Quote:

---

If we line up the usual suspects for explaining anything we do, viz., our genes and our experiences, we have to wonder, “Do some people get born authoritarian followers?” Maybe they do. Much of the social interaction within animal species is shaped by who submits to whom, and we know from breeding experiments that one can turn out increasingly dominant, or increasingly submissive offspring by controlling who mates with whom. That’s where pit bulls came from, on the one hand, and gentle laboratory rats, on the other.

The more obvious expectation that our level of authoritarianism is shaped by our experiences and environment has more support, but it still may not work the way you’d suppose. We might expect parents to be the chief determiners of their children’s attitudes. My fellow Missourian, Mark Twain, called this the “corn-pone” theory, which he got from a young slave who said, “You tell me where a man gets his corn pone, and I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.” And there’s no doubt most parents want their children to have the same attitudes they do, right down to answers to the RWA scale. But even though parents supply the genes and the corn pone, and have the first crack at their children’s learning, they seldom turn out carbon copies of themselves in their offsprung.

If you take the entering freshman class at some big North American public university, you can develop an explanation of the differences among them in right-wing authoritarianism by again using Bandura’s social learning theory. By and large the students were probably pretty authoritarian as children, submitting to authority, learning whom to fear and dislike, and usually doing what they were supposed to do. But when adolescence struck with all its hormones, urges, and desires for autonomy, some of them began to have new experiences that could have shaken up their early learnings. If the experiences reinforced the parents’, teachers’, and clergies’ teachings (e.g. that wrecked car), authoritarian attitudes would likely remain high. But if the experiences indicated the teachings were wrong (e.g. “Sex isn’t bad. It’s great!”), the teen is likely to become less authoritarian. (Of course, if the wrecked car and one’s first sexual encounter occur at the same moment, the lesson will be mixed. But doubtless memorable.) It’s naturally easier for children from authoritarian homes to remain authoritarian, and it’s easier for kids with unauthoritarian parents to become decidedly unauthoritarian. But ultimately the experiences do most of the shaping.

I have discovered in my investigations that, by and large, high RWA students had simply missed many of the experiences that might have lowered their authoritarianism. Take that first item on page 59 about fathers being the head of the family. Authoritarian followers often said they didn’t know any other kind of families. And they hadn’t known any unpatriotic people, nor had they broken many rules. They simply had not met many different kinds of people or done their share of wild and crazy things. Instead they had grown up in an enclosed, rather homogeneous environment--with their friends, their schools, their readings, their amusements all controlled to keep them out of harm’s way and Satan’s evil clutches. They had contentedly traveled around on short leashes in relatively small, tight, safe circles all their lives.

Interestingly enough, authoritarian followers show a remarkable capacity for change IF they have some of the important experiences. For example, they are far less likely to have known a homosexual (or realized an acquaintance was homosexual) than most people. But if you look at the high RWAs who do know someone gay or lesbian, they are much less hostile toward homosexuals in general than most authoritarians are. Getting to know a homosexual usually makes one more accepting of homosexuals as a group. Personal experiences can make a lot of difference, which is a truly hopeful discovery. The problem is, most right-wing authoritarians won’t willingly exit their small world and try to meet a gay.

People can end up with extreme scores on the RWA scale in other ways. Cataclysmic events, for example, can undo everything you have learned before and throw you up on a far-away beach. But most people who end up on one extreme or the other land there because most of the influences in their life got in line and pushed in the same direction

Those who go to a fundamentalist Bible college featuring a church-related curriculum, taught by a church-selected faculty to a mainly High RWA student body that lives in men’s dorms and women’s dorms separated by a moat with alligators in it, will probably graduate about as authoritarian as they were when they went in. If, however, they go to a different kind of school, their education may well lower their authoritarianism. I teach at the “big state university” in my province, and over the four years of an undergraduate program at the University of Manitoba students’ RWA scale scores drop about 10%. Liberal arts majors drop more than that, “applied” majors such as business and nursing drop less. But the students who drop the most, 15-20%, no matter what they major in, are those who laid down high RWA scale scores when they first came in the door.

