The issue with that kind of research is that it did not start from a neutral angle, that gives a benefit of doubt to any position in the sense of assuming with some charity that sensible people could hold that position fully consciously, rationally, but more like “these people are so obviously wrong, let’s try to explain from what mental malfunction the wrong comes from”. So there is no neutral angle, no charity, no benefit of doubt given.
The idea was originally called “authoritarian personality” and it was largely a bunch of Frankfurt-School Neo-Marxists, Marxo-Freudists trying to explain Nazism after WW2. So you can imagine how incredibly charged it must have been, riding the wave of a world-historical clash of ideologies. After in 1981 Bob Altemeyer corrected some bias in the original tests, he renamed it RWA.
Generally the basic issue is psychologists simply assuming only ideas from center to left can be sane at all, and treating the rest as a form of a disorder.
Another example of uncharitably quasi-medicalizing worldviews without examining how could actually sane people consider them valid—and actually closely related to RWA—Social Dominance Orientation and Social Dominance Theory which is basically an extremely convoluted way of saying they don’t like testosterone-driven behavior.
To make the whole thing useful, it should be debiased to the extent that even people who actually have such positions should accept the result as an accurate label they can identifiy with. Most likely it should be understood as survivalism on the thrive-and-survive axis.
Generally the basic issue is psychologists simply assuming only ideas from center to left can be sane at all, and treating the rest as a form of a disorder.
RWA is not listed in the DSM-IV as a mental disorder (and neither is any authoritarian-orientated personality type), so I don’t know what basis you have for saying this. Interestingly, though, anti-authoritarian personalities are listed in the DSM-IV, so if anything, the opposite of your point seems true.
You may be correct about bias, but in my view it was certainly the case that post-war psychology was far more open to the idea that all ‘psychologically normal’ people could display ‘evil’ behaviors under certain circumstances (Milgram experiment, Standford prison experiment, etc.)
And at any rate, I already mentioned Stenner’s work and that characterizing people as RWA or non-RWA is misleading. Again, her work suggests that it should be viewed as a reaction to external forces, similar to what you’re saying about ‘survivalism.’
Another example of uncharitably quasi-medicalizing worldviews without examining how could actually sane people consider them valid—and actually closely related to RWA—Social Dominance Orientation and Social Dominance Theory which is basically an extremely convoluted way of saying they don’t like testosterone-driven behavior.
To make the whole thing useful, it should be debiased to the extent that even people who actually have such positions should accept the result as an accurate label they can identifiy with.
I’m not sure why you’re saying this. Why would self-identification make it ‘useful’? Certainly few would self-identify as psychopaths (to give an example), even though we know that psychopathy most definitely exists and is quite a useful concept.
That discussion is about aggression. Why confuse aggression with dominance? They are so completely unrelated it is not even funny. Dominance (status-relevant concerns) is an in-group behavior, while aggression is typically directed towards the outgroup.
SDO is obviously so much more about status-relevant concerns in-group than aggression towards the outgroup.
Note: SDO is a clearly shitty test and I have specifically mentioned it as a counter-example of how not to do psychology. The question sounds more like a laughable cardboard-cutout parody of a conservative person than something real people would use to describe their views: “It’s OK if some groups have more of a chance in life than others.” the problem is obvious—it is the simply reverted form of an egalitarian credo, instead of actually trying to figure out how different people think. For this reason, SDO is pretty much useless, because the researcher just basically inverts what he believes and checks if people agree with the reversed form… so I meant it as a negative example, but so far as it has any utility at all, clearly it is something related to status-relevant concerns?
Why would self-identification make it ‘useful’? Certainly few would self-identify as psychopaths (to give an example), even though we know that psychopathy most definitely exists and is quite a useful concept.
Bingo! Precisely for that reason. Because psychopathy is a disorder. Once it is turned into something people can identify with, it is probably no longer a disorder. That means charity / understanding was restored, and it is no longer medicalizing differing opinions. Ability to identify with is a measure of to what extent is it treated as a disorder or not.
