Authoritarian Beliefs Research Articles

Do right-wing authoritarian beliefs originate from psychological conflict?

Do right-wing authoritarian beliefs originate from psychological conflict?

The impact of death qualification, belief in a just world, legal authoritarianism, and locus of control on venirepersons' evaluations of aggravating and mitigating circumstances in capital trials

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of death qualification, belief in a just world (BJW), legal authoritarianism (RLAQ), and locus of control (LOC) on venirepersons' evaluations of aggravating and mitigating circumstances in capital trials. 212 venirepersons from the 12th Judicial Circuit in Bradenton, FL, completed a booklet that contained the following: one question that measured their attitudes toward the death penalty; one question that categorized their death-qualification status; the BJW, LOC, and RLAQ scales; a summary of the guilt and penalty phases of a capital case; a 26-item measure that required participants to evaluate aggravators, nonstatutory mitigators, and statutory mitigators on a 6-point Likert scale; sentence preference; and standard demographic questions. Results indicated that death-qualified venirepersons were more likely to demonstrate higher endorsements of aggravating factors and lower endorsements of both nonstatutory and statutory mitigating factors. Death-qualified participants were also more likely to have a high belief in a just world, espouse legal authoritarian beliefs, and exhibit an internal locus of control. Findings also suggested that venirepersons with a low belief in a just world and an external locus of control demonstrated higher endorsements of statutory mitigators. Participants with legal authoritarian beliefs revealed higher endorsements of aggravators and lower endorsements of nonstatutory mitigators. Legal implications and applications are discussed.

Religious outlook and students’ attitudes towards school science

Science and religion both describe the way things are, and both refer to the source of authority behind ‘truth’. Personal beliefs about science and religion can affect attitudes towards science and the learning of science. This paper reports the results of two exploratory studies: a qualitative study and a quantitative survey study on the interactions between scientific and religious ideas, particularly the influence of descriptive and authoritarian beliefs on attitudinal differences among academic and social groups of high school students from a Hindu Himalayan region of India. These beliefs are not domain dependent and are less likely to be affected by an increased emphasis on the nature of science in school curriculum.

Exposure to terrorism, stress-related mental health symptoms, and defensive coping among Jews and Arabs in Israel.

The authors conducted a large-scale study of terrorism in Israel via telephone surveys in September 2003 with 905 adult Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCIs). Structural equation path modeling indicated that exposure to terrorism was significantly related to greater loss and gain of psychosocial resources and to greater posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depressive symptoms. Psychosocial resource loss and gain associated with terrorism were, in turn, significantly related to both greater PTSD and depressive symptoms. PCIs had significantly higher levels of PTSD and depressive symptoms than Jews. Further, PTSD symptoms in particular were related to greater authoritarian beliefs and ethnocentrism, suggesting how PTSD may lead to a self-protective style of defensive coping.

Secular humanism and "scientific psychiatry"

The Council for Secular Humanism identifies Secular Humanism as a "way of thinking and living" committed to rejecting authoritarian beliefs and embracing "individual freedom and responsibility ... and cooperation." The paradigmatic practices of psychiatry are civil commitment and insanity defense, that is, depriving innocent persons of liberty and excusing guilty persons of their crimes: the consequences of both are confinement in institutions ostensibly devoted to the treatment of mental diseases. Black's Law Dictionary states: "Every confinement of the person is an 'imprisonment,' whether it be in a common prison, or in private house, or in the stocks, or even by forcibly detaining one in the public streets." Accordingly, I maintain that Secular Humanism is incompatible with the principles and practices of psychiatry.

Peirce on Education: Nurturing the First Rule of Reason

Through an exegetic reading of Peirce’s minor texts on higher education, I find that Peirce’s conception of a “Liberal Education” is close to the Herbartian conception of Bildung. Peirce calls for a general education with the ambition of qualifying critical thinkers with the capacity to go beyond the strict rules and narrow borders of the artes liberales, – the different subject matters or sciences taught at a university. Thus, Peirce’s conception of a liberal education is closely linked to his interpretation of common sense – or sensis communis – as a critical commonsensism. To him, it is urgent to educate and nurture “the first rule of reason,” described as a will to learn, a curiosity, a dissatisfaction of what you already incline to think, and an intense desire to find things out. The nurturing of this “first rule of reason” is thus about educating an intellectual community of critical thinkers who are able to question authoritative beliefs, knowing how to debunk them, and how to turn away from obiter dictum.

