. He identifies Right-wing politics with "conservatism" in the sense of opposition to change. That attitude to change is now (and perhaps always was) a quite inadequate criterion of who is on the Right or Left he totally ignores. That Rightists like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were and are great advocates of change (generally back to something like a former state of affairs) is ignored by Altemeyer. He also ignores that the most ferocious enemies of change are not to be found anywhere in the West but rather in the Communist countries (Brahm, 1982). Stalin, Brezhnev, Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng have been the great enemies of change and defenders of their status quo for their peoples in our times. So Communists are Rightists and Margaret Thatcher is a Leftist according to Altemeyer's definitions.
What Altemeyer appears not to know and which any course in modern political history might have taught him is that those described as "conservatives" politically have long opposed the extension of State power while Leftists have justified it for assisting the poor. Historians of the British Conservative party find only skepticism and pragmatism as enduring characteristics of Conservative thought (Norton & Aughey, 1981; Feiling, 1953). Such skepticism has tended to lead to both suspicion of social innovations and suspicion of big government as a solution to problems but it has certainly not led to any rejection of change for its own sake. When an experiment has clearly failed (such as State ownership of industry) conservative pragmatism finds no difficulty in abandoning it. In an era when extending State power was all the rage opposition to it could be calumnied as motivated only by dislike of any change. Political "Conservatives", of course always denied that charge vigorously and in fact have always clearly believed in "progress". For instance the major "conservative" political party in Altemeyer's own country (Canada) calls itself the "Progressive Conservative" party. It is that very belief in progress that now tends to bring "conservatives" into conflict with environmentalists so that it is they (the "conservatives") who promote change while the environmentalists oppose it. The obvious lesson is that we all now seem to have no alternative to accepting what the "conservatives" have always claimed: That it is your attitude to State power that determines where you stand on the Right-Left divide. "Conservatives" (Reagan, Thatcher) want limited State power, influence and intervention while Leftists (Stalin, Brezhnev, Li Peng) want a lot of it. Altemeyer, however, shows no awareness that this debate ever took place.
Even outside the political literature, one of the major writers on conservatism in the psychology literature was aware at least as long ago as 1978 of the highly conditional relationship between dictionary- type conservatism and Rightism (Wilson, 1978) but it was obviously too much to expect that Altemeyer would keep up with the work of the major writers in his own field.
It is perhaps therefore fitting that Altemeyer's political unawareness seems to have ended up causing him to fail in predicting political stances. By his own admission, his scale of "Right-wing authoritarianism" gives almost no prediction of actual political choices (as in who votes for what candidate). He has indeed studied conservatism -- but not conservatism of any politically relevant kind. The fact that those who are politically tagged as "conservatives" are not in fact conservative in Altemeyer's simple sense meant that his enterprise was completely undermined from the start. So in the end his own research confirmed what greater political sophistication might have predicted: That what he studied has no current party-political relevance.
It might finally be noted that Altemeyer's apparent lack of background seems to be to a degree self-inflicted. Although I have had over a hundred papers on authoritarianism and conservatism published over the years, Altemeyer cites only three of them. Altemeyer seems to have felt some need to justify this. His "explanation" took the form of an attack on just one of my papers, one in which I presented the first version of my "Directiveness" scale (designed to measure authoritarianism). As a first version of a scale it was not difficult to find fault with -- and Altemeyer proceeded to find fault. What he failed to mention to his readers, however, is that I agree with such criticisms. The scale would not be in its Mark VI version by now if I did not. Altemeyer seems to think there is some relevance in criticizing the Mark I version of a scale that is now in Mark VI form! In the same attack Altemeyer also says that I think that Milgram's experiments used students as subjects and Psychology Department faculty as authority figures. I said no such thing. I said that the "tradition of research" emanating from Milgram's work was so characterized. In other words, Milgram's successors tend to be less rigorous than Milgram. Altemeyer's attempts to denigrate my work are then quite shallow. It is hard, therefore, to avoid the impression that Altemeyer was simply looking for anything which might justify his failure to consider ideas other than his own.
J.J. Ray
University of N.S.W., Australia
REFERENCES
Altemeyer, R. (1981)Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: Univ. Manitoba Press.
Ray, J.J. (1973) Conservatism, authoritarianism and related variables: A review and an empirical study. Ch. 2 in: G.D. Wilson (Ed.) The psychology of conservatism London: Academic Press.
Ray, J.J. (1985) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.
Ray, J.J. (1987) Special review of "Right-wing authoritarianism" by R.A. Altemeyer. Personality & Indiv. Diffs. 8, 771-772.
NOTE:
Published reviews of the book can be found as under:
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Australian Journal of Psychology, 42, 87-111.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Letter to the editor about Altemeyer's Enemies of Freedom. In: Canadian Psychology, 31, 392-393.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 763-764.
FINIS
Monday, October 10, 2005
(With a post-publication addendum following the original article)
Personality & Individual Differences 1990, 11, 763-764.
BOOK REVIEW
Enemies of freedom: Understanding right-wing authoritarianism
by R. Altemeyer. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1988, $22.95 Hardbound 407 pp.
In a true science, research is cumulative. In writing on any given topic people take account of what others before them have done. I suspect that many of us have some idea that this is often not so in psychology. In psychology the wheel is constantly being reinvented. What is written often shows little awareness of what has gone before.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this that I have so far been able to document (Ray, 1986a) is the idea that achievement motivation might be measured by self-report scales rather than by projective tests. I was able to find over 70 such scales published over a 40 year period and most of the authors of such scales showed no awareness that anyone before them had ever thought of such an idea. The minority did know of one or two such previous efforts. That is surely not good science.
I do not really know why such things happen but one major contributory explanation that I have also been able to document (Ray, 1986b) is the unsatisfactory state of Psychological Abstracts. The more optimistic among us probably fancy that this service provides an encyclopedic view of psychological publications. In reality, it covers less than half. Social Science Citation Index is, in a way, even worse. It aims only at providing a "representative" view of the literature rather than a comprehensive one. In other words, they deliberately exclude what they see as "minor" journals. At least Psychological Abstracts will abstract any paper of psychological interest if it is drawn to their attention. Their main problem seems to be lack of resources.
Given this context, then, it is not really too surprising that the book reviewed here (Altemeyer, 1988) is yet another example from psychology of "scientific" work that does not really deserve that title. Like many other psychologists, Altemeyer ignores large amounts of previous work. Perhaps worse than that, however, is his "research" methodology. If he wants to know why his students believe a particular thing his principal research "technique" for finding out why is to give the students a questionnaire asking what the source of their belief was: Parents, friends, own personal experience etc. He then appears to accept these attributions as accurate or important information about what actually did cause a particular belief. Any possibility that the students might be naive, inexperienced, unobservant, dishonest, defensive etc. just does not seem to be taken seriously by Altemeyer.
When it comes to acknowledging or using previous work Altemeyer (1988) also falls down. His book purports to be about Right-wing authoritarianism. Over the last 20 years I have had published well over a hundred articles on authoritarianism, conservatism and related topics. How many of these does Altemeyer cite? Three! He actually ignores most of the recent references on his topic. Of the other two prolific authors on authoritarianism (K. Rigby and P. Heaven), Rigby is not mentioned at all and Heaven gets one mention only -- apparently only because he did once use Altemeyer's RWA scale.
Altemeyer appears to excuse himself for giving no heed to my work by giving a critique of one of my papers -- the paper (Ray, 1976) in which my "Directiveness" scale first appeared. I have published many scales to measure variables in the authoritarianism area and I have published many papers reporting other work on the Directiveness scale but Altemeyer confines himself to one paper on one scale. He makes some generally reasonable criticisms of that paper and the scale it describes. If I did not think that some reasonable criticisms of the Directiveness scale were possible, the scale would scarcely by now be in its Mark VI version! Altemeyer, however, gives his readers no hint that he is criticizing a scale that has since been extensively revised to take account of precisely the sort of criticism that he makes!
Altemeyer himself has made considerable alterations to his own RWA scale over the years but he does not seem to recognize it as legitimate that others might need to do the same. It is hard to avoid the impression that he is interested only in playing his own games and simply dismisses any thought that he might learn from what others have done before him.
Another example of this is his conclusion from his own "research" that right-wing authoritarian attitudes are learnt by children from their parents, teachers etc. The massive and methodologically sophisticated twin study by Martin & Jardine in Modgil & Modgil (1986) which shows that up to 50% of the variance in conservatism can be explained as genetically inherited is treated how? No behaviour genetics studies of any kind are even mentioned. Altemeyer prefers the impressions of his students to hard scientific data.
Altemeyer's limitations also show in his definition of "conservatism". After the publication of his first book (Altemeyer, 1981), I on several occasions wrote critically (e.g. Ray, 1985 & 1987) of his failure in that book to define or say what he meant by "conservative" or "Right-wing" (he appears to use the two terms interchangeably). He attempts to make good the deficit in his current book but the definition he comes up with is plainly outdated: It may show some ability at looking up dictionaries but it shows little awareness of politics. It is: "A disposition to preserve the status quo, to maintain social stability, to preserve tradition". By such a criterion, Britain's Prime Minister Thatcher (surely one of the world's leading conservative politicians) would not qualify as a conservative. Far from maintaining the status quo, she is one of the most energetic reformers Britain has ever had! Her poll tax on registered voters means that the right to vote in Britain will in future have to be bought. It is hard to imagine a proposal more novel or tradition-breaching than that! And which countries in this century have been most determined to maintain social stability and to preserve their traditions, sometimes at almost any cost? Surely the Communist-ruled ones! See Brahm (1982). It is only the virtual worldwide abandonment of Communism and socialism that has recently brought about some change in such countries. Surely the key to the Left/Right divide today is attitude to State power, control and intervention. Leftists want a lot of it (allegedly to assist the poor and disadvantaged) and conservatives want little of it. (This, of course, suggests the inference that if any side of politics is characteristically authoritarian today it is the Left!). One of the major writers on conservatism was aware of the poor correlation between dictionary-type conservatism and Rightist politics at least as far back as 1978 (Wilson, 1978) but it was obviously too much to expect that Altemeyer should keep up with major writers in his own field.
Another example of Altemeyer's remarkable political thinking is his finding that his scale of "Right-wing authoritarianism" provides virtually no prediction of Right-wing political preferences! He seems quite unmoved by the fact that his own research shows his scale as not measuring what it purports to measure. He seems to think that it is his game and he will play it any way he likes. His research shows that many "Right-wing authoritarians" are Leftists but he sees no problem with that. Black might as well be white.
Does all this matter? There have been plenty of silly books published before. What does one more matter? Poorly done work slips through to publication all the time, does it not? It probably does, but this book won the prize for behavioral science research of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This book exemplifies what mainstream psychologists regard as first-class science! The statements I made initially above about the bad state of modern psychology must have seemed initially rather sweeping and extreme. Do they now?
J.J. Ray
University of N.S.W., Australia
REFERENCES
Altemeyer, R.A.(1981)Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg:
Univ. Manitoba Press.
Modgil, S. & Modgil, C. (1986) Hans Eysenck: Consensus and
controversy Lewes, E. Sussex: Falmer.
Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.
Ray, J.J. (1986a) Measuring achievement motivation by self-reports. Psychological Reports 58, 525-526.
Ray, J.J. (1986b) The inadequacy of "Psychological Abstracts" Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 39, 184-185.