We may be misunderstanding each other. Reworded: testosterone’s link with status-related concern is very clear. example Do you think it is not clearly demonstrated enough, or you think status-related concerns are a different thing than dominance? To me they mean the same thing.
I am preparing an article actually that relates to this, so if you have any concerns here please detail.
Once it is turned into something people can identify with, it is probably no longer a disorder.
What?
Sure, this is not a perfect measure. People often accept they have disorders (usually when they actually perceive suffering from them). Still, if you want to remove judgements (like it being seen as a disorder) from a psychological profile, checking whether people could identify with the label sounds kinda like an important milestone in that? If you want to check which words used to describe gay people are not offensive, it is sort of a good idea if they themselves use them?
Thanks for the clarification. Yes, the link with status-related concern is definitely more established than with aggression. I’d be interested in reading your article.
I’m still not convinced that the purpose of SDO is to make behaviors correlated with testosterone look like disorders or that this is the mainstream position of psychology.
Still, if you want to remove judgements (like it being seen as a disorder) from a psychological profile, checking whether people could identify with the label sounds kinda like an important milestone in that?
It’s not obvious to me why it should be important?
Why it should be important to remove these judgements? Plain simply because it is highly uncharitable and hostile to people to basically invalidate their positions saying they don’t come from a reasoning process like every other position, but from psychological malfunction.
Of course, we know actually most positions don’t come from reasoning processes, but more like affective etc. heuristics and only rationalized with reasoning :) But since the social etiquette is (currently) to give people the benefit of doubt and assume and pretend they arrive to their stances rationally, singling out a few positions and basically saying they are exceptions because they come from specific psychological dispositions is I think hostile or disrespectful.
By your description (I haven’t seen the test) it seems like SDO is a test for “nonapples”.
(It is not round? Is it not red? Is it not a fruit? Be aware, you may have found a nonapple! People sometimes say that nonapples are useful and necessary, but we have clearly documented examples where nonapples have exploded, damaged property, or even killed people.)
A possibly important question is what happened after the findings were reported and the “diagnosis” was applied—did anyone propose for the high-RWA scorers a direction of treatment? Did this personality type make it into the DSM? Because I don’t think we can talk about medicalizing a worldview as long as the medical establishment does not take any action against it whatsoever. Rather, the fact that groups of researchers in psychology wanted to see whether there was such a thing as a dominance-, hierarchy-driven personality—and then stick a name on it—does not necessarily mean they were condemning it. Just taking note of it as a phenomenon.
Left-wing bias isn’t necessarily evident in this. From the Wikipedia article:
There have been a number of other attempts to identify “left-wing authoritarians” in the United States and Canada. These would be people who submit to leftist authorities, are highly conventional to liberal viewpoints, and are aggressive to people who oppose left-wing ideology. These attempts have failed because measures of authoritarianism always correlate at least slightly with the right. However, left-wing authoritarians were found in Eastern Europe. [19] There are certainly extremists across the political spectrum, but most psychologists now believe that authoritarianism is a predominantly right-wing phenomenon.[20]
Furthermore, while this tidbit indicates that researchers believe high-RWA scorers are more biased (which is the closest to condemnation I could find in the article):
According to research by Altemeyer, right-wing authoritarians tend to exhibit cognitive errors and symptoms of faulty reasoning. Specifically, they are more likely to make incorrect inferences from evidence and to hold contradictory ideas that result from compartmentalized thinking. They are also more likely to uncritically accept insufficient evidence that supports their beliefs, and they are less likely to acknowledge their own limitations.[14] Whether right-wing authoritarians are less intelligent than average is disputed, with Stenner arguing that variables such as high verbal ability (indicative of high cognitive capacity) have a very substantial ameliorative effect in diminishing authoritarian tendencies.