Shocks and Government Beliefs: The Rise and Fall of American Inflation

We use a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to estimate the parameters of a “true” data-generating mechanism and those of a sequence of approximating models that a monetary authority uses to guide its decisions. Gaps between a true expectational Phillips curve and the monetary authority's approximating nonexpectational Phillips curve models unleash inflation that a monetary authority that knows the true model would avoid. A sequence of dynamic programming problems implies that the monetary authority's inflation target evolves as its estimated Phillips curve moves. Our estimates attribute the rise and fall of post-WWII inflation in the United States to an intricate interaction between the monetary authority's beliefs and economic shocks. Shocks in the 1970s made the monetary authority perceive a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment which ignited big inflation. The monetary authority's beliefs about the Phillips curve changed in ways that account for former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's conquest of U.S. inflation.

Tocqueville's Tyranny of the Majority Reconsidered

Tocqueville's famous argument about tyranny in Democracy in America begins with an analysis of the real of democratic government. The advantages include the effective use of certain authoritative beliefs to reconnect the individual to society in an era when these ties are weakening. But these beliefs tend to deepen a commitment to majority power as sovereign and even absolute. With this tendency in mind, Tocqueville presents two somewhat differing views of majority tyranny. The argument for the first and rather traditional view, direct majoritarian dominance of government, is weak though not entirely implausible. The more interesting and influential argument concerns the effects of modern majoritarianism on thought. The effects, especially a soft tyranny over the mind, are not a defect of democracy but its direct implication, if what is taken to be authoritative in the governing sense, majority rule, is not constrained by both constitutional measures and by a critique showing h...

Attitudes Toward the Poor and Attributions for Poverty

Prior psychological research on attitudes toward the poor has focused almost exclusively on the attributions people make to explain why individuals are poor (e.g., Smith & Stone, 1989; Zucker & Weiner, 1993). The goal of the current study was to investigate the relationships among feelings about the poor and poverty, stereotypes of the poor, attributions for poverty, and sociopolitical ideologies (as assessed by the Protestant Ethic, Belief in a Just World, and Right Wing Authoritarianism Scales). In our Midwestern college sample (n = 209), attitudes toward the poor were found to be significantly more negative than attitudes toward the middle class. In addition, participants were most likely to blame poor people them‐selves for their poverty. However, attitudes toward the poor and attributions for the causes of poverty were found to vary among individuals from different sociodemographic backgrounds and by degree of endorsement of Protestant ethic, just world, and authoritarianism beliefs. Few gender differences were obtained.

Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Toward Female Authority

Attitudes toward female authority and their relationship to gender beliefs were examined using implicit and explicit measures of each. Implicit attitudes covaried with implicit gender authority beliefs (i.e., linking men to high-authority and women to low-authority roles). Explicit attitudes covaried with explicit gender authority beliefs, feminist identification, and hostile sexism. Thus, gender authority beliefs may influence both conscious and unconscious prejudice against female authorities. Although women showed less explicit prejudice than did men, their implicit attitudes were similarly negative. Finally, the relationship found between two different response latency methods (a priming task for attitudes, a categorization task for beliefs) supports the assumption that implicit measures assess similar constructs (i.e., automatic associations in long-term memory).

Social Information Processing and the Verbal and Physical Abuse of Women

This study examined the relationship between personality and the abuse of women. Relatively unexplored variables such as authoritarianism, private self-consciousness, and adversarial sexual beliefs were examined along with sex-role attitudes. It was predicted that personality variables with a social information processing orientation (i.e., private self-consciousness and adversarial sexual beliefs) would be more closely associated with abuse than generalized, attitudinal variables (i.e., sex-role attitudes and authoritarianism). One hundred forty-nine men completed a questionnaire containing the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS), Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale, Self-Consciousness Scale, Adversarial Sexual Beliefs Scale (ASB), and the Attitudes Toward Women Scale. The results show that scores on the ASB are most closely associated with the CTS scores. Also, there was a borderline significant effect of private self-consciousness on verbal abuse scores. The results suggest that aspects of social information processing are more closely associated with abuse than are general, attitudinal variables.