Ray, J.J. (1987) Special review of "Right-wing authoritarianism" by R.A. Altemeyer. Personality & Indiv. Diffs. 8, 771-772.
POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDUM
I should have mentioned above that there is another Canadian study that is everything which Altemeyer's work is not -- the study by Sutherland & Tanenbaum (1980). This was a remarkably rigorous study that used a large Canadian general population sample and applied to it scales that distinguished carefully between the various supposed "components" of authoritarianism. It may be noted from their Table III that high and low scorers of their measure of "General Obedience" (excerpted from the F scale) were virtually identical in political party orientation -- both being on average very much at the political centre in fact.
I did not above give the exact reference to the failure of the RWA scale to predict vote. My reference was to p. 239 of Enemies of Freedom -- where Altemeyer makes the bald statement that "Right-wing authoritarians show little preference in general for any political party". So in what sense are the statements in the scale "right-wing" if right-wingers are no more likely to endorse them than Leftists are? Altemeyer is like a character in "Alice in Wonderland" where words can mean anything that he says they mean.
Even Altemeyer however seems eventually to have become perturbed after the decline and fall of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe enabled use of his RWA scale there. Studies in the East such as those by Altemeyer & Kamenshikov (1991), McFarland, Ageyev and Abalakina-Paap (1992) and Hamilton, Sanders & McKearney (1995) showed that high RWA scores were associated with support for Communism!! So an alleged "Rightist" scale went from being non-political to being a measure of Leftism! If you took it at face-value, it showed Communists were Rightists! -- the absurdity of which I was not slow to point out at the time (Ray, 1992).
After that, Altemeyer more or less gave up his original claim and engaged in a bit of historical revisionism. He said (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 218) that when he "began talking about right-wing authoritarianism, I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived established authorities in one's life". It is true that he did originally define what he was measuring in something like that way (in detail, he defined it as a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness) but what was new, unusual or "brazen" about such a conceptualization defies imagination. The concept of submission to established authority was, for instance, part of the old Adorno et al (1950) work. What WAS brazen was Altemeyer's claim that what he was measuring was characteristic of the political Right. But it is precisely the "Right-wing" claim that he now seems to have dropped and the RWA scale is now said to measure simply submission to authority.
Even that claim, however, seems ambitious. In a general population survey, Heaven (1984) found that the peer-rated behaviours that the RWA scale significantly predicted were submissiveness (r = 0.22) and authoritarianism (0.20) but the very low level of the correlations may be noted. More importantly, however, there is evidence showing that there is no such thing as a consistent or overall attitude to authority -- not even to conventional authority (Ray, 1972; Ray & Lovejoy, 1990). People are discriminating about what authority they will accept and when they will accept it. So "acceptance of conventional authority" is now clearly a "unicorn" concept -- i.e. there turns out to be no reality there to correspond the words. But anybody who talked to committed U.S. conservatives about the U.S. Supreme Court in late 2003 would soon get an idea of how little respect conservatives have for THAT major example of conventional authority! James Lindgren has also drawn together some U.S. public opinion poll data showing that respect for authority among the public at large is anything but monolithic.
It may also be noted that, despite all the evidence to the contrary and Altemeyer's own backdown, the RWA scale still seems to be referred to by all its users as measuring something "Right-wing". As I have pointed out at some length elsewhere (Ray, 1987) psychologists hold to their prejudices so rigidly that they rarely let little things like evidence disturb them.
Altemeyer did however have still more to contribute in his role as the clown of political psychology. He then went on to develop a scale of Left-Wing Authoritarianism -- the LWA scale. When he tested it on over two thousand people however, he could not find one single high-scorer on it! The LWA scale did not detect a single Left-wing authoritarian! Again he himself proved that his scale was not valid -- unless of course one is so totally one-eyed as to accept that there ARE no Left-wing authoritarians. If you are as good at waving magic wands as Altemeyer is, you might perhaps be able to claim that no such thing as Communism has ever existed, I guess.
ALTEMEYER ON RELIGION
Unsurprisingly, Altemeyer does not seem to have had much success at getting papers published in the journal literature. In fact I could find only one of them online. So I thought it might be useful for me to append here a few comments on that article.
His paper is about religion and does seem to show the usual Leftist hostility to religion. He concerns himself with the now hoary question of whether or not religious people are racially prejudiced. The answer of course does to a large degree depend on how you define "religious". But generally, psychological research -- such as mine -- has found no association between orthodox Christian beliefs and racial prejudice. That does not suit religion-hating Leftists at all, however -- as "racist" is one of their handiest terms of abuse. So we find Altemeyer riding to the rescue with a paper headed "Authoritarianism, Religious Fundamentalism, Quest, and Prejudice"
Again in this paper Altemeyer relies heavily on his Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale. As the very name of it implies, it contains a "mixed bag" of statements. Many are worded in a very aggressive and punitive ("authoritarian") way but there are also in the scale statements such as: "National anthems, flags and glorification of one's country should all be de-emphasized to promote the brotherhood of all men" (from p. 305 of Altemeyer's 1981 book). Now how many conservatives would agree with that statement? Very few, I suspect. So agreeing with the aggressive and hostile statements of the RWA scale can get you a high score on it but just rejecting characteristically Leftist statements can also get you a high score on it. So whether any given correlation with the scale arises from its conservative character or its authoritarian character is simply unknowable.
So Altemeyer's failure to recognize that simply being conservative could lead you to get elevated scores on his RWA scale leads him to lots of apparently profound conclusions that are in fact much more parsimoniously (simply) interpreted. For instance, he concludes: "people raised in no religion are apt to be the least authoritarian [conservative] respondents". But all that that finding really tells us is that modern-day North American Christians tend to be conservative. Big news! In a similar vein he supports his assertion that high scorers on his RWA scale [conservatives] are characterized by "deplorable behavior" by showing that they were more supportive of Republican President Richard Nixon and were more opposed to Communists and more dubious about homosexuality. Again: Big news
Anyway, Altemeyer's whole approach in this article is again so silly and naive that it does not deserve a full critique so I will simply move on to a few remarks on what he says about religion and racism. His first interesting statement is this one: "For example, in a study of 533 University of Manitoba students tested in the fall of 1987 by Altemeyer, the RWA Scale correlated .48 with a measure of acceptance of Christian beliefs, the Christian Orthodoxy (CO) Scale ( Fullerton & Hunsberger, 1982). It also correlated .41 with a measure of prejudice against most of the minorities mentioned a few paragraphs ago. But CO scores correlated precisely .00 with prejudice". In other words, Altemeyer found what I found 15 year before him (not that he mentions my work) -- that orthodox Christian beliefs have ZERO correlation with racial prejudice.
That pesky finding did not defeat him, though. He went back to the drawing board and came up with his own measure of religious belief -- a "Religious Fundamentalism" (RF) scale, which was essentially a set of statements that were very dogmatic about the truth of religion. And he went on to show (Phew!) that that scale DID show a small (.30) correlation with racial prejudice. But here's the kicker: Altemeyer's scale of religious belief deliberately EXCLUDED all specifically Christian statements of belief! Even an atheist with a passionate belief in flying saucers could get a high score on it! There is a later study here which also used Altemeyer's scales and that study confirms that high scorers on Altemeyer's RF scale (but not Christians) tended to be simple-minded. So once again poor old Alty tried to fudge his data and failed. All he has really shown is that racial prejudice (but not Christianity) tends to be simple-minded.
It may finally be worth noting that my earlier study used a measure of religious dogmatism too (which I called the "religiocentrism" scale) but my scale was specifically Christian in content. And guess what? It too showed NO correlation with ethnic prejudice. So it was only by taking the Christianity out of religion that Altemeyer could show that religious people were bigots. What a laugh! Only too typical of Leftist psychology, however.
REFERENCES
Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.
Altemeyer, R. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Altemeyer, R. & Kamenshikov, A. (1991) Impressions of American and Soviet behaviour: RWA changes in a mirror. South African J. Psychology 21, 255-260.
Hamilton, V. L., Sanders, J., & McKearney, S. J. (1995). Orientations toward authority in an authoritarian state: Moscow in 1990. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 356-365
Heaven P. C. L. (1984) Predicting authoritarian behaviour: analysis of three measures. Personality & Individual Differences, 5, 251-253.
McFarland, S. G., Ageyev, V. S., & Abalakina-Paap, M. A. (1992). Authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 1004-1010
Ray, J.J. (1972) The measurement of political deference: Some Australian data. British Journal of Political Science 2, 244-251.
Ray, J.J. (1987) Intolerance of ambiguity among psychologists: A comment on Maier & Lavrakas. Sex Roles 16, 559-562.
Ray, J.J.(1992) Defining authoritarianism: A comment on Duckitt & Foster, Altemeyer & Kamenshikov and Meloen. South African J. Psychology, 22, 178-179.
Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1990) Does attitude to authority exist? Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 765-769.
Sutherland, S.L. & Tanenbaum, E.J. (1980) Submissive authoritarians: Need we fear the fearful toadie? Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology, 17 (1), 1-23.
FINIS
Personality & Individual Differences 1990, 11, 763-764.
BOOK REVIEW
Enemies of freedom: Understanding right-wing authoritarianism
by R. Altemeyer. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1988, $22.95 Hardbound 407 pp.
In a true science, research is cumulative. In writing on any given topic people take account of what others before them have done. I suspect that many of us have some idea that this is often not so in psychology. In psychology the wheel is constantly being reinvented. What is written often shows little awareness of what has gone before.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this that I have so far been able to document (Ray, 1986a) is the idea that achievement motivation might be measured by self-report scales rather than by projective tests. I was able to find over 70 such scales published over a 40 year period and most of the authors of such scales showed no awareness that anyone before them had ever thought of such an idea. The minority did know of one or two such previous efforts. That is surely not good science.
I do not really know why such things happen but one major contributory explanation that I have also been able to document (Ray, 1986b) is the unsatisfactory state of Psychological Abstracts. The more optimistic among us probably fancy that this service provides an encyclopedic view of psychological publications. In reality, it covers less than half. Social Science Citation Index is, in a way, even worse. It aims only at providing a "representative" view of the literature rather than a comprehensive one. In other words, they deliberately exclude what they see as "minor" journals. At least Psychological Abstracts will abstract any paper of psychological interest if it is drawn to their attention. Their main problem seems to be lack of resources.
Given this context, then, it is not really too surprising that the book reviewed here (Altemeyer, 1988) is yet another example from psychology of "scientific" work that does not really deserve that title. Like many other psychologists, Altemeyer ignores large amounts of previous work. Perhaps worse than that, however, is his "research" methodology. If he wants to know why his students believe a particular thing his principal research "technique" for finding out why is to give the students a questionnaire asking what the source of their belief was: Parents, friends, own personal experience etc. He then appears to accept these attributions as accurate or important information about what actually did cause a particular belief. Any possibility that the students might be naive, inexperienced, unobservant, dishonest, defensive etc. just does not seem to be taken seriously by Altemeyer.
When it comes to acknowledging or using previous work Altemeyer (1988) also falls down. His book purports to be about Right-wing authoritarianism. Over the last 20 years I have had published well over a hundred articles on authoritarianism, conservatism and related topics. How many of these does Altemeyer cite? Three! He actually ignores most of the recent references on his topic. Of the other two prolific authors on authoritarianism (K. Rigby and P. Heaven), Rigby is not mentioned at all and Heaven gets one mention only -- apparently only because he did once use Altemeyer's RWA scale.