… it doesn’t follow that this springs from an equal and opposite bias against RWAs. Who knows, maybe the scientists are right. Maybe high-RWA scorers do exhibit these biases more than the rest. (At least it can be agreed on that either they do or they don’t. The position that everyone across the political spectrum is equally wrong doesn’t seem likely.)
Also, it might be worth asking whether high-RWA scorers don’t necessarily identify with the label of “authoritarian” because the researchers made their result sound like a slur, or because the testers have internalized the widespread societal attitude that authoritarianism is bad and reminiscent of murderous regimes. It takes a step further towards NRx for right-wing authoritarians to remove the last vestiges of lip-service to liberally-slanted feel-good words in Western society of all persuasions (freedom, democracy, rights and so on), which most aren’t going to make. (At least not until Moldbug & co. have claimed a larger share of society as their political allies.)
I suspect that the problem with identifying “left-wing authoritarians” could be that when someone becomes too obviously authoritarian, left-wing people who don’t agree with them re-classify them as right-wing.
That is, the real problem is not defining “authoritarian personality”. I believe such personality type exists empirically, and can hold many kinds of political beliefs (even libertarian beliefs). The real problem is defining “right-wing” and “left-wing” meaningfully, without sneaking in something about authority.
It’s not that “authoritarian” is silently re-defined as “not left-wing”, but rather that “left-wing” is silently re-defined as “not authoritarian”. So when you have a situation where left-wing people come to power and their corrupted human hardware becomes obvious, for example in Soviet Russia, a few decades later you will find people who are telling you with straight face that “actually, Stalinists were right-wing”.
What they mean by saying that, in my opinion, is something like: “I admit that these people were horrible, which means I have to deny that they belonged to my tribe”. (People who think that Stalinists were the good guys usually don’t feel the need to re-classify them as right-wing.) In tribal thinking, my tribe is defined as “the good people”, so if someone was a member of my tribe, they couldn’t be evil, and if someone was evil, then by definition they were not really members of my tribe. (Analogically, religious people who disapprove of Inquisition say that the inquisitors were not true Christians, etc.)
(There is also the recently popular tendency to re-define words to mean “X, except when our tribe is doing that”. Which means you cannot be sexist against men, racist against white people, and if you blindly believe and worship someone left-wing on tumblr it does not make you an authoritarian personality. But to me it seems that most people understand this as a dishonest move, and perhaps only the true believers really buy it. On the other hand most people are unable to define “left-wing” and “right-wing” other than saying how the common consensus already classifies the existing political parties.)
Rather, the fact that groups of researchers in psychology wanted to see whether there was such a thing as a dominance-, hierarchy-driven personality—and then stick a name on it—does not necessarily mean they were condemning it. Just taking note of it as a phenomenon.
Please be aware of how it all comes from the Frankfurter School, Freudo-Marxism. When someone like Adorno defines an Authoritarian Personality and actually does it to explain nazism around 1950, the amount of condemnation in it s rather huge and really obvious. Altmeyer may be different, but the “tradition”, the central point was already set and Altmeyer could only deviate with relative to that.
I mean, if you work from a biological angle, such as studying rhesus monkeys or an anthropological angle, a dominance and hierarchy driven personality is simply normal. It is also normal from the historical angle, such as describing the Roman pater familas or any random medieval lord. From all these angles, you would not put a special name on it, such as RWA or authoritarian personality, as they would be pretty normal. The angle from which it looks special, weird, unusual is precisely that one angle that also condemns it hard, namely modern, liberal, Western civilization. I think the huge connotations of condemnation really cannot be unnoticed here. Either you find it normal in which case it hardly has a name, or you condemn it.
It takes a step further towards NRx for right-wing authoritarians to remove the last vestiges of lip-service to liberally-slanted feel-good words in Western society of all persuasions (freedom, democracy, rights and so on), which most aren’t going to make. (At least not until Moldbug & co. have claimed a larger share of society as their political allies.)
