Personality and emotional correlates of right-wing authoritarianism

In this paper I would like to report the results of three studies designed to bring additional clarity to the research on personality, affect, and ideology. The central hypothesis was that extreme right-wing ideology, as measured in authoritarianism, would correlate moderately with openness to experience and weakly with conscientiousness. In Study 1, the NEO FFI and the RWA Scale were administered with a set of attitude measures to identify the relationship among personality, authoritarianism, and political beliefs. Study 2 replicated the connection between personality and authoritarianism found in Study 1, using the more detailed NEO PI-R. A conservatism scale was also included, to examine Eckhardt's (1991) conclusion that all right-wing dimensions correlate together. Finally, Study 3 examined the RWA Scale and several measures of emotion to test the hypothesis that right-wing ideology is correlated with negative affect (Tomkins, 1965).

STUDY 1

METHOD

Paricipants. Eighty-two volunteers (38 men and 44 women) were recruited from lower level psychology courses at a small, Midwestern, liberal arts college. The mean age was 21.15 (SD-- 5.13). All of the subjects received extra-credit in their classes for participating.

Procedure. The data were collected from groups of 10 to 15 subjects in small classrooms. After providing their informed consent and being assured of anonymity, the participants were given a packet containing several questionnaires. In order of administration, these included the 60 item NEO FFI personality inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1991), the 34 item RWA Scale (Altemeyer, 1996), the 13 item Anti-Fat Attitudes Questionnaire (AFAQ; Crandall, 1994), the 12 item Attitudes Toward Homosexuals Scale (ATHS; Altemeyer, 1996), and a 10 item scale of ethnocentrism which assesses prejudice against a variety of minority groups. This latter measure was adapted from the 20 item Manitoba Ethnocentrism Scale (Altemeyer, 1996). Items which pertained to Canadian social issues (e.g. "Canada should guarantee that French language rights exist all across the country") were either modified or omitted, leaving a balanced scale consisting of five protraits and five contraits. With the exception of the NEO FFI, which is standardized on 85point scale, the items from all of the Instruments were arranged on a 9-point Likert scale, ranging from very strongly disagree (1) to very strongly agree (9). After completing these questionnaires, the subjects were thanked for their participation and excused.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The internal reliability of the NEO FFI was calculated using coefficient alpha. These values were .83,.82,.75, .78, and .83 for N, E, 0, A, and C, respectively, which approximates published data for these measures (Costa & McCrae, 1992a). The sample means for these traits were N=22.90, E=31.63, 0=27.50, A=31.65, and C=31.46, all of which fall into the average range of the population (Costa & McCrae, 1992a). Internal consistency for the RWA scale revealed an alpha of .91, and the sample mean for this measure was 139.55 (SD=34.17). These also approximate normal, average values for a college population (Altemeyer, 1996).