Altemeyer appears to excuse himself for giving no heed to my work by giving a critique of one of my papers -- the paper (Ray, 1976) in which my "Directiveness" scale first appeared. I have published many scales to measure variables in the authoritarianism area and I have published many papers reporting other work on the Directiveness scale but Altemeyer confines himself to one paper on one scale. He makes some generally reasonable criticisms of that paper and the scale it describes. If I did not think that some reasonable criticisms of the Directiveness scale were possible, the scale would scarcely by now be in its Mark VI version! Altemeyer, however, gives his readers no hint that he is criticizing a scale that has since been extensively revised to take account of precisely the sort of criticism that he makes!
Altemeyer himself has made considerable alterations to his own RWA scale over the years but he does not seem to recognize it as legitimate that others might need to do the same. It is hard to avoid the impression that he is interested only in playing his own games and simply dismisses any thought that he might learn from what others have done before him.
Another example of this is his conclusion from his own "research" that right-wing authoritarian attitudes are learnt by children from their parents, teachers etc. The massive and methodologically sophisticated twin study by Martin & Jardine in Modgil & Modgil (1986) which shows that up to 50% of the variance in conservatism can be explained as genetically inherited is treated how? No behaviour genetics studies of any kind are even mentioned. Altemeyer prefers the impressions of his students to hard scientific data.
Altemeyer's limitations also show in his definition of "conservatism". After the publication of his first book (Altemeyer, 1981), I on several occasions wrote critically (e.g. Ray, 1985 & 1987) of his failure in that book to define or say what he meant by "conservative" or "Right-wing" (he appears to use the two terms interchangeably). He attempts to make good the deficit in his current book but the definition he comes up with is plainly outdated: It may show some ability at looking up dictionaries but it shows little awareness of politics. It is: "A disposition to preserve the status quo, to maintain social stability, to preserve tradition". By such a criterion, Britain's Prime Minister Thatcher (surely one of the world's leading conservative politicians) would not qualify as a conservative. Far from maintaining the status quo, she is one of the most energetic reformers Britain has ever had! Her poll tax on registered voters means that the right to vote in Britain will in future have to be bought. It is hard to imagine a proposal more novel or tradition-breaching than that! And which countries in this century have been most determined to maintain social stability and to preserve their traditions, sometimes at almost any cost? Surely the Communist-ruled ones! See Brahm (1982). It is only the virtual worldwide abandonment of Communism and socialism that has recently brought about some change in such countries. Surely the key to the Left/Right divide today is attitude to State power, control and intervention. Leftists want a lot of it (allegedly to assist the poor and disadvantaged) and conservatives want little of it. (This, of course, suggests the inference that if any side of politics is characteristically authoritarian today it is the Left!). One of the major writers on conservatism was aware of the poor correlation between dictionary-type conservatism and Rightist politics at least as far back as 1978 (Wilson, 1978) but it was obviously too much to expect that Altemeyer should keep up with major writers in his own field.
Another example of Altemeyer's remarkable political thinking is his finding that his scale of "Right-wing authoritarianism" provides virtually no prediction of Right-wing political preferences! He seems quite unmoved by the fact that his own research shows his scale as not measuring what it purports to measure. He seems to think that it is his game and he will play it any way he likes. His research shows that many "Right-wing authoritarians" are Leftists but he sees no problem with that. Black might as well be white.
Does all this matter? There have been plenty of silly books published before. What does one more matter? Poorly done work slips through to publication all the time, does it not? It probably does, but this book won the prize for behavioral science research of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This book exemplifies what mainstream psychologists regard as first-class science! The statements I made initially above about the bad state of modern psychology must have seemed initially rather sweeping and extreme. Do they now?
J.J. Ray
University of N.S.W., Australia
REFERENCES
Altemeyer, R.A.(1981)Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg:
Univ. Manitoba Press.
Modgil, S. & Modgil, C. (1986) Hans Eysenck: Consensus and
controversy Lewes, E. Sussex: Falmer.
Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.
Ray, J.J. (1986a) Measuring achievement motivation by self-reports. Psychological Reports 58, 525-526.
Ray, J.J. (1986b) The inadequacy of "Psychological Abstracts" Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 39, 184-185.
Ray, J.J. (1987) Special review of "Right-wing authoritarianism" by R.A. Altemeyer. Personality & Indiv. Diffs. 8, 771-772.
POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDUM
I should have mentioned above that there is another Canadian study that is everything which Altemeyer's work is not -- the study by Sutherland & Tanenbaum (1980). This was a remarkably rigorous study that used a large Canadian general population sample and applied to it scales that distinguished carefully between the various supposed "components" of authoritarianism. It may be noted from their Table III that high and low scorers of their measure of "General Obedience" (excerpted from the F scale) were virtually identical in political party orientation -- both being on average very much at the political centre in fact.
I did not above give the exact reference to the failure of the RWA scale to predict vote. My reference was to p. 239 of Enemies of Freedom -- where Altemeyer makes the bald statement that "Right-wing authoritarians show little preference in general for any political party". So in what sense are the statements in the scale "right-wing" if right-wingers are no more likely to endorse them than Leftists are? Altemeyer is like a character in "Alice in Wonderland" where words can mean anything that he says they mean.
Even Altemeyer however seems eventually to have become perturbed after the decline and fall of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe enabled use of his RWA scale there. Studies in the East such as those by Altemeyer & Kamenshikov (1991), McFarland, Ageyev and Abalakina-Paap (1992) and Hamilton, Sanders & McKearney (1995) showed that high RWA scores were associated with support for Communism!! So an alleged "Rightist" scale went from being non-political to being a measure of Leftism! If you took it at face-value, it showed Communists were Rightists! -- the absurdity of which I was not slow to point out at the time (Ray, 1992).
After that, Altemeyer more or less gave up his original claim and engaged in a bit of historical revisionism. He said (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 218) that when he "began talking about right-wing authoritarianism, I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived established authorities in one's life". It is true that he did originally define what he was measuring in something like that way (in detail, he defined it as a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness) but what was new, unusual or "brazen" about such a conceptualization defies imagination. The concept of submission to established authority was, for instance, part of the old Adorno et al (1950) work. What WAS brazen was Altemeyer's claim that what he was measuring was characteristic of the political Right. But it is precisely the "Right-wing" claim that he now seems to have dropped and the RWA scale is now said to measure simply submission to authority.
Even that claim, however, seems ambitious. In a general population survey, Heaven (1984) found that the peer-rated behaviours that the RWA scale significantly predicted were submissiveness (r = 0.22) and authoritarianism (0.20) but the very low level of the correlations may be noted. More importantly, however, there is evidence showing that there is no such thing as a consistent or overall attitude to authority -- not even to conventional authority (Ray, 1972; Ray & Lovejoy, 1990). People are discriminating about what authority they will accept and when they will accept it. So "acceptance of conventional authority" is now clearly a "unicorn" concept -- i.e. there turns out to be no reality there to correspond the words. But anybody who talked to committed U.S. conservatives about the U.S. Supreme Court in late 2003 would soon get an idea of how little respect conservatives have for THAT major example of conventional authority! James Lindgren has also drawn together some U.S. public opinion poll data showing that respect for authority among the public at large is anything but monolithic.
It may also be noted that, despite all the evidence to the contrary and Altemeyer's own backdown, the RWA scale still seems to be referred to by all its users as measuring something "Right-wing". As I have pointed out at some length elsewhere (Ray, 1987) psychologists hold to their prejudices so rigidly that they rarely let little things like evidence disturb them.
Altemeyer did however have still more to contribute in his role as the clown of political psychology. He then went on to develop a scale of Left-Wing Authoritarianism -- the LWA scale. When he tested it on over two thousand people however, he could not find one single high-scorer on it! The LWA scale did not detect a single Left-wing authoritarian! Again he himself proved that his scale was not valid -- unless of course one is so totally one-eyed as to accept that there ARE no Left-wing authoritarians. If you are as good at waving magic wands as Altemeyer is, you might perhaps be able to claim that no such thing as Communism has ever existed, I guess.
ALTEMEYER ON RELIGION
Unsurprisingly, Altemeyer does not seem to have had much success at getting papers published in the journal literature. In fact I could find only one of them online. So I thought it might be useful for me to append here a few comments on that article.
His paper is about religion and does seem to show the usual Leftist hostility to religion. He concerns himself with the now hoary question of whether or not religious people are racially prejudiced. The answer of course does to a large degree depend on how you define "religious". But generally, psychological research -- such as mine -- has found no association between orthodox Christian beliefs and racial prejudice. That does not suit religion-hating Leftists at all, however -- as "racist" is one of their handiest terms of abuse. So we find Altemeyer riding to the rescue with a paper headed "Authoritarianism, Religious Fundamentalism, Quest, and Prejudice"
Again in this paper Altemeyer relies heavily on his Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale. As the very name of it implies, it contains a "mixed bag" of statements. Many are worded in a very aggressive and punitive ("authoritarian") way but there are also in the scale statements such as: "National anthems, flags and glorification of one's country should all be de-emphasized to promote the brotherhood of all men" (from p. 305 of Altemeyer's 1981 book). Now how many conservatives would agree with that statement? Very few, I suspect. So agreeing with the aggressive and hostile statements of the RWA scale can get you a high score on it but just rejecting characteristically Leftist statements can also get you a high score on it. So whether any given correlation with the scale arises from its conservative character or its authoritarian character is simply unknowable.
So Altemeyer's failure to recognize that simply being conservative could lead you to get elevated scores on his RWA scale leads him to lots of apparently profound conclusions that are in fact much more parsimoniously (simply) interpreted. For instance, he concludes: "people raised in no religion are apt to be the least authoritarian [conservative] respondents". But all that that finding really tells us is that modern-day North American Christians tend to be conservative. Big news! In a similar vein he supports his assertion that high scorers on his RWA scale [conservatives] are characterized by "deplorable behavior" by showing that they were more supportive of Republican President Richard Nixon and were more opposed to Communists and more dubious about homosexuality. Again: Big news
Anyway, Altemeyer's whole approach in this article is again so silly and naive that it does not deserve a full critique so I will simply move on to a few remarks on what he says about religion and racism. His first interesting statement is this one: "For example, in a study of 533 University of Manitoba students tested in the fall of 1987 by Altemeyer, the RWA Scale correlated .48 with a measure of acceptance of Christian beliefs, the Christian Orthodoxy (CO) Scale ( Fullerton & Hunsberger, 1982). It also correlated .41 with a measure of prejudice against most of the minorities mentioned a few paragraphs ago. But CO scores correlated precisely .00 with prejudice". In other words, Altemeyer found what I found 15 year before him (not that he mentions my work) -- that orthodox Christian beliefs have ZERO correlation with racial prejudice.
That pesky finding did not defeat him, though. He went back to the drawing board and came up with his own measure of religious belief -- a "Religious Fundamentalism" (RF) scale, which was essentially a set of statements that were very dogmatic about the truth of religion. And he went on to show (Phew!) that that scale DID show a small (.30) correlation with racial prejudice. But here's the kicker: Altemeyer's scale of religious belief deliberately EXCLUDED all specifically Christian statements of belief! Even an atheist with a passionate belief in flying saucers could get a high score on it! There is a later study here which also used Altemeyer's scales and that study confirms that high scorers on Altemeyer's RF scale (but not Christians) tended to be simple-minded. So once again poor old Alty tried to fudge his data and failed. All he has really shown is that racial prejudice (but not Christianity) tends to be simple-minded.
