7 ms·

This really does need to be broken down by demographic because given the tilts in age, immigration status, social status, urban/rural among voters, all of this

This really does need to be broken down by demographic because given the tilts in age, immigration status, social status, urban/rural among voters, all of this just might be a measure of one group vs another. 'Londoners more neurotic, Villagers more conscientious and authoritarian' Also - I don't like the term 'authoritarian' in this context as it's ill defined.

pjc50 8y ago
"RWA authoritarian" is pretty well defined as "someone who scores highly on this test": http://www.panojohnson.com/automatons/rwa-scale.xhtml http://www.panojohnson.com/automatons/rwa-scale.xhtml If you scroll down a bit in the original article there's a breakdown of subject RWA scores by age and gender. It even has error bars.
- fortythirteen 8y ago
  For reference, I got a 59, which is securely within the supposed "non-authoritarian" side. That being said, the questions in that test are quite binary and, The RW in RWA being for "Right Wing", heavily biased towards "authoritarianism" being a solely right wing, religiously conservative thing, which it is most certainly not. There were no questions on the test that would capture a pure Stalinist/Maoist as the obvious authoritarian he/she is. This throws the entire study into question on its claims. Also, with regards to the original study, the high degree of neuroticism in remainers could easily be characterized as them being susceptible to fear based propaganda.
  - epx 8y ago
    Thanks for the mention of this test. I scored 51, but for some reason I am known as the 'right wing conservative AWM' in some circles. I just suppose that even liberal people judge by looks (I do look like the prototypical AWM) and by small disagreements about some liberal thesis (e.g. I don't agree with 100% with current feminism mantras, yet in absolute terms I agree 90% with feminists in general and disagree 99.9% with barefoot&pregnant types). There is a lot of cargo cult among liberals.
    - fortythirteen 8y ago
      Like most situations, you learn more about someone from the questions they ask than the answers they give. The creator(s) of that survey have some extremely binary world views.
      - misnome 8y ago
        I'd be very hesitant to make that conclusion. Much more likely is that more nuanced middle-ground questions are a lot more open to individual interpretation than the "extreme" statements, and thus give you a lot less "signal" in what you are trying to measure - even some of these could be seen as widely open to interpretation. I'm guessing the scale (rather than agree/disagree) is attempting to compensate for this somewhat. (Caveat: I'm a scientist but not with a background in anything close to Psychology; I've seen but not written these sorts of tests).
    - shubb 8y ago
      It sounds like you have views that are controversial in your social environment. That's not authritarian - that's anti-authoritarian. If you had those views because everyone around you had them, and didn't like people disagreeing because it was outside social norms, then you would be authoritarian. In Germany, people with high RWA are probably very anti-rascist for instance. It's an interesting metric.
- rayiner 8y ago
  > It is always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubt in people’s minds. I have no idea what this is supposed to measure, but it sounds like garbage to me. It’s literally a test of how people identify themselves (either as establishment or as a “rabble rouser”). Then arbitrarily labeling the earablishment supporters as “autboritarian.” To see why thia question is ridiculous: Imagine asking this question to people in Tehran during the Shah. In that case, the “proper authorities” were the western-aligned Shah government, while the “rabble rousers” would be the Islamists. But it was the rabble rousers’ view that was authoritarian.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - sparkie 8y ago
    > You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority’s view by protesting for women’s abortion rights, for animal rights ... This one is completely nuts. Mistreating animals: Not good. Mistreating unborn babies: Totally fine! Disclaimer: I am not anti-abortion, but I'm certainly not pro-abortion in the way I am pro-animal rights.
    - astura 8y ago
      >Important: You may find that you sometimes have different reactions to different parts of a statement. For example, you might very strongly disagree (“-4”) with one idea in a statement, but slightly agree (“+1”) with another idea in the same item. When this happens, please combine your reactions, and [record] how you feel on balance (a “-3” in this case).