I consider this fairly impossible. One thing is clear all over the political spectrum, freedom, democracy and rights and suchlike are at least preferable to modern, demotic, populist dictatorships of the Saddam type. Nobody ever came up with a serious recipe how to violate these principles in a way that it results in some kind of an nice premodern monarchy and not Saddam. From this angle, NRx is pretty much a doomed idea. It seems in the modern world you can only choose from modern systems, such as democracy or modern, demotic, populist tyranny. Anything seriously premodern would require changing the era, not the system, changing the whole culture and perhaps even technology. Within, strictly within modern alternatives, freedom, democracy and rights are preferable, thus they will continue to stay popular. And this is why any model about behavior that seems to be rather clearly opposed to it cannot help but be condemnative.
This is basically a challenge. It is probably possible to live closer to biological / anthropological norms i.e. being “dominance-positive” while still accepting the general outlines of freedom, equality and rights, but how this is possible needs to be worked out, currently it is not at all obvious.
The issue with that kind of research is that it did not start from a neutral angle, that gives a benefit of doubt to any position in the sense of assuming with some charity that sensible people could hold that position fully consciously, rationally, but more like “these people are so obviously wrong, let’s try to explain from what mental malfunction the wrong comes from”. So there is no neutral angle, no charity, no benefit of doubt given.
The idea was originally called “authoritarian personality” and it was largely a bunch of Frankfurt-School Neo-Marxists, Marxo-Freudists trying to explain Nazism after WW2. So you can imagine how incredibly charged it must have been, riding the wave of a world-historical clash of ideologies. After in 1981 Bob Altemeyer corrected some bias in the original tests, he renamed it RWA.
Generally the basic issue is psychologists simply assuming only ideas from center to left can be sane at all, and treating the rest as a form of a disorder.
Another example of uncharitably quasi-medicalizing worldviews without examining how could actually sane people consider them valid—and actually closely related to RWA—Social Dominance Orientation and Social Dominance Theory which is basically an extremely convoluted way of saying they don’t like testosterone-driven behavior.
To make the whole thing useful, it should be debiased to the extent that even people who actually have such positions should accept the result as an accurate label they can identifiy with. Most likely it should be understood as survivalism on the thrive-and-survive axis.
RWA is not listed in the DSM-IV as a mental disorder (and neither is any authoritarian-orientated personality type), so I don’t know what basis you have for saying this. Interestingly, though, anti-authoritarian personalities are listed in the DSM-IV, so if anything, the opposite of your point seems true.
You may be correct about bias, but in my view it was certainly the case that post-war psychology was far more open to the idea that all ‘psychologically normal’ people could display ‘evil’ behaviors under certain circumstances (Milgram experiment, Standford prison experiment, etc.)
And at any rate, I already mentioned Stenner’s work and that characterizing people as RWA or non-RWA is misleading. Again, her work suggests that it should be viewed as a reaction to external forces, similar to what you’re saying about ‘survivalism.’
I’m not sure why you’re associating testosterone with SDO, as testosterone has not yet been convincingly shown to be correlated with SDO. In fact we have had this discussion here before: http://lesswrong.com/lw/84i/social_status_testosterone/
I’m not sure why you’re saying this. Why would self-identification make it ‘useful’? Certainly few would self-identify as psychopaths (to give an example), even though we know that psychopathy most definitely exists and is quite a useful concept.
That discussion is about aggression. Why confuse aggression with dominance? They are so completely unrelated it is not even funny. Dominance (status-relevant concerns) is an in-group behavior, while aggression is typically directed towards the outgroup.
The link with dominance (again: not aggression) is so well-known that T is used a proxy for dominance-oriented interests (status relevant concerns) in stereotype threat studies: http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org/bibliography_josephs_newman_brown_beer.html
SDO is obviously so much more about status-relevant concerns in-group than aggression towards the outgroup.