It may finally be worth noting that my earlier study used a measure of religious dogmatism too (which I called the "religiocentrism" scale) but my scale was specifically Christian in content. And guess what? It too showed NO correlation with ethnic prejudice. So it was only by taking the Christianity out of religion that Altemeyer could show that religious people were bigots. What a laugh! Only too typical of Leftist psychology, however.
REFERENCES
Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.
Altemeyer, R. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Altemeyer, R. & Kamenshikov, A. (1991) Impressions of American and Soviet behaviour: RWA changes in a mirror. South African J. Psychology 21, 255-260.
Hamilton, V. L., Sanders, J., & McKearney, S. J. (1995). Orientations toward authority in an authoritarian state: Moscow in 1990. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 356-365
Heaven P. C. L. (1984) Predicting authoritarian behaviour: analysis of three measures. Personality & Individual Differences, 5, 251-253.
McFarland, S. G., Ageyev, V. S., & Abalakina-Paap, M. A. (1992). Authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 1004-1010
Ray, J.J. (1972) The measurement of political deference: Some Australian data. British Journal of Political Science 2, 244-251.
Ray, J.J. (1987) Intolerance of ambiguity among psychologists: A comment on Maier & Lavrakas. Sex Roles 16, 559-562.
Ray, J.J.(1992) Defining authoritarianism: A comment on Duckitt & Foster, Altemeyer & Kamenshikov and Meloen. South African J. Psychology, 22, 178-179.
Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1990) Does attitude to authority exist? Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 765-769.
Sutherland, S.L. & Tanenbaum, E.J. (1980) Submissive authoritarians: Need we fear the fearful toadie? Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology, 17 (1), 1-23.
FINIS
Sunday, October 09, 2005
The Journal of Social Psychology, 1985, 125(2), 271-272
DEFECTIVE VALIDITY in the Altemeyer Authoritarianism Scale
JOHN J. RAY
School of Sociology, University of New South Wales, Australia
FEW BOOKS HAVE WON WIDER ACCLAIM than Right-Wing Authoritarianism by Altemeyer (1981), a particularly convincing critique of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). It contains a new RWA scale developed by Altemeyer to replace the F scale and used by him to carry out a number of new studies of the sources of authoritarianism. What he establishes by its use is, however, disappointingly sparse: a number of things (such as high scorers having high-scoring parents) that could be equally well explained by saying that the scale measures nothing more than conservatism. In fact, a perusal of the scale's items positively suggests such a conclusion. They cover a range of issues very familiar in conservatism scales; what makes them particularly authoritarian is certainly not immediately evident. Positive validation of the scale as measuring authoritarianism as well as conservatism is, therefore, clearly called for.
Two other scales exist that were designed to measure solely authoritarianism and solely conservatism. If the RWA scale measures a mixture of these two attributes, then it should show moderate correlations with both. The first is the Ray Directiveness scale (Ray, 1976), a measure of authoritarian personality. It has repeatedly been shown both to give strong predictions of authoritarian behavior and not to predict overall conservatism (Ray & Lovejoy, 1983). The second is the Ray Conservatism scale (Ray, 1982), balanced against both acquiescence and authoritarianism; that is, it contains an equal number of pro-authoritary and anti-authority conservatism items as well as pro-authority and anti-authority "leftist" items. The scale, thus, measures conservatism because any tendency to measure authoritarianism is experimentally controlled for. The scale exists in 68-, 22-, and 14-item forms (Ray & Heaven, 1984), but only the 68-item form has exact balancing against authoritarianism. Because 68 items are too many for most surveys, a new 24-item form having complete balancing was devised for the present work on the basis of the item analyses of the full scale. Only items showing high item-total correlations were chosen; they included all those in the 14-item form.
The 24-item Conservatism scale, the 24-item Altemeyer scale, the 14-item Directiveness scale, and a social desirability scale were included in a questionnaire administered to a random cluster sample of 84 people interviewed door to-door in the Australian city of Brisbane. The reliabilities of the 24- and 14-item forms of the Conservatism scale were .82 and .79 (alpha). The Altemeyer scale had an alpha of .89 and a correlation between its positive and negative halves of -.58 (before reverse scoring). With strongly agree to a conservative item scoring 5 points and strongly disagree scoring 1 point, its mean was 75.62 with a SD of 15.56.
The Altemeyer scale correlated .76 and .81 with the two forms of the Conservatism scale and -.024 with the authoritarianism scale. The authoritarianism scale correlated -.045 and -.039 with the two conservatism scales. Clearly, the Altemeyer scale is just another conservatism scale.
REFERENCES
Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.
Altemeyer, R. A. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.
Ray, J.J. (1982) Authoritarianism/libertarianism as the second dimension of social attitudes. Journal of Social Psychology, 117, 33-44.
Ray, J.J. & Heaven, P.C. L. (1984) Conservatism and authoritarianism among urban Afrikaners. Journal of Social Psychology, 122, 163-170.
Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1983). The behavioral validity of some recent measures of authoritarianism. Journal of Social Psychology, 120, 91-99.
POST-PUBLICATION UPDATE
I should have mentioned above that there is another Canadian study that is everything which Altemeyer's work is not -- the study by Sutherland & Tanenbaum (1980). This was a remarkably rigorous study that used a large Canadian general population sample and applied to it scales that distinguished carefully between the various supposed "components" of authoritarianism. It may be noted from their Table III that high and low scorers of their measure of "General Obedience" (excerpted from the F scale) were virtually identical in political party orientation -- both being on average very much at the political centre in fact.
And in accordance with that, in a later book Altemeyer (1988, p. 239) reports that Right Wing Authoritarians as detected by his scale, "show little preference in general for any political party"! In other words, according to the RWA scale, half of Right-Wing authoritarians vote for Leftist political parties! So how can they be Rightist if they vote for Leftist parties? The scale therefore fails its most basic validity test. I was too generous above. The RWA scale is not even Right-wing, let alone Right-wing authoritarian. In what sense are the statements in the scale "right-wing" if right-wingers are no more likely to endorse them than Leftists are? Altemeyer is like a character in "Alice in Wonderland" where words can mean anything that he says they mean.
Even Altemeyer however seems eventually to have become perturbed about the meaning of his scale after the decline and fall of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe enabled use of his RWA scale there. Studies in the East such as those by Altemeyer & Kamenshikov (1991), McFarland, Ageyev and Abalakina-Paap (1992) and Hamilton, Sanders & McKearney (1995) showed that high RWA scores were associated with support for Communism!! So an alleged "Rightist" scale went from being non-political to being a measure of Leftism! If you took it at face-value, it showed Communists were Rightists! -- the absurdity of which I was not slow to point out at the time (Ray, 1992).
After that, Altemeyer more or less gave up his original claim and engaged in a bit of historical revisionism. He said (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 218) that when he "began talking about right-wing authoritarianism, I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived established authorities in one's life". It is true that he did originally define what he was measuring in something like that way (in detail, he defined it as a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness) but what was new, unusual or "brazen" about such a conceptualization defies imagination. The concept of submission to established authority was, for instance, part of the old Adorno et al (1950) work. What WAS brazen was Altemeyer's claim that what he was measuring was characteristic of the political Right. But it is precisely the "Right-wing" claim that he now seems to have dropped and the RWA scale is now said to measure simply submission to authority.
Even that claim, however, seems ambitious. In a general population survey, Heaven (1984) found that the peer-rated behaviours that the RWA scale significantly predicted were submissiveness (r = 0.22) and authoritarianism (0.20) but the very low level of the correlations may be noted. More importantly, however, there is evidence showing that there is no such thing as a consistent or overall attitude to authority -- not even to conventional authority (Ray, 1972; Ray & Lovejoy, 1990). People are discriminating about what authority they will accept and when they will accept it. So "acceptance of conventional authority" is now clearly a "unicorn" concept -- i.e. there turns out to be no reality there to correspond the words. But anybody who talked to committed U.S. conservatives about the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years would soon get an idea of how little respect conservatives have for THAT major example of conventional authority! James Lindgren has also drawn together some U.S. public opinion poll data showing that respect for authority among the public at large is anything but monolithic.
It may also be noted that, despite all the evidence to the contrary and Altemeyer's own backdown, the RWA scale still seems to be referred to by all its users as measuring something "Right-wing". As I have pointed out at some length elsewhere (Ray, 1987) psychologists hold to their prejudices so rigidly that they rarely let little things like evidence disturb them.
So what DOES the RWA scale measure?
There is, however, one shred of justification for psychologists continuing to refer to the RWA scale as measuring something "Right-wing". Like the F scale which was its inspiration, the RWA scale seems to have little to do with voting behaviour or, indeed, any sort of behaviour, but it does correlate well with various other measures of conservative attitudes -- as seen above. It does appear to measure some sort of conservatism, if not a politically relevant type of conservatism. So what could that possibly be?
The most probable answer is that, like the F scale, it simply measures old-fashioned attitudes. Conservatives undoubtedly have some respect for the past so they would tend to find some sense or plausibility in attitudes from the past and would say so. But the evidence is that they no more allow such thinking to influence their political decisions than Leftists do.
Another possibility is that vote is little influenced by ideology -- a view which has been put forward by Lipset (1959), among others. So maybe the RWA scale simply demonstrates that. Undoubtedly, there is a large grain of truth in that. Ideology clearly is only one factor in vote. Economic self-interest is another obvious factor. But to declare ideology irrelevant would surely be to declare irrelevant just about the whole of politics -- which does depend heavily on ideological statements of one sort or another! Fortunately, we do not have to do that. As I have shown in my own work, an empirically constructed scale of conservative attitudes can correlate up to .50 with vote and by using several scales, a multiple R of up to .70 can be obtained. So ideology may not be the whole story but it is still highly relevant -- if measured in a relevant way. Altemeyer's way was not relevant.
A third possibility has to do with the tone of the RWA items. They are generally expressed in a combative, aggressive, hostile way. It is clear that Leftists are angry and hate-filled people (witness how they behave when they gain unrestricted power -- as in Communist regimes) so that aspect of the RWA items could resonate with Leftists and attract assent from them -- while conservatives assent more to the basic content of the item. But which ever way you look at it, Altemeyer's scale is simply irrelevant in telling us anything about contemporary politics.
Altemeyer is of course aware of the validity problems with his scale but seems to be largely in denial about it. He has made various attempt to demonstrate validity for it and chief of these attempts seems to be how students and others perform in playing a game of Altemeyer's own devising. I will simply quote what another writer says about the game concerned:
Epilogue
Altemeyer did however have still more to contribute in his role as the clown of political psychology. He went on to develop a scale of Left-Wing Authoritarianism -- the LWA scale. When he tested it on over two thousand people however, he could not find one single high-scorer on it! The LWA scale did not detect a single Left-wing authoritarian! Again he himself proved that his scale was not valid -- unless of course one is so totally one-eyed as to accept that there ARE no Left-wing authoritarians. If you are as good at waving magic wands as Altemeyer is, you might perhaps be able to claim that no such thing as Communism has ever existed, I guess.