  - pjc50 8y ago
    > To see why thia question is ridiculous: Imagine asking this question to people in Tehran during the Shah. In that case, the “proper authorities” were the western-aligned Shah government, while the “rabble rousers” would be the Islamists. But it was the rabble rousers’ view that was authoritarian. This illustrates both a problem with trying to retroactively jam events into ideological frameworks, and a tragedy of revolutionary parties. At the time, the Shah's government was percieved as authoritarian - that's why there was a revolution in the first place. But it turns out that the violent overthrow of a government (internally or externally) tends to result in the new government exerting extreme force to maintain its position against ""counter-revolutionaries"". Perhaps the unique thing about the American revolution is that it wasn't followed by a Terror, and the civil war was deferred for another century by interpreting "all men are created equal" to mean "not all men".
- pattrn 8y ago
  The amount of bias in the wording of these questions makes me skeptical of the survey's usefulness. It feels more like a questionnaire about support of various social issues, where if you disagree with the social issue then you get categorized as authoritarian. For instance, it's very possible to believe that protesters are frequently wrong and that authorities are frequently correct without being an authoritarian. You can believe those things without believing it's the government's duty or responsibility to enforce your personal beliefs. Many of the questions exhibit this problem. One of the questions in particular categorizes you as less authoritarian if you support abolishing prayer in schools. By definition, using government to reduce personal freedom is an authoritarian policy, which makes banning prayer an authoritarian policy. This type of bias shows up in many of the questions. Scores from this test seem to represent how closely the person who answered matches the social views of the survey's author. I'm not sure how useful that is to anyone other than the author.
  - shubb 8y ago
    It is also possible that they were looking for 'questions that indicate cluster membership'. RWA could be defined as "tendency to trust in authority, value obeying rules, and dislike people who break rules". It's a bad name, as someone in a left wing country with high RWA would tend to disapprove of right wing protesters for instance. So in designing the test you put together a huge list of questions that vagually relate to RWA, collect answers, and then look for ones that tend to cluster together. 'People who answer yes to this tend to answer yes to these others'. You then remove the ones that show poor correlation, and you have a test.
  - danek 8y ago
    I think you have it backwards. Abolishing prayer in school is not authoritarianism and doesn’t reduce personal freedom. You’re still free to pray on your own at school. Having an official religion is authoritarian (unless it’s a religious school), and pressuring people to participate in a prayer is pressuring them to have less personal freedom (from your religion). I guess authoritarians tend to view a policy which gives equal preference to everyone as an attack on their “special status” and a reduction of their freedoms.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- reefoctopus 8y ago
  The book mentioned at the bottom of the page with the broken link should point here: http://theauthoritarians.org/Downloads/TheAuthoritarians.pdf http://theauthoritarians.org/Downloads/TheAuthoritarians.pdf
- belorn 8y ago
  Let me rewrite a few of those questions. I wonder how those would change the outcome. The established authorities generally turn out to be wrong as right, while the extremist on all ends of the political scale are usually just “loud mouths” that ignore facts in favor of political positioning. In marriage men should have to promise to serve and protect their wife, and women should have to promise to obey their husbands. Nudist are an recognized minority group and should have their rights protected in the same way as groups that identify based on religion or sexual orientation. You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority’s view by protesting for women’s abortion rights, Mens rights to consented parenthood, for animal rights, or to abolish school prayer. Abolishment of gender roles is good. The days when women and men are identified based on their gender belong strictly in the past.
  - maldusiecle 8y ago
    I like it, you took all the clearly written statements and added non sequiturs and grammatical errors to them.
- fallingfrog 8y ago
  I scored 20 (zero percent authoritarian), but I mean those were some pretty extreme and silly questions. I can't see anyone really scoring too high on a test like this who isn't completely crazy!