Note: SDO is a clearly shitty test and I have specifically mentioned it as a counter-example of how not to do psychology. The question sounds more like a laughable cardboard-cutout parody of a conservative person than something real people would use to describe their views: “It’s OK if some groups have more of a chance in life than others.” the problem is obvious—it is the simply reverted form of an egalitarian credo, instead of actually trying to figure out how different people think. For this reason, SDO is pretty much useless, because the researcher just basically inverts what he believes and checks if people agree with the reversed form… so I meant it as a negative example, but so far as it has any utility at all, clearly it is something related to status-relevant concerns?
Bingo! Precisely for that reason. Because psychopathy is a disorder. Once it is turned into something people can identify with, it is probably no longer a disorder. That means charity / understanding was restored, and it is no longer medicalizing differing opinions. Ability to identify with is a measure of to what extent is it treated as a disorder or not.
I haven’t. Multiple quoted passages in that link talk about dominance.
Testosterone has been shown not to be linked with aggression. The link with dominance is less clear but still not established.
What?
We may be misunderstanding each other. Reworded: testosterone’s link with status-related concern is very clear. example Do you think it is not clearly demonstrated enough, or you think status-related concerns are a different thing than dominance? To me they mean the same thing.
I am preparing an article actually that relates to this, so if you have any concerns here please detail.
Sure, this is not a perfect measure. People often accept they have disorders (usually when they actually perceive suffering from them). Still, if you want to remove judgements (like it being seen as a disorder) from a psychological profile, checking whether people could identify with the label sounds kinda like an important milestone in that? If you want to check which words used to describe gay people are not offensive, it is sort of a good idea if they themselves use them?
Thanks for the clarification. Yes, the link with status-related concern is definitely more established than with aggression. I’d be interested in reading your article.
I’m still not convinced that the purpose of SDO is to make behaviors correlated with testosterone look like disorders or that this is the mainstream position of psychology.
It’s not obvious to me why it should be important?
Why it should be important to remove these judgements? Plain simply because it is highly uncharitable and hostile to people to basically invalidate their positions saying they don’t come from a reasoning process like every other position, but from psychological malfunction.
Of course, we know actually most positions don’t come from reasoning processes, but more like affective etc. heuristics and only rationalized with reasoning :) But since the social etiquette is (currently) to give people the benefit of doubt and assume and pretend they arrive to their stances rationally, singling out a few positions and basically saying they are exceptions because they come from specific psychological dispositions is I think hostile or disrespectful.
By your description (I haven’t seen the test) it seems like SDO is a test for “nonapples”.
(It is not round? Is it not red? Is it not a fruit? Be aware, you may have found a nonapple! People sometimes say that nonapples are useful and necessary, but we have clearly documented examples where nonapples have exploded, damaged property, or even killed people.)
It’s in the linked wiki, but yes.
A possibly important question is what happened after the findings were reported and the “diagnosis” was applied—did anyone propose for the high-RWA scorers a direction of treatment? Did this personality type make it into the DSM? Because I don’t think we can talk about medicalizing a worldview as long as the medical establishment does not take any action against it whatsoever. Rather, the fact that groups of researchers in psychology wanted to see whether there was such a thing as a dominance-, hierarchy-driven personality—and then stick a name on it—does not necessarily mean they were condemning it. Just taking note of it as a phenomenon.
Left-wing bias isn’t necessarily evident in this. From the Wikipedia article:
Furthermore, while this tidbit indicates that researchers believe high-RWA scorers are more biased (which is the closest to condemnation I could find in the article):
… it doesn’t follow that this springs from an equal and opposite bias against RWAs. Who knows, maybe the scientists are right. Maybe high-RWA scorers do exhibit these biases more than the rest. (At least it can be agreed on that either they do or they don’t. The position that everyone across the political spectrum is equally wrong doesn’t seem likely.)