FINIS
DEFECTIVE VALIDITY in the Altemeyer Authoritarianism Scale
JOHN J. RAY
School of Sociology, University of New South Wales, Australia
FEW BOOKS HAVE WON WIDER ACCLAIM than Right-Wing Authoritarianism by Altemeyer (1981), a particularly convincing critique of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). It contains a new RWA scale developed by Altemeyer to replace the F scale and used by him to carry out a number of new studies of the sources of authoritarianism. What he establishes by its use is, however, disappointingly sparse: a number of things (such as high scorers having high-scoring parents) that could be equally well explained by saying that the scale measures nothing more than conservatism. In fact, a perusal of the scale's items positively suggests such a conclusion. They cover a range of issues very familiar in conservatism scales; what makes them particularly authoritarian is certainly not immediately evident. Positive validation of the scale as measuring authoritarianism as well as conservatism is, therefore, clearly called for.
Two other scales exist that were designed to measure solely authoritarianism and solely conservatism. If the RWA scale measures a mixture of these two attributes, then it should show moderate correlations with both. The first is the Ray Directiveness scale (Ray, 1976), a measure of authoritarian personality. It has repeatedly been shown both to give strong predictions of authoritarian behavior and not to predict overall conservatism (Ray & Lovejoy, 1983). The second is the Ray Conservatism scale (Ray, 1982), balanced against both acquiescence and authoritarianism; that is, it contains an equal number of pro-authoritary and anti-authority conservatism items as well as pro-authority and anti-authority "leftist" items. The scale, thus, measures conservatism because any tendency to measure authoritarianism is experimentally controlled for. The scale exists in 68-, 22-, and 14-item forms (Ray & Heaven, 1984), but only the 68-item form has exact balancing against authoritarianism. Because 68 items are too many for most surveys, a new 24-item form having complete balancing was devised for the present work on the basis of the item analyses of the full scale. Only items showing high item-total correlations were chosen; they included all those in the 14-item form.
The 24-item Conservatism scale, the 24-item Altemeyer scale, the 14-item Directiveness scale, and a social desirability scale were included in a questionnaire administered to a random cluster sample of 84 people interviewed door to-door in the Australian city of Brisbane. The reliabilities of the 24- and 14-item forms of the Conservatism scale were .82 and .79 (alpha). The Altemeyer scale had an alpha of .89 and a correlation between its positive and negative halves of -.58 (before reverse scoring). With strongly agree to a conservative item scoring 5 points and strongly disagree scoring 1 point, its mean was 75.62 with a SD of 15.56.
The Altemeyer scale correlated .76 and .81 with the two forms of the Conservatism scale and -.024 with the authoritarianism scale. The authoritarianism scale correlated -.045 and -.039 with the two conservatism scales. Clearly, the Altemeyer scale is just another conservatism scale.
REFERENCES
Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.
Altemeyer, R. A. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.
Ray, J.J. (1982) Authoritarianism/libertarianism as the second dimension of social attitudes. Journal of Social Psychology, 117, 33-44.
Ray, J.J. & Heaven, P.C. L. (1984) Conservatism and authoritarianism among urban Afrikaners. Journal of Social Psychology, 122, 163-170.
Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1983). The behavioral validity of some recent measures of authoritarianism. Journal of Social Psychology, 120, 91-99.
POST-PUBLICATION UPDATE
I should have mentioned above that there is another Canadian study that is everything which Altemeyer's work is not -- the study by Sutherland & Tanenbaum (1980). This was a remarkably rigorous study that used a large Canadian general population sample and applied to it scales that distinguished carefully between the various supposed "components" of authoritarianism. It may be noted from their Table III that high and low scorers of their measure of "General Obedience" (excerpted from the F scale) were virtually identical in political party orientation -- both being on average very much at the political centre in fact.
And in accordance with that, in a later book Altemeyer (1988, p. 239) reports that Right Wing Authoritarians as detected by his scale, "show little preference in general for any political party"! In other words, according to the RWA scale, half of Right-Wing authoritarians vote for Leftist political parties! So how can they be Rightist if they vote for Leftist parties? The scale therefore fails its most basic validity test. I was too generous above. The RWA scale is not even Right-wing, let alone Right-wing authoritarian. In what sense are the statements in the scale "right-wing" if right-wingers are no more likely to endorse them than Leftists are? Altemeyer is like a character in "Alice in Wonderland" where words can mean anything that he says they mean.
Even Altemeyer however seems eventually to have become perturbed about the meaning of his scale after the decline and fall of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe enabled use of his RWA scale there. Studies in the East such as those by Altemeyer & Kamenshikov (1991), McFarland, Ageyev and Abalakina-Paap (1992) and Hamilton, Sanders & McKearney (1995) showed that high RWA scores were associated with support for Communism!! So an alleged "Rightist" scale went from being non-political to being a measure of Leftism! If you took it at face-value, it showed Communists were Rightists! -- the absurdity of which I was not slow to point out at the time (Ray, 1992).
After that, Altemeyer more or less gave up his original claim and engaged in a bit of historical revisionism. He said (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 218) that when he "began talking about right-wing authoritarianism, I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived established authorities in one's life". It is true that he did originally define what he was measuring in something like that way (in detail, he defined it as a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness) but what was new, unusual or "brazen" about such a conceptualization defies imagination. The concept of submission to established authority was, for instance, part of the old Adorno et al (1950) work. What WAS brazen was Altemeyer's claim that what he was measuring was characteristic of the political Right. But it is precisely the "Right-wing" claim that he now seems to have dropped and the RWA scale is now said to measure simply submission to authority.
Even that claim, however, seems ambitious. In a general population survey, Heaven (1984) found that the peer-rated behaviours that the RWA scale significantly predicted were submissiveness (r = 0.22) and authoritarianism (0.20) but the very low level of the correlations may be noted. More importantly, however, there is evidence showing that there is no such thing as a consistent or overall attitude to authority -- not even to conventional authority (Ray, 1972; Ray & Lovejoy, 1990). People are discriminating about what authority they will accept and when they will accept it. So "acceptance of conventional authority" is now clearly a "unicorn" concept -- i.e. there turns out to be no reality there to correspond the words. But anybody who talked to committed U.S. conservatives about the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years would soon get an idea of how little respect conservatives have for THAT major example of conventional authority! James Lindgren has also drawn together some U.S. public opinion poll data showing that respect for authority among the public at large is anything but monolithic.
It may also be noted that, despite all the evidence to the contrary and Altemeyer's own backdown, the RWA scale still seems to be referred to by all its users as measuring something "Right-wing". As I have pointed out at some length elsewhere (Ray, 1987) psychologists hold to their prejudices so rigidly that they rarely let little things like evidence disturb them.
So what DOES the RWA scale measure?
There is, however, one shred of justification for psychologists continuing to refer to the RWA scale as measuring something "Right-wing". Like the F scale which was its inspiration, the RWA scale seems to have little to do with voting behaviour or, indeed, any sort of behaviour, but it does correlate well with various other measures of conservative attitudes -- as seen above. It does appear to measure some sort of conservatism, if not a politically relevant type of conservatism. So what could that possibly be?
The most probable answer is that, like the F scale, it simply measures old-fashioned attitudes. Conservatives undoubtedly have some respect for the past so they would tend to find some sense or plausibility in attitudes from the past and would say so. But the evidence is that they no more allow such thinking to influence their political decisions than Leftists do.
Another possibility is that vote is little influenced by ideology -- a view which has been put forward by Lipset (1959), among others. So maybe the RWA scale simply demonstrates that. Undoubtedly, there is a large grain of truth in that. Ideology clearly is only one factor in vote. Economic self-interest is another obvious factor. But to declare ideology irrelevant would surely be to declare irrelevant just about the whole of politics -- which does depend heavily on ideological statements of one sort or another! Fortunately, we do not have to do that. As I have shown in my own work, an empirically constructed scale of conservative attitudes can correlate up to .50 with vote and by using several scales, a multiple R of up to .70 can be obtained. So ideology may not be the whole story but it is still highly relevant -- if measured in a relevant way. Altemeyer's way was not relevant.
A third possibility has to do with the tone of the RWA items. They are generally expressed in a combative, aggressive, hostile way. It is clear that Leftists are angry and hate-filled people (witness how they behave when they gain unrestricted power -- as in Communist regimes) so that aspect of the RWA items could resonate with Leftists and attract assent from them -- while conservatives assent more to the basic content of the item. But which ever way you look at it, Altemeyer's scale is simply irrelevant in telling us anything about contemporary politics.
Altemeyer is of course aware of the validity problems with his scale but seems to be largely in denial about it. He has made various attempt to demonstrate validity for it and chief of these attempts seems to be how students and others perform in playing a game of Altemeyer's own devising. I will simply quote what another writer says about the game concerned:
"Altemeyer's favorite proof of right-wing turpitude comes from something he designed called the "Global Change Game." Altemeyer does not explain the game in detail, but, essentially, participants control various regions of the globe and then make decisions (e.g., wage war, allocate "resources," restrain population growth) about what their respective regions will do. Apparently, when only RWAs played the game, "after 40 years, not counting nuclear war, 2.1 billion people had died."
Frightening, no? Only until one reads that the 2.1 billion figure was calculated "according to a complicated formulae used in the game to take into account the consequences of war, long-term unemployment, malnutrition and poor medical infrastructures." In other words, the results of any game simply reflect the designers' assumptions as to how the world really works. Altemeyer takes it for granted, for example, that foreign aid from wealthy countries reduces suffering in poor countries, notwithstanding the contrary theory that foreign aid makes matters worse by entrenching kleptocracies and rewarding government failure. Hence, the hapless high RWAs who don't see the world the way Altemeyer does necessarily fail when they play the game. The Global Change Game, in short, proves only that Altemeyer's political views differ from those of conservatives. As he is hardly reticent about making this point to begin with, it is unclear why he needed a "sophisticated simulation" to prove it.
Epilogue
Altemeyer did however have still more to contribute in his role as the clown of political psychology. He went on to develop a scale of Left-Wing Authoritarianism -- the LWA scale. When he tested it on over two thousand people however, he could not find one single high-scorer on it! The LWA scale did not detect a single Left-wing authoritarian! Again he himself proved that his scale was not valid -- unless of course one is so totally one-eyed as to accept that there ARE no Left-wing authoritarians. If you are as good at waving magic wands as Altemeyer is, you might perhaps be able to claim that no such thing as Communism has ever existed, I guess.
FINIS
Monday, October 03, 2005
This article was written in 1989 for publication in The British Journal of Psychology but was not accepted
BOOK REVIEW
Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-wing authoritarianism
By: R. Altemeyer. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1988.
407 pp. Hardbound. $22.95
This book won the prize for behavioural science research issued by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. So the book represents what at least American mainstream psychologists regard as first-class science. It seems likely, however, that there eventually will be some embarrassment about this. Let us look at some of the book's more remarkable features.
Let us say that we had set one of our postgraduate students the task of studying variable X. His task included devising a measure of variable X and using it to help us understand variations in X. When the student hands in his assignment we find that he has virtually ignored the last 20 years of research (consisting of a couple of hundred papers) on X and devised a new measure of X which provides virtually no prediction of X. How would we mark him? Fail? Most likely.
The student behavior I have just outlined, however, is also accurate as an outline of Altemeyer's work.