Children's Social and Cognitive Development and Child-Care Quality: Testing for Differential Associations Related to Poverty, Gender, or Ethnicity

Secondary data analysis of data from 3 large child-care studies was conducted to address questions about whether factors such as poverty, minority ethnic background, gender, or parental authoritarian beliefs moderate the association between child-care quality and child cognitive and social outcomes. Data (N = 1,307) were combined to accrue a sufficient number of children who attended high-quality child-care centers who were from impoverished families or minority ethnic backgrounds to reliably compare their developmental outcomes with those of children in poorer quality care. Children's behavior, language skills, and preacademic skills were analyzed as a function of child-care quality (low-, medium-, and high-quality groups based on the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale total scores), background risk factors, and parental attitudes to test hypotheses about risk and protective factors. Results provide further support for the hypothesis that quality of child care is related to children's development for all children and quite limited support that child-care quality may matter more for children experiencing social risk factors. Language development was the only outcome in which child-care quality interacted with a risk variable, ethnicity, suggesting that quality of care is differentially more important for language development for children of color than for White-non-Hispanic children.

Elucidating The Etiology and Nature of Beliefs about Parenting Styles

This study was designed to investigate relationships among self‐reported and spouse‐reported beliefs about parenting styles, the characteristics of the individuals manifesting these styles, and the contextual characteristics of parenting. Demographic characteristics, life circumstances, family functioning, personality traits, ability indices, and parenting‐styles indicators were collected from a sample of 452 women and 293 men, all of whom were raising adolescents in contemporary Russia. Of the families studied, 275 were intact (i.e. consisted of married and cohabiting couples). It was found that individual characteristics and contextual characteristics (e.g. family functioning) together predicted about 20% of the variance in reported beliefs about parental styles of responsiveness and demandingness. Moreover, these variables discriminated about 65% of the parents reporting indulging, neglectful, authoritarian or authoritative beliefs about parenting. The percentage of explained variance doubled when beliefs about parenting styles of partners were placed in the model. Thus, in attempts to understand the etiology of parents’ beliefs about parenting styles, more attention should be given to beliefs about parenting styles of their spouses. It might be that beliefs about parenting styles emerge as a structure shared by spouses; they are mediated, but not solely determined, by the individual characteristics of parents and their children.

Military and Civilian Undergraduates: Attitudes Toward Women, Masculinity, and Authoritarianism

The influence of civilian and military college environments and undergraduates' sex on gender role attitudes and authoritarianism was investigated. Three hundred thirteen male and 69 female, primarily white middle-class students at the United States Naval Academy, United States Air Force Academy, Reserve Officer Training Corps, and a civilian university participated. Approximately 7% were Hispanic, 6% African-American, and 5% Asian-American. Military students had the most traditional authoritarian beliefs and gender role attitudes. When men only were analyzed, USNA males were the most traditional in their attitudes toward women and in antifemininity attitudes. ROTC men were the most traditional in authoritarianism and in status beliefs. All military-affiliated men held more traditional toughness attitudes than did civilian men. USNA men had the most traditional attitudes toward women as compared to the USNA females and civilian females and males.

Hinshaw, S.P., Zupan, B.A., Simmel, C., Nigg, J.T., & Melnick, S. (1997). Peer status in boys with and without ADHD: Predictions from overt and covert antisocial behavior, social isolation and authoritative parenting beliefs. Child Development, 68, 880-896.

Hinshaw, S.P., Zupan, B.A., Simmel, C., Nigg, J.T., & Melnick, S. (1997). Peer status in boys with and without ADHD: Predictions from overt and covert antisocial behavior, social isolation and authoritative parenting beliefs. Child Development, 68, 880-896.

Peer Status in Boys With and Without Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Predictions from Overt and Covert Antisocial Behavior, Social Isolation, and Authoritative Parenting Beliefs.

Because of the centrality of peer relationship difficulties for children with attentiondeficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), we investigated behavioral (overt and covert antisocial activity), internalizing (self-reports and observed social isolation), and familial (authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting beliefs) predictors of peer sociometric nominations among previously unfamiliar, ethnically diverse ADHD (N=73) and comparison (N=60) boys, aged 6-12 years. Authoritative maternal parenting beliefs and negatively weighted social isolation explained significant variance in positive peer regard; aggression, covert behavior, and authoritative parenting beliefs were the independent predictors of both negative peer status and peer social preference. We extended such predictions with statistical control of (1) child cognitive variables, (2) maternal psychopathology, and (3) ADHD boys, but authoritative parenting beliefs were stronger predictors in ADHD than in comparison youth. We discuss family-peer linkages regarding peer competence.