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  I really don't like this survey, and I'm not really sure that it measures anything other than a specific kind of cultural conservatism. There are those who have very authoritative views over how one ought to act that wouldn't be defined as culturally conservative, for example, within the intersectional movement, there are those who believe that one cannot say 'America is a meritocracy and those who work hard can get ahead' because it doesn't fully respect someone's life experience given their race and gender. To the extent that this is an 'infraction' in certain public institutions. Agree or not - it's 'authoritative', just not in the traditional terms. Even if the survey measured this kind of authoritarianism more broadly, I'm not sure it would be measuring something fully.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

pjc50 8y ago

"RWA authoritarian" is pretty well defined as "someone who scores highly on this test": http://www.panojohnson.com/automatons/rwa-scale.xhtml http://www.panojohnson.com/automatons/rwa-scale.xhtml If you scroll down a bit in the original article there's a breakdown of subject RWA scores by age and gender. It even has error bars.

fortythirteen 8y ago
For reference, I got a 59, which is securely within the supposed "non-authoritarian" side. That being said, the questions in that test are quite binary and, The RW in RWA being for "Right Wing", heavily biased towards "authoritarianism" being a solely right wing, religiously conservative thing, which it is most certainly not. There were no questions on the test that would capture a pure Stalinist/Maoist as the obvious authoritarian he/she is. This throws the entire study into question on its claims. Also, with regards to the original study, the high degree of neuroticism in remainers could easily be characterized as them being susceptible to fear based propaganda.
- epx 8y ago
  Thanks for the mention of this test. I scored 51, but for some reason I am known as the 'right wing conservative AWM' in some circles. I just suppose that even liberal people judge by looks (I do look like the prototypical AWM) and by small disagreements about some liberal thesis (e.g. I don't agree with 100% with current feminism mantras, yet in absolute terms I agree 90% with feminists in general and disagree 99.9% with barefoot&pregnant types). There is a lot of cargo cult among liberals.
  - fortythirteen 8y ago
    Like most situations, you learn more about someone from the questions they ask than the answers they give. The creator(s) of that survey have some extremely binary world views.
    - misnome 8y ago
      I'd be very hesitant to make that conclusion. Much more likely is that more nuanced middle-ground questions are a lot more open to individual interpretation than the "extreme" statements, and thus give you a lot less "signal" in what you are trying to measure - even some of these could be seen as widely open to interpretation. I'm guessing the scale (rather than agree/disagree) is attempting to compensate for this somewhat. (Caveat: I'm a scientist but not with a background in anything close to Psychology; I've seen but not written these sorts of tests).
  - shubb 8y ago
    It sounds like you have views that are controversial in your social environment. That's not authritarian - that's anti-authoritarian. If you had those views because everyone around you had them, and didn't like people disagreeing because it was outside social norms, then you would be authoritarian. In Germany, people with high RWA are probably very anti-rascist for instance. It's an interesting metric.
rayiner 8y ago
> It is always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in government and religion than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubt in people’s minds. I have no idea what this is supposed to measure, but it sounds like garbage to me. It’s literally a test of how people identify themselves (either as establishment or as a “rabble rouser”). Then arbitrarily labeling the earablishment supporters as “autboritarian.” To see why thia question is ridiculous: Imagine asking this question to people in Tehran during the Shah. In that case, the “proper authorities” were the western-aligned Shah government, while the “rabble rousers” would be the Islamists. But it was the rabble rousers’ view that was authoritarian.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sparkie 8y ago
  > You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority’s view by protesting for women’s abortion rights, for animal rights ... This one is completely nuts. Mistreating animals: Not good. Mistreating unborn babies: Totally fine! Disclaimer: I am not anti-abortion, but I'm certainly not pro-abortion in the way I am pro-animal rights.
  - astura 8y ago
    >Important: You may find that you sometimes have different reactions to different parts of a statement. For example, you might very strongly disagree (“-4”) with one idea in a statement, but slightly agree (“+1”) with another idea in the same item. When this happens, please combine your reactions, and [record] how you feel on balance (a “-3” in this case).