Right-wing authoritarianism was very much a "hot" research topic of the '50's and '60's. Since that time, however, there have been only three researchers who have continued to write extensively on it in the journal literature: Patrick Heaven, Ken Rigby and myself. Other authors seem to contribute just one or two papers and then fall silent on the topic. We three diehards have however been prolific. I alone
have had over a hundred papers on the subject published over the last 20 years. Science is supposed to be a "brick-by-brick" building process in which one learns from what went before so one would expect that anybody writing on authoritarianism would have to give major consideration to the writings of Rigby, Heaven and Ray. Altemeyer, however, in his current book totally ignores Rigby, cites only one paper by Heaven (a paper in which Heaven used Altemeyer's scale) and cites only three papers by myself (two of which refer to Altemeyer's own work). Altemeyer is obviously hard to impress. His own work must be good.
But how good is it? Would it not be a minimum validity requirement for a scale of Right-wing authoritarianism that it give a good prediction of Right-wing political choices? Altemeyer's scale does not. Scores on the RWA scale are roughly normally distributed so it should have the potential to discriminate well but by Altemeyer's own admission his scale gives virtually no prediction of Right-wing
political preference at all. Whatever it measures is essentially non-political. Altemeyer seems to think that we should take it on trust that the scale "could" have political relevance "some day". That being so, the book is more a horoscope than a work of science. Even a horoscope, however, would presumably make more sense than saying (as Altemeyer by implication does) that at the present time many Right-wing authoritarians are Leftists!
So if the Altemeyer work is an empirical disaster, is it maybe some sort of theoretical triumph? Far from it. The theory content makes even the empirical work look good. There has of course been a couple of centuries of writing on what differentiates conservatives from their adversaries. Altemeyer's knowledge of that literature appears to be what he calls "zippo" (nil). The definition he gives of conservatism is a schoolboy one: it shows that he may have gotten as far as being
able to consult a dictionary but it shows a complete ignorance of political thinking. His definition is: "A disposition to preserve the status quo, to maintain social stability, to preserve tradition". By this definition, Britain's Prime Minister Thatcher (surely one of the world's leading conservatives) seems not to be conservative. Is she concentrating on maintaining the status quo? Far from it. She is one of the most energetic reformers Britain has ever had. And which countries in this century have done most to maintain social stability and to preserve their traditions, generally at enormous human cost? Surely the Communist ones! See Brahm (1982). So Communists are conservatives and Margaret Thatcher is a Leftist in Altemeyer's strange world. The fact that conservatives have long opposed the extension of State power, control and intervention and are now beginning to reverse such extensions seems to have escaped Altemeyer. It is basically your attitude to State power that makes you a conservative or a Communist, not your attitude to anything as vague as "change". One of the major writers on conservatism was aware of the poor linkage between dictionary-type conservatism and Rightism at least as far back as 1978 (Wilson, 1978) but it was obviously too much to expect that Altemeyer
keep up with the work of the major writers in his own field.
So how did Altemeyer get that prize? One can only speculate but perhaps it had something to do with some sort of "Rightists under the bed" mentality on the part of the awarding committee. Altemeyer does manage to sound pretty alarming about Right-wing authoritarians. Perhaps for some people it is reassuring to think that you have enemies and to be told that they are a bad lot. The satisfactoriness of the
conclusions made up for all deficits of theory, method and results.
J.J. Ray
University of N.S.W., Australia
REFERENCES
Brahm, H. (1982) Die Sowjetunion -- eine konservative Gesellschaft? Osteuropa 32(7), 531-544.
Ray, J.J. (1987) Special review of "Right-wing authoritarianism" by R.A. Altemeyer. Personality & Indiv. Diffs. 8, 771-772.
Wilson, G. (1978) The psychology of conservatism: Comment on Stacey New Zealand Psychologist 7, 21.
NOTE:
Published reviews of the book can be found as under:
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Australian Journal of Psychology, 42, 87-111.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Letter to the editor about Altemeyer's Enemies of Freedom. In: Canadian Psychology, 31, 392-393.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 763-764.
FINIS
BOOK REVIEW
Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-wing authoritarianism
By: R. Altemeyer. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1988.
407 pp. Hardbound. $22.95
This book won the prize for behavioural science research issued by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. So the book represents what at least American mainstream psychologists regard as first-class science. It seems likely, however, that there eventually will be some embarrassment about this. Let us look at some of the book's more remarkable features.
Let us say that we had set one of our postgraduate students the task of studying variable X. His task included devising a measure of variable X and using it to help us understand variations in X. When the student hands in his assignment we find that he has virtually ignored the last 20 years of research (consisting of a couple of hundred papers) on X and devised a new measure of X which provides virtually no prediction of X. How would we mark him? Fail? Most likely.
The student behavior I have just outlined, however, is also accurate as an outline of Altemeyer's work.
Right-wing authoritarianism was very much a "hot" research topic of the '50's and '60's. Since that time, however, there have been only three researchers who have continued to write extensively on it in the journal literature: Patrick Heaven, Ken Rigby and myself. Other authors seem to contribute just one or two papers and then fall silent on the topic. We three diehards have however been prolific. I alone
have had over a hundred papers on the subject published over the last 20 years. Science is supposed to be a "brick-by-brick" building process in which one learns from what went before so one would expect that anybody writing on authoritarianism would have to give major consideration to the writings of Rigby, Heaven and Ray. Altemeyer, however, in his current book totally ignores Rigby, cites only one paper by Heaven (a paper in which Heaven used Altemeyer's scale) and cites only three papers by myself (two of which refer to Altemeyer's own work). Altemeyer is obviously hard to impress. His own work must be good.
But how good is it? Would it not be a minimum validity requirement for a scale of Right-wing authoritarianism that it give a good prediction of Right-wing political choices? Altemeyer's scale does not. Scores on the RWA scale are roughly normally distributed so it should have the potential to discriminate well but by Altemeyer's own admission his scale gives virtually no prediction of Right-wing
political preference at all. Whatever it measures is essentially non-political. Altemeyer seems to think that we should take it on trust that the scale "could" have political relevance "some day". That being so, the book is more a horoscope than a work of science. Even a horoscope, however, would presumably make more sense than saying (as Altemeyer by implication does) that at the present time many Right-wing authoritarians are Leftists!
So if the Altemeyer work is an empirical disaster, is it maybe some sort of theoretical triumph? Far from it. The theory content makes even the empirical work look good. There has of course been a couple of centuries of writing on what differentiates conservatives from their adversaries. Altemeyer's knowledge of that literature appears to be what he calls "zippo" (nil). The definition he gives of conservatism is a schoolboy one: it shows that he may have gotten as far as being
able to consult a dictionary but it shows a complete ignorance of political thinking. His definition is: "A disposition to preserve the status quo, to maintain social stability, to preserve tradition". By this definition, Britain's Prime Minister Thatcher (surely one of the world's leading conservatives) seems not to be conservative. Is she concentrating on maintaining the status quo? Far from it. She is one of the most energetic reformers Britain has ever had. And which countries in this century have done most to maintain social stability and to preserve their traditions, generally at enormous human cost? Surely the Communist ones! See Brahm (1982). So Communists are conservatives and Margaret Thatcher is a Leftist in Altemeyer's strange world. The fact that conservatives have long opposed the extension of State power, control and intervention and are now beginning to reverse such extensions seems to have escaped Altemeyer. It is basically your attitude to State power that makes you a conservative or a Communist, not your attitude to anything as vague as "change". One of the major writers on conservatism was aware of the poor linkage between dictionary-type conservatism and Rightism at least as far back as 1978 (Wilson, 1978) but it was obviously too much to expect that Altemeyer
keep up with the work of the major writers in his own field.
So how did Altemeyer get that prize? One can only speculate but perhaps it had something to do with some sort of "Rightists under the bed" mentality on the part of the awarding committee. Altemeyer does manage to sound pretty alarming about Right-wing authoritarians. Perhaps for some people it is reassuring to think that you have enemies and to be told that they are a bad lot. The satisfactoriness of the
conclusions made up for all deficits of theory, method and results.
J.J. Ray
University of N.S.W., Australia
REFERENCES
Brahm, H. (1982) Die Sowjetunion -- eine konservative Gesellschaft? Osteuropa 32(7), 531-544.
Ray, J.J. (1987) Special review of "Right-wing authoritarianism" by R.A. Altemeyer. Personality & Indiv. Diffs. 8, 771-772.
Wilson, G. (1978) The psychology of conservatism: Comment on Stacey New Zealand Psychologist 7, 21.
NOTE:
Published reviews of the book can be found as under:
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Australian Journal of Psychology, 42, 87-111.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Letter to the editor about Altemeyer's Enemies of Freedom. In: Canadian Psychology, 31, 392-393.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 763-764.
FINIS
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Letter to the editor of Canadian Psychology. Published 1990, 31, 392-393.
As I am sure you are aware, Canadian scholarship has recently been honoured in that Bob Altemeyer's book Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-wing Authoritarianism received the 1988 prize for behavioral science research awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The book has also received a number of favourable reviews. I don't like to spoil the glow but I feel that some comments on the limitations of the book are needed to balance the
account. I would like to submit, in fact, that the book is a complete failure as far as achieving what it set out to achieve is concerned.
In response to Altemeyer's earlier book on the same subject (Altemeyer, 1981), I on a couple of occasions wrote (Ray, 1985b & 1987) that his concept of "right-wing authoritarianism" strongly resembled traditional political conceptions of conservatism and noted his failure to define what he meant by "Right-wing". In this book he attempts to remedy that deficit. But the definition of "conservative" that he now gives is a poor one: "A disposition to preserve the status-quo, to
maintain social stability, to preserve tradition". By such a definition Britain's Margaret Thatcher (perhaps the contemporary world's most notable conservative politician) would not be conservative! Is the most energetic reformer Britain has seen for a long time "maintaining the status quo"? I do not pretend that an account of what underlies "Conservatism" is easy (I myself grappled with the problem at some length with only indifferent success in Ray, 1981) but Altemeyer shows no awareness of the great literature on the problem or even any awareness that there is a problem.
Another failing of the book concerns Altemeyer's claim that Right-wing authoritarianism is learned during the process of growing up from parents and others. He ignores the huge and sophisticated twin study by Martin & Jardine (1986) which showed that up to 50% of the variance in conservatism can be explained as genetically inherited. Although he appears to address the nature/nurture issue, he in fact cites no behaviour genetics research at all.
He also takes no account of whether or not any form of attitudinal authoritarianism really exists. Is it true, for instance, that experience with the parent as an authority influences later attitudes to other authorities? It might be "obvious" to say "Yes" to this but it is not true . Rigby & Rump (1981) found that attitudes to various
authorities are correlated with attitude to parents only during early adolescence and that by late adolescence the relationship has vanished entirely. Attitude to authority as such just does not seem to exist. There are attitudes to particular authorities but these are often not correlated with one-another. Parents as authorities and policemen as authorities have nothing in common as far as attitudes towards them are concerned.
I also (Ray, 1971) reported two examples of failures to correlate between different types of attitude to authority (among High School students) many years ago. I hoped at the time that the students were a-typical but as both of those failures to correlate have recently been replicated in two large and very different adult samples (See Table 2 of Byrne, Reinhart & Heaven, 1989 and Table 2 of Ray, 1985a) it seems that the students might in fact have been typical. So if a general attitude to authority does not exist as such how must more inclusive concepts such as "authoritarianism" fare? The generality and generalizability that Altemeyer assumes is fictitious. The generalizability that he observes is the product of his very extensive and careful selection of items which confirm it, not a reflection of
much in the real world. Altemeyer has created a world of his own from which most disturbing outside information has been rigorously excluded.
