Right-wing Authoritarianism - Criticism

Criticism

Altemeyer's research on authoritarianism has been challenged by psychologist John J. Ray, who questions the sampling methods used and the ability of the RWA Scale to predict authoritarian behavior and provides evidence that the RWA scale measures conservatism rather than "directiveness", a construct that John J. Ray invented and that he relates to authoritarianism. Ray's approach is, however, a minority position among researchers and other psychologists have found that both the RWA Scale and the original F-Scale are good predictors of both attitudes and behavior.

A recent refinement to this body of research was presented in Karen Stenner's 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic. Stenner argues that RWA is best understood as expressing a dynamic response to external threat, not a static disposition based only on the traits of submission, aggression, and conventionalism. Stenner is critical of Altemeyer's social learning interpretation and argues that it cannot account for how levels of authoritarianism fluctuate with social conditions. She argues that the RWA Scale can be viewed as a measure of expressed authoritarianism, but that other measures are needed to assess authoritarian predispositions which interact with threatening circumstances to produce the authoritarian response.

Recent criticism has also come as a result of treating RWA as uni-dimensional even in contexts where it makes no sense to do so. For example, RWA has been used in regression analyses with fundamentalism as another predictor, and attitudes to homosexuality and racism as the outcomes. This research seemed to show that, for example, Fundamentalism would be associated with reduced racism once the authoritarian component was removed, and this was summarized in a recent review of the field. However, since the RWA scale has items that also measure fundamentalist religiosity, and attitudes to homosexuality, this undermines the interpretation of such analyses. Even worse is the possibility that the unrecognised dimensionality in RWA can cause a statistical artifact to arise in such regressions, which can reduce or even reverse some of the relationships. Mavor and colleagues have argued that this artifact eliminates or even reverses any apparent tendency for fundamentalism to reduce racism once RWA is controlled. The implication is that in some domains such as the social psychology of religion it is not only preferable to think of RWA as consisting of at least two components, but essential in order to avoid statistical errors and incorrect conclusions. Several options currently exist for scales that acknowledge at least the two main underlying components in the scale (aggression/submission and conventionalism).