- pjc50 8y ago
  > To see why thia question is ridiculous: Imagine asking this question to people in Tehran during the Shah. In that case, the “proper authorities” were the western-aligned Shah government, while the “rabble rousers” would be the Islamists. But it was the rabble rousers’ view that was authoritarian. This illustrates both a problem with trying to retroactively jam events into ideological frameworks, and a tragedy of revolutionary parties. At the time, the Shah's government was percieved as authoritarian - that's why there was a revolution in the first place. But it turns out that the violent overthrow of a government (internally or externally) tends to result in the new government exerting extreme force to maintain its position against ""counter-revolutionaries"". Perhaps the unique thing about the American revolution is that it wasn't followed by a Terror, and the civil war was deferred for another century by interpreting "all men are created equal" to mean "not all men".
pattrn 8y ago
The amount of bias in the wording of these questions makes me skeptical of the survey's usefulness. It feels more like a questionnaire about support of various social issues, where if you disagree with the social issue then you get categorized as authoritarian. For instance, it's very possible to believe that protesters are frequently wrong and that authorities are frequently correct without being an authoritarian. You can believe those things without believing it's the government's duty or responsibility to enforce your personal beliefs. Many of the questions exhibit this problem. One of the questions in particular categorizes you as less authoritarian if you support abolishing prayer in schools. By definition, using government to reduce personal freedom is an authoritarian policy, which makes banning prayer an authoritarian policy. This type of bias shows up in many of the questions. Scores from this test seem to represent how closely the person who answered matches the social views of the survey's author. I'm not sure how useful that is to anyone other than the author.
- shubb 8y ago
  It is also possible that they were looking for 'questions that indicate cluster membership'. RWA could be defined as "tendency to trust in authority, value obeying rules, and dislike people who break rules". It's a bad name, as someone in a left wing country with high RWA would tend to disapprove of right wing protesters for instance. So in designing the test you put together a huge list of questions that vagually relate to RWA, collect answers, and then look for ones that tend to cluster together. 'People who answer yes to this tend to answer yes to these others'. You then remove the ones that show poor correlation, and you have a test.
- danek 8y ago
  I think you have it backwards. Abolishing prayer in school is not authoritarianism and doesn’t reduce personal freedom. You’re still free to pray on your own at school. Having an official religion is authoritarian (unless it’s a religious school), and pressuring people to participate in a prayer is pressuring them to have less personal freedom (from your religion). I guess authoritarians tend to view a policy which gives equal preference to everyone as an attack on their “special status” and a reduction of their freedoms.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
reefoctopus 8y ago
The book mentioned at the bottom of the page with the broken link should point here: http://theauthoritarians.org/Downloads/TheAuthoritarians.pdf http://theauthoritarians.org/Downloads/TheAuthoritarians.pdf
belorn 8y ago
Let me rewrite a few of those questions. I wonder how those would change the outcome. The established authorities generally turn out to be wrong as right, while the extremist on all ends of the political scale are usually just “loud mouths” that ignore facts in favor of political positioning. In marriage men should have to promise to serve and protect their wife, and women should have to promise to obey their husbands. Nudist are an recognized minority group and should have their rights protected in the same way as groups that identify based on religion or sexual orientation. You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority’s view by protesting for women’s abortion rights, Mens rights to consented parenthood, for animal rights, or to abolish school prayer. Abolishment of gender roles is good. The days when women and men are identified based on their gender belong strictly in the past.
- maldusiecle 8y ago
  I like it, you took all the clearly written statements and added non sequiturs and grammatical errors to them.
fallingfrog 8y ago
I scored 20 (zero percent authoritarian), but I mean those were some pretty extreme and silly questions. I can't see anyone really scoring too high on a test like this who isn't completely crazy!
sonnyblarney 8y ago
I really don't like this survey, and I'm not really sure that it measures anything other than a specific kind of cultural conservatism. There are those who have very authoritative views over how one ought to act that wouldn't be defined as culturally conservative, for example, within the intersectional movement, there are those who believe that one cannot say 'America is a meritocracy and those who work hard can get ahead' because it doesn't fully respect someone's life experience given their race and gender. To the extent that this is an 'infraction' in certain public institutions. Agree or not - it's 'authoritative', just not in the traditional terms. Even if the survey measured this kind of authoritarianism more broadly, I'm not sure it would be measuring something fully.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]