High RWA parents may anticipate this and try to send their kids to “safe” colleges. They may also blame the faculty at the public university for “messing up the Jones kid so badly.” But as much as some of the profs might like to take credit for it, I think the faculty usually has little to do with the 10% drop. Instead, I think when High RWA students get to a big university whose catchment area is the world, and especially if it’s located some distance from mom and dad, they simply begin to meet all kinds of new people and begin to have some of the experiences that most of their classmates had some years earlier. The drop does not come from reading Marx in Political Science or from the philosophy prof who wears his atheism as a badge. These attempts at influence can be easily dismissed by the well-inoculated high RWA student. It probably comes more from the late night bull-sessions, where you have to defend your ideas, not just silently reject the prof’s, and other activities that take place in the dorms, I’ll bet.

What happens after graduation from university? Over the years I have collected RWA scale scores from three different groups of Manitoba alumni. One group answered 12 years after they had first completed the scale as introductory psychology students; the second set responded 18 years after they were freshmen; and the third had to wait 27 years to repeat the thrill. What do you think I found?

If you swear by Freud, there should be only minimal change over all these intervals because Freud thought our personalities were pretty much set in stone by age six. If you believe the man on the street instead, you’ll think RWA scale scores rose after college because “everybody knows people get more conservative as they get older.” But if you believe the data from these three studies, you’ll pay less attention to both Freud and the man in the street from now on. Many alumni did stay more or less the same; but others (usually folks, as I said above, who had been highly authoritarian as freshmen) changed substantially.7 And overall RWA scale scores showed a decrease in all of the studies: 5% over 12 years, 9% over 18 years, and 11% over 27 years.

Support for genetic origins of things like right-wing authoritarianism increased recently when Jack and Jeanne Block of the University of California at Berkeley reported some results of a longitudinal study they ran. They found that females who became liberals as adults had shown some distinctive characteristics while in nursery school, compared with little girls who grew up to become conservatives. The future liberals had been talkative and dominating, expressed negative feelings openly, teased other children rather than got teased, were verbally fluent, sought to be independent, were self-assertive, attempted to transfer blame onto others, were aggressive and set high standards for themselves. Little girls who grew up to be conservatives, in turn, had been indecisive and vacillating, were easily victimized by other children, were inhibited and constricted, kept their thoughts and feelings to themselves, were shy and reserved, were anxious in an unpredictable environment, tended to yield and give in to others, were obedient, and compliant, and were immobilized by stress. The liberal versus conservative men showed far fewer differences as children than the women had. But future liberals were resourceful, independent and proud of their accomplishments, while tomorrow’s conservative men at nursery school were visibly deviant from their peers, appeared to feel unworthy, had a readiness to feel guilty, were anxious in an unpredictable environment, and tended to be suspicious and distrustful of others.

---

Quote:

---

S'funny, I consider Authoritarian Conservatism a mental illness in the sociopathic spectrum, so the irony of hearing one of em refer to liberals as mentally ill strikes me as a bad case of projection.

---

Quote:

---

If a "goodly" king overtaxes his people by necessity, they'll get pissed, and if a "wicked" king cuts them a break to get them off their back they'll be happy - the REASONS behind the actions never do quite matter so much as the actions themselves

---

Quote:

---

I made the decision, when much younger, that I would do what *I* believed to be "right", irrespective of the social codes, laws, or potential consequences, that I would "do as thou wilt" and be damned to anyone or anything other than my own conscience, be it men, gods, or the established order.

---

Quote:

---

I find it ironic in the extreme that both the left and the right consider the other subhuman, mentally retarded, hopelessly irrational, etc.

---

Quote:

---

most children are liberals

---

Quote:

---

I'd suspect the Liberals who become Conservative do so very much because they see the real world, and in a kneejerk reaction turn away from it. The nuanced grey world of competing viewpoints is a much scarier place than the black and white "I'm good you're bad" that the "conservatives" live in.

---

Quote:

---

From my experience of the church, where they differ from liberals is that they are not very inclusive towards people who are different from them. They don't care about the rights of people of colour. What they see instead is people of colour taking away resources from them, resources that they were previously entitled to. It's not EVERY conservative, but it's a fairly common mindset.

---

Quote:

---

it's what's convenient based on geography and demographics in a certain region

---