Also, it might be worth asking whether high-RWA scorers don’t necessarily identify with the label of “authoritarian” because the researchers made their result sound like a slur, or because the testers have internalized the widespread societal attitude that authoritarianism is bad and reminiscent of murderous regimes. It takes a step further towards NRx for right-wing authoritarians to remove the last vestiges of lip-service to liberally-slanted feel-good words in Western society of all persuasions (freedom, democracy, rights and so on), which most aren’t going to make. (At least not until Moldbug & co. have claimed a larger share of society as their political allies.)
I suspect that the problem with identifying “left-wing authoritarians” could be that when someone becomes too obviously authoritarian, left-wing people who don’t agree with them re-classify them as right-wing.
That is, the real problem is not defining “authoritarian personality”. I believe such personality type exists empirically, and can hold many kinds of political beliefs (even libertarian beliefs). The real problem is defining “right-wing” and “left-wing” meaningfully, without sneaking in something about authority.
It’s not that “authoritarian” is silently re-defined as “not left-wing”, but rather that “left-wing” is silently re-defined as “not authoritarian”. So when you have a situation where left-wing people come to power and their corrupted human hardware becomes obvious, for example in Soviet Russia, a few decades later you will find people who are telling you with straight face that “actually, Stalinists were right-wing”.
What they mean by saying that, in my opinion, is something like: “I admit that these people were horrible, which means I have to deny that they belonged to my tribe”. (People who think that Stalinists were the good guys usually don’t feel the need to re-classify them as right-wing.) In tribal thinking, my tribe is defined as “the good people”, so if someone was a member of my tribe, they couldn’t be evil, and if someone was evil, then by definition they were not really members of my tribe. (Analogically, religious people who disapprove of Inquisition say that the inquisitors were not true Christians, etc.)
(There is also the recently popular tendency to re-define words to mean “X, except when our tribe is doing that”. Which means you cannot be sexist against men, racist against white people, and if you blindly believe and worship someone left-wing on tumblr it does not make you an authoritarian personality. But to me it seems that most people understand this as a dishonest move, and perhaps only the true believers really buy it. On the other hand most people are unable to define “left-wing” and “right-wing” other than saying how the common consensus already classifies the existing political parties.)
Please be aware of how it all comes from the Frankfurter School, Freudo-Marxism. When someone like Adorno defines an Authoritarian Personality and actually does it to explain nazism around 1950, the amount of condemnation in it s rather huge and really obvious. Altmeyer may be different, but the “tradition”, the central point was already set and Altmeyer could only deviate with relative to that.
I mean, if you work from a biological angle, such as studying rhesus monkeys or an anthropological angle, a dominance and hierarchy driven personality is simply normal. It is also normal from the historical angle, such as describing the Roman pater familas or any random medieval lord. From all these angles, you would not put a special name on it, such as RWA or authoritarian personality, as they would be pretty normal. The angle from which it looks special, weird, unusual is precisely that one angle that also condemns it hard, namely modern, liberal, Western civilization. I think the huge connotations of condemnation really cannot be unnoticed here. Either you find it normal in which case it hardly has a name, or you condemn it.
I consider this fairly impossible. One thing is clear all over the political spectrum, freedom, democracy and rights and suchlike are at least preferable to modern, demotic, populist dictatorships of the Saddam type. Nobody ever came up with a serious recipe how to violate these principles in a way that it results in some kind of an nice premodern monarchy and not Saddam. From this angle, NRx is pretty much a doomed idea. It seems in the modern world you can only choose from modern systems, such as democracy or modern, demotic, populist tyranny. Anything seriously premodern would require changing the era, not the system, changing the whole culture and perhaps even technology. Within, strictly within modern alternatives, freedom, democracy and rights are preferable, thus they will continue to stay popular. And this is why any model about behavior that seems to be rather clearly opposed to it cannot help but be condemnative.
This is basically a challenge. It is probably possible to live closer to biological / anthropological norms i.e. being “dominance-positive” while still accepting the general outlines of freedom, equality and rights, but how this is possible needs to be worked out, currently it is not at all obvious.