Finally, it should perhaps be noted that Altemeyer's research "technique" seems generally to consist of asking his students why they do certain things. He then accepts those answers fairly uncritically. That his students might be naive, defensive, uninsightful, dishonest, unsophisticated, inexperienced etc. he seems to give little weight to. The book, then, is largely a study of attributions rather than of
anything the attributions concern. This may be of some specialized interest but it is hardly a study of authoritarianism.
Altemeyer's RWA scale bears a strong resemblance to older scales of general conservatism so whatever consistencies his results show probably flow from that fact. In other words, insofar as he has studied anything at all, he has probably studied some form of conservatism.
It should be noted, however, that Altemeyer's scale gives, by his own admission, virtually no prediction of Right-wing political preferences. What he has studied seems therefore to be some non-political form of conservatism. Since the central claim of the book is that it explains Right-wing authoritarianism, that is a remarkably irrelevant achievement! Putting it another way, Altemeyer finds that many Right-wing authoritarians are Leftists. What sense does that make? Black might as well be white.
Yours faithfully,
J.J. Ray
REFERENCES
Altemeyer, R. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
Altemeyer, R. (1988) Enemies of freedom: Understanding Right-wing authoritarianism San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Byrne, D.G., Reinhart, M.I. & Heaven, P.C.L. (1989) Type A behaviour and the authoritarian personality. British J. Medical Psychology 62, 163-173.
Martin, N. & Jardine, R. (1986) Eysenck's contribution to behaviour genetics. In: S & C. Modgil (Eds.) Hans Eysenck: Consensus and controversy Lewes, E. Sussex: Falmer.
Ray, J.J. (1971) An "Attitude to Authority" scale. Australian Psychologist, 6, 31-50.
Ray, J.J. (1985a) Using multiple class indicators to examine working class ideology. Personality & Individual Differences 6, 557-562.
Ray, J.J. (1985b) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.
Ray, J.J. (1987) Special review of "Right-wing authoritarianism" by R.A. Altemeyer. Personality & Indiv. Diffs. 8, 771-772.
Rigby, K. & Rump, E.E. (1981) Attitudes towards parents and institutional authorities during adolescence. J. of Psychol. 109, 109-118.
*************
POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDUM
I should have mentioned above that there is another Canadian study that is everything which Altemeyer's work is not -- the study by Sutherland & Tanenbaum (1980). This was a remarkably rigorous study that used a large Canadian general population sample and applied to it scales that distinguished carefully between the various supposed "components" of authoritarianism. It may be noted from their Table III that high and low scorers of their measure of "General Obedience" (excerpted from the F scale) were virtually identical in political party orientation -- both being on average very much at the political centre in fact.
I did not above give the exact reference to the failure of the RWA scale to predict vote. My reference was to p. 239 of Enemies of Freedom -- where Altemeyer makes the bald statement that "Right-wing authoritarians show little preference in general for any political party". So in what sense are the statements in the scale "right-wing" if right-wingers are no more likely to endorse them than Leftists are? Altemeyer is like a character in "Alice in Wonderland" where words can mean anything that he says they mean.
Even Altemeyer however seems eventually to have become perturbed after the decline and fall of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe enabled use of his RWA scale there. Studies in the East such as those by Altemeyer & Kamenshikov (1991), McFarland, Ageyev and Abalakina-Paap (1992) and Hamilton, Sanders & McKearney (1995) showed that high RWA scores were associated with support for Communism!! So an alleged "Rightist" scale went from being non-political to being a measure of Leftism! If you took it at face-value, it showed Communists were Rightists! -- the absurdity of which I was not slow to point out at the time (Ray, 1992).
After that, Altemeyer more or less gave up his original claim and engaged in a bit of historical revisionism. He said (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 218) that when he "began talking about right-wing authoritarianism, I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived established authorities in one's life". It is true that he did originally define what he was measuring in something like that way (in detail, he defined it as a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness) but what was new, unusual or "brazen" about such a conceptualization defies imagination. The concept of submission to established authority was, for instance, part of the old Adorno et al (1950) work. What WAS brazen was Altemeyer's claim that what he was measuring was characteristic of the political Right. But it is precisely the "Right-wing" claim that he now seems to have dropped and the RWA scale is now said to measure simply submission to authority.
Even that claim, however, seems ambitious. In a general population survey, Heaven (1984) found that the peer-rated behaviours that the RWA scale significantly predicted were submissiveness (r = 0.22) and authoritarianism (0.20) but the very low level of the correlations may be noted. More importantly, however, there is evidence showing that there is no such thing as a consistent or overall attitude to authority -- not even to conventional authority (Ray, 1972; Ray & Lovejoy, 1990). People are discriminating about what authority they will accept and when they will accept it. So "acceptance of conventional authority" is now clearly a "unicorn" concept -- i.e. there turns out to be no reality there to correspond the words. But anybody who talked to committed U.S. conservatives about the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years would soon get an idea of how little respect conservatives have for THAT major example of conventional authority! James Lindgren has also drawn together some U.S. public opinion poll data showing that respect for authority among the public at large is anything but monolithic.
It may also be noted that, despite all the evidence to the contrary and Altemeyer's own backdown, the RWA scale still seems to be referred to by all its users as measuring something "Right-wing". As I have pointed out at some length elsewhere (Ray, 1987) psychologists hold to their prejudices so rigidly that they rarely let little things like evidence disturb them.
So what DOES the RWA scale measure?
There is, however, one shred of justification for psychologists continuing to refer to the RWA scale as measuring something "Right-wing". Like the F scale which was its inspiration, the RWA scale seems to have little to do with voting behaviour or, indeed, any sort of behaviour, but it does correlate well with various other measures of conservative attitudes (Ray, 1985). It does appear to measure some sort of conservatism, if not a politically relevant type of conservatism. So what could that possibly be?
The most probable answer is that, like the F scale, it simply measures old-fashioned attitudes. Conservatives undoubtedly have some respect for the past so they would tend to find some sense or plausibility in attitudes from the past and would say so. But the evidence is that they no more allow such thinking to influence their political decisions than Leftists do.
Another possibility is that vote is little influenced by ideology -- a view which has been put forward by Lipset (1959), among others. So maybe the RWA scale simply demonstrates that. Undoubtedly, there is a large grain of truth in that. Ideology clearly is only one factor in vote. Economic self-interest is another obvious factor. But to declare ideology irrelevant would surely be to declare irrelevant just about the whole of politics -- which does depend heavily on ideological statements of one sort or another! Fortunately, we do not have to do that. As I have shown in my own work, an empirically constructed scale of conservative attitudes can correlate up to .50 with vote and by using several scales, a multiple R of up to .70 can be obtained. So ideology may not be the whole story but it is still highly relevant -- if measured in a relevant way. Altemeyer's way was not relevant.
A third possibility has to do with the tone of the RWA items. They are generally expressed in a combative, aggressive, hostile way. It is clear that Leftists are angry and hate-filled people (witness how they behave when they gain unrestricted power -- as in Communist regimes) so that aspect of the RWA items could resonate with Leftists and attract assent from them -- while conservatives assent more to the basic content of the item. But which ever way you look at it, Altemeyer's scale is simply irrelevant in telling us anything about contemporary politics.
Altemeyer is of course aware of the validity problems with his scale but seems to be largely in denial about it. He has made various attempt to demonstrate validity for it and chief of these attempts seems to be how students and others perform in playing a game of Altemeyer's own devising. I will simply quote what another writer says about the game concerned:
Epilogue
Altemeyer did however have still more to contribute in his role as the clown of political psychology. He went on to develop a scale of Left-Wing Authoritarianism -- the LWA scale. When he tested it on over two thousand people however, he could not find one single high-scorer on it! The LWA scale did not detect a single Left-wing authoritarian! Again he himself proved that his scale was not valid -- unless of course one is so totally one-eyed as to accept that there ARE no Left-wing authoritarians. If you are as good at waving magic wands as Altemeyer is, you might perhaps be able to claim that no such thing as Communism has ever existed, I guess.
REFERENCES
Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.
Altemeyer, R. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Altemeyer, R. & Kamenshikov, A. (1991) Impressions of American and Soviet behaviour: RWA changes in a mirror. South African J. Psychology 21, 255-260.
Hamilton, V. L., Sanders, J., & McKearney, S. J. (1995). Orientations toward authority in an authoritarian state: Moscow in 1990. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 356-365
Heaven P. C. L. (1984) Predicting authoritarian behaviour: analysis of three measures. Personality & Individual Differences, 5, 251-253.
Lipset, S.M. (1959) Democracy and working class authoritarianism. American Sociological Review, 24, 482-502.
McFarland, S. G., Ageyev, V. S., & Abalakina-Paap, M. A. (1992). Authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 1004-1010
Ray, J.J. (1972) The measurement of political deference: Some Australian data. British Journal of Political Science 2, 244-251.
Ray, J.J. (1985) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.
Ray, J.J. (1987) Intolerance of ambiguity among psychologists: A comment on Maier & Lavrakas. Sex Roles 16, 559-562.
Ray, J.J.(1992) Defining authoritarianism: A comment on Duckitt & Foster, Altemeyer & Kamenshikov and Meloen. South African J. Psychology, 22, 178-179.
Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1990) Does attitude to authority exist? Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 765-769.
Sutherland, S.L. & Tanenbaum, E.J. (1980) Submissive authoritarians: Need we fear the fearful toadie? Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology, 17 (1), 1-23.
FINIS
As I am sure you are aware, Canadian scholarship has recently been honoured in that Bob Altemeyer's book Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-wing Authoritarianism received the 1988 prize for behavioral science research awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The book has also received a number of favourable reviews. I don't like to spoil the glow but I feel that some comments on the limitations of the book are needed to balance the
account. I would like to submit, in fact, that the book is a complete failure as far as achieving what it set out to achieve is concerned.
In response to Altemeyer's earlier book on the same subject (Altemeyer, 1981), I on a couple of occasions wrote (Ray, 1985b & 1987) that his concept of "right-wing authoritarianism" strongly resembled traditional political conceptions of conservatism and noted his failure to define what he meant by "Right-wing". In this book he attempts to remedy that deficit. But the definition of "conservative" that he now gives is a poor one: "A disposition to preserve the status-quo, to
maintain social stability, to preserve tradition". By such a definition Britain's Margaret Thatcher (perhaps the contemporary world's most notable conservative politician) would not be conservative! Is the most energetic reformer Britain has seen for a long time "maintaining the status quo"? I do not pretend that an account of what underlies "Conservatism" is easy (I myself grappled with the problem at some length with only indifferent success in Ray, 1981) but Altemeyer shows no awareness of the great literature on the problem or even any awareness that there is a problem.
Another failing of the book concerns Altemeyer's claim that Right-wing authoritarianism is learned during the process of growing up from parents and others. He ignores the huge and sophisticated twin study by Martin & Jardine (1986) which showed that up to 50% of the variance in conservatism can be explained as genetically inherited. Although he appears to address the nature/nurture issue, he in fact cites no behaviour genetics research at all.
He also takes no account of whether or not any form of attitudinal authoritarianism really exists. Is it true, for instance, that experience with the parent as an authority influences later attitudes to other authorities? It might be "obvious" to say "Yes" to this but it is not true . Rigby & Rump (1981) found that attitudes to various
authorities are correlated with attitude to parents only during early adolescence and that by late adolescence the relationship has vanished entirely. Attitude to authority as such just does not seem to exist. There are attitudes to particular authorities but these are often not correlated with one-another. Parents as authorities and policemen as authorities have nothing in common as far as attitudes towards them are concerned.