Beliefs About Physicians: Their Role in Health Care Utilization, Satisfaction, and Compliance

Although the most prominent social psychological models of health behavior are expectancy based, little attention has been paid to the role of individuals' beliefs about physicians in the utilization and evaluation of health care. Three studies suggest that individuals' beliefs about whether physicians should adopt an authoritarian or egalitarian role in health care interactions are related to health care utilization, satisfaction, and compliance. In Study 1, we found that authoritarian role expectations were associated with more self-reported visits to medical professionals in a sample of college undergraduates. In Study 2, we examined a sample of elderly outpatients and found that authoritarian beliefs were associated with objective indicators of greater health care utilization. In Study 3, we had undergraduates with authoritarian or egalitarian role expectations read a vignette in which a physician displayed either an authoritarian or egalitarian communication style. Although all subjects reported greater liking for the egalitarian than the authoritarian physician, egalitarian belief subjects reported being particularly dissatisfied with the authoritarian physician and reported particularly weak intentions of following the authoritarian physician's treatment prescriptions. These results suggest that individuals' subjective beliefs about medical professionals are an important determinant of health-related behaviors and perceptions.

Counter-Reformation Sanctity: The Bollandists' Vita of Blessed Hemma of Gurk

It is now commonplace for historians of religion to treat the creation of saints as a political process that included such issues as doctrinal orthodoxy, church authority and popular practices and beliefs. The early twentieth-century Bollandist scholar of sanctity, Hippolyte Delehaye sj, touched on these when he considered the problems facing the critical, but devout, hagiographer in his history, The work of the Bollandists:To question the lawfulness of the cult of a saint, or to raise doubts as to the authenticity of his relics, were issues which could not in most cases remain theoretical, but which demanded practical measures, and in the application of these more than usual tact was required. How was it to be made clear to the faithful that the authority of the Church was not responsible for certain vagaries? How were devotions which had taken root in the heart of the people to be suppressed without causing serious disturbances? On the other hand how were they to be upheld, in the face of the conviction that they were without foundation?… Of course the faithful have never been taught that the lives of the saints are to be believed in the same measure as the Gospel, but it is a fact that they incline to this belief. Hence was it not dangerous, from the standpoint of faith, to destroy certain pious illusions?

Findings on the Revised Morally Debatable Behaviors Scale

Abstract The Morally Debatable Behaviors Scale (Harding & Phillips, 1986; MDBS) was developed in Europe in the mid-1980s to measure the justifiability of morally contestable behaviors. For the present study, we used a revised version of the MDBS (the MDBS-R) to gather data from 156 adults. Principal component analysis revealed three primary factors related to honesty-dishonesty morality, personal-sexual morality, and legal-punitive morality. Women showed less tolerance for illegal acts but more tolerance for personal and sexual freedom than did men. Moral tolerance was unrelated to self-esteem, but individuals with strong religious and authoritarian beliefs were usually more dogmatic in their attitudes. Political liberalism was predictive of increased moral tolerance and flexibility. Generally speaking, the respondents were least tolerant of behaviors that were illegal or dishonest (e.g., stealing a car, welfare fraud) and showed the most disagreement over behaviors that were controversial, often sexual i...

Class, powerlessness and political polarization

AbstractIt is proposed that perceptions of powerlessness influence attitudes towards political policies and ideologies, and that these attitudes influence levels of support for political parties. A cross‐sectional survey analysis of the relations between social class, powerlessness, ideology, and party preference supports this contention. However, the role of powerlessness in influencing the appeal of political attitudes is found to be conditional on respondents' social class. For middle class respondents, powerlessness is associated with opposition to economic redistribution, whereas for the working class it is associated with pro‐redistributive attitudes. For respondents in all classes, powerlessness is associated with authoritarian beliefs, but these are only of relevance for the partisanship of respondents in the middle class. As a consequence of this pattern of relationships, powerlessness is associated with political polarization between social classes, which takes the form of increased support for the Conservative party in the middle class and increased support for the Labour party in the working class. Apart from their substantive implications these findings illustrate the importance of social structural characteristics in conditioning the relationships between social psychological variables.