I also (Ray, 1971) reported two examples of failures to correlate between different types of attitude to authority (among High School students) many years ago. I hoped at the time that the students were a-typical but as both of those failures to correlate have recently been replicated in two large and very different adult samples (See Table 2 of Byrne, Reinhart & Heaven, 1989 and Table 2 of Ray, 1985a) it seems that the students might in fact have been typical. So if a general attitude to authority does not exist as such how must more inclusive concepts such as "authoritarianism" fare? The generality and generalizability that Altemeyer assumes is fictitious. The generalizability that he observes is the product of his very extensive and careful selection of items which confirm it, not a reflection of
much in the real world. Altemeyer has created a world of his own from which most disturbing outside information has been rigorously excluded.
Finally, it should perhaps be noted that Altemeyer's research "technique" seems generally to consist of asking his students why they do certain things. He then accepts those answers fairly uncritically. That his students might be naive, defensive, uninsightful, dishonest, unsophisticated, inexperienced etc. he seems to give little weight to. The book, then, is largely a study of attributions rather than of
anything the attributions concern. This may be of some specialized interest but it is hardly a study of authoritarianism.
Altemeyer's RWA scale bears a strong resemblance to older scales of general conservatism so whatever consistencies his results show probably flow from that fact. In other words, insofar as he has studied anything at all, he has probably studied some form of conservatism.
It should be noted, however, that Altemeyer's scale gives, by his own admission, virtually no prediction of Right-wing political preferences. What he has studied seems therefore to be some non-political form of conservatism. Since the central claim of the book is that it explains Right-wing authoritarianism, that is a remarkably irrelevant achievement! Putting it another way, Altemeyer finds that many Right-wing authoritarians are Leftists. What sense does that make? Black might as well be white.
Yours faithfully,
J.J. Ray
REFERENCES
Altemeyer, R. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
Altemeyer, R. (1988) Enemies of freedom: Understanding Right-wing authoritarianism San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Byrne, D.G., Reinhart, M.I. & Heaven, P.C.L. (1989) Type A behaviour and the authoritarian personality. British J. Medical Psychology 62, 163-173.
Martin, N. & Jardine, R. (1986) Eysenck's contribution to behaviour genetics. In: S & C. Modgil (Eds.) Hans Eysenck: Consensus and controversy Lewes, E. Sussex: Falmer.
Ray, J.J. (1971) An "Attitude to Authority" scale. Australian Psychologist, 6, 31-50.
Ray, J.J. (1985a) Using multiple class indicators to examine working class ideology. Personality & Individual Differences 6, 557-562.
Ray, J.J. (1985b) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.
Ray, J.J. (1987) Special review of "Right-wing authoritarianism" by R.A. Altemeyer. Personality & Indiv. Diffs. 8, 771-772.
Rigby, K. & Rump, E.E. (1981) Attitudes towards parents and institutional authorities during adolescence. J. of Psychol. 109, 109-118.
*************
POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDUM
I should have mentioned above that there is another Canadian study that is everything which Altemeyer's work is not -- the study by Sutherland & Tanenbaum (1980). This was a remarkably rigorous study that used a large Canadian general population sample and applied to it scales that distinguished carefully between the various supposed "components" of authoritarianism. It may be noted from their Table III that high and low scorers of their measure of "General Obedience" (excerpted from the F scale) were virtually identical in political party orientation -- both being on average very much at the political centre in fact.
I did not above give the exact reference to the failure of the RWA scale to predict vote. My reference was to p. 239 of Enemies of Freedom -- where Altemeyer makes the bald statement that "Right-wing authoritarians show little preference in general for any political party". So in what sense are the statements in the scale "right-wing" if right-wingers are no more likely to endorse them than Leftists are? Altemeyer is like a character in "Alice in Wonderland" where words can mean anything that he says they mean.
Even Altemeyer however seems eventually to have become perturbed after the decline and fall of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe enabled use of his RWA scale there. Studies in the East such as those by Altemeyer & Kamenshikov (1991), McFarland, Ageyev and Abalakina-Paap (1992) and Hamilton, Sanders & McKearney (1995) showed that high RWA scores were associated with support for Communism!! So an alleged "Rightist" scale went from being non-political to being a measure of Leftism! If you took it at face-value, it showed Communists were Rightists! -- the absurdity of which I was not slow to point out at the time (Ray, 1992).
After that, Altemeyer more or less gave up his original claim and engaged in a bit of historical revisionism. He said (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 218) that when he "began talking about right-wing authoritarianism, I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived established authorities in one's life". It is true that he did originally define what he was measuring in something like that way (in detail, he defined it as a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness) but what was new, unusual or "brazen" about such a conceptualization defies imagination. The concept of submission to established authority was, for instance, part of the old Adorno et al (1950) work. What WAS brazen was Altemeyer's claim that what he was measuring was characteristic of the political Right. But it is precisely the "Right-wing" claim that he now seems to have dropped and the RWA scale is now said to measure simply submission to authority.
Even that claim, however, seems ambitious. In a general population survey, Heaven (1984) found that the peer-rated behaviours that the RWA scale significantly predicted were submissiveness (r = 0.22) and authoritarianism (0.20) but the very low level of the correlations may be noted. More importantly, however, there is evidence showing that there is no such thing as a consistent or overall attitude to authority -- not even to conventional authority (Ray, 1972; Ray & Lovejoy, 1990). People are discriminating about what authority they will accept and when they will accept it. So "acceptance of conventional authority" is now clearly a "unicorn" concept -- i.e. there turns out to be no reality there to correspond the words. But anybody who talked to committed U.S. conservatives about the U.S. Supreme Court in recent years would soon get an idea of how little respect conservatives have for THAT major example of conventional authority! James Lindgren has also drawn together some U.S. public opinion poll data showing that respect for authority among the public at large is anything but monolithic.
It may also be noted that, despite all the evidence to the contrary and Altemeyer's own backdown, the RWA scale still seems to be referred to by all its users as measuring something "Right-wing". As I have pointed out at some length elsewhere (Ray, 1987) psychologists hold to their prejudices so rigidly that they rarely let little things like evidence disturb them.
So what DOES the RWA scale measure?
There is, however, one shred of justification for psychologists continuing to refer to the RWA scale as measuring something "Right-wing". Like the F scale which was its inspiration, the RWA scale seems to have little to do with voting behaviour or, indeed, any sort of behaviour, but it does correlate well with various other measures of conservative attitudes (Ray, 1985). It does appear to measure some sort of conservatism, if not a politically relevant type of conservatism. So what could that possibly be?
The most probable answer is that, like the F scale, it simply measures old-fashioned attitudes. Conservatives undoubtedly have some respect for the past so they would tend to find some sense or plausibility in attitudes from the past and would say so. But the evidence is that they no more allow such thinking to influence their political decisions than Leftists do.
Another possibility is that vote is little influenced by ideology -- a view which has been put forward by Lipset (1959), among others. So maybe the RWA scale simply demonstrates that. Undoubtedly, there is a large grain of truth in that. Ideology clearly is only one factor in vote. Economic self-interest is another obvious factor. But to declare ideology irrelevant would surely be to declare irrelevant just about the whole of politics -- which does depend heavily on ideological statements of one sort or another! Fortunately, we do not have to do that. As I have shown in my own work, an empirically constructed scale of conservative attitudes can correlate up to .50 with vote and by using several scales, a multiple R of up to .70 can be obtained. So ideology may not be the whole story but it is still highly relevant -- if measured in a relevant way. Altemeyer's way was not relevant.
A third possibility has to do with the tone of the RWA items. They are generally expressed in a combative, aggressive, hostile way. It is clear that Leftists are angry and hate-filled people (witness how they behave when they gain unrestricted power -- as in Communist regimes) so that aspect of the RWA items could resonate with Leftists and attract assent from them -- while conservatives assent more to the basic content of the item. But which ever way you look at it, Altemeyer's scale is simply irrelevant in telling us anything about contemporary politics.
Altemeyer is of course aware of the validity problems with his scale but seems to be largely in denial about it. He has made various attempt to demonstrate validity for it and chief of these attempts seems to be how students and others perform in playing a game of Altemeyer's own devising. I will simply quote what another writer says about the game concerned:
"Altemeyer's favorite proof of right-wing turpitude comes from something he designed called the "Global Change Game." Altemeyer does not explain the game in detail, but, essentially, participants control various regions of the globe and then make decisions (e.g., wage war, allocate "resources," restrain population growth) about what their respective regions will do. Apparently, when only RWAs played the game, "after 40 years, not counting nuclear war, 2.1 billion people had died."
Frightening, no? Only until one reads that the 2.1 billion figure was calculated "according to a complicated formulae used in the game to take into account the consequences of war, long-term unemployment, malnutrition and poor medical infrastructures." In other words, the results of any game simply reflect the designers' assumptions as to how the world really works. Altemeyer takes it for granted, for example, that foreign aid from wealthy countries reduces suffering in poor countries, notwithstanding the contrary theory that foreign aid makes matters worse by entrenching kleptocracies and rewarding government failure. Hence, the hapless high RWAs who don't see the world the way Altemeyer does necessarily fail when they play the game. The Global Change Game, in short, proves only that Altemeyer's political views differ from those of conservatives. As he is hardly reticent about making this point to begin with, it is unclear why he needed a "sophisticated simulation" to prove it.
Epilogue
Altemeyer did however have still more to contribute in his role as the clown of political psychology. He went on to develop a scale of Left-Wing Authoritarianism -- the LWA scale. When he tested it on over two thousand people however, he could not find one single high-scorer on it! The LWA scale did not detect a single Left-wing authoritarian! Again he himself proved that his scale was not valid -- unless of course one is so totally one-eyed as to accept that there ARE no Left-wing authoritarians. If you are as good at waving magic wands as Altemeyer is, you might perhaps be able to claim that no such thing as Communism has ever existed, I guess.
REFERENCES
Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.
Altemeyer, R. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Altemeyer, R. & Kamenshikov, A. (1991) Impressions of American and Soviet behaviour: RWA changes in a mirror. South African J. Psychology 21, 255-260.
Hamilton, V. L., Sanders, J., & McKearney, S. J. (1995). Orientations toward authority in an authoritarian state: Moscow in 1990. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 356-365
Heaven P. C. L. (1984) Predicting authoritarian behaviour: analysis of three measures. Personality & Individual Differences, 5, 251-253.
Lipset, S.M. (1959) Democracy and working class authoritarianism. American Sociological Review, 24, 482-502.
McFarland, S. G., Ageyev, V. S., & Abalakina-Paap, M. A. (1992). Authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 1004-1010
Ray, J.J. (1972) The measurement of political deference: Some Australian data. British Journal of Political Science 2, 244-251.
Ray, J.J. (1985) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.
Ray, J.J. (1987) Intolerance of ambiguity among psychologists: A comment on Maier & Lavrakas. Sex Roles 16, 559-562.
Ray, J.J.(1992) Defining authoritarianism: A comment on Duckitt & Foster, Altemeyer & Kamenshikov and Meloen. South African J. Psychology, 22, 178-179.
Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1990) Does attitude to authority exist? Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 765-769.
Sutherland, S.L. & Tanenbaum, E.J. (1980) Submissive authoritarians: Need we fear the fearful toadie? Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology, 17 (1), 1-23.
FINIS
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