Personality and emotional correlates of right-wing authoritarianism

Social Behavior and Personality, 2000 by Bulter, J Corey

The correlations between RWA and N, E, 0, A, and C were.09, -.03, -.48, -.06, and A 0, respectively, and of these, only the correlation with openness reached significance (P=-.48, p

In order to demonstrate that authoritarianism is associated with the entire domain of openness to experience, and not simply one particular aspect of the taut, the RWA Scale was correlated with each facet of 0. As displayed in Table 1, five of the six facets (i.e. openness to aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas, and values) were indeed significantly correlated with . I The relationship between RWA and openness to fantasy was low and nonsignificant, but in the predicted direction. Notice, though, that fantasy does not correlate strongly with any of the other openness facets in this sample either The correlations for the openness facets and conservatism, which are also presented in Table 1, indicate a less pervasive connection between the trait and general political philosophy As one might expect, openness to values was most strongly correlated with authoritarianism, but feelings and actions came in a close second and third respectively. This pattern of results appears to indicate that authoritarians are closed not merely in terms of their values, they are closed also to art, emotional expression, and even the exploration of new activities. In fact, given that the mean correlation of RWA and the openness facets 30), compares favorably to the magnitude of the mean intercorrelation among the facets themselves (r--.22), we may be justified in viewing authoritarianism as an additional facet of openness to experience.

A number of other facets on the NEO PI-R correlated with authoritarianism and conservatism in theoretically interesting ways. In the domain of extraversion, for example, authoritarians tended to be somewhat less gregarious (r= -.25, p

To test the possibility that authoritarianism is a combination of a closed personality style and conservative political attitudes, I performed a partial correlation between RWA and 0, controlling for conservatism. This yielded a somewhat lower correlation of r= --.40 (p

STUDY3

METHOD

Part/c/pants. Eighty-five volunteers (36 men and 49 women) were recruited from lower level psychology courses at a small public university in the Midwest. The mean age was 19.84 (SD=2.20). All of the subjects received extra-credit in their classes for participating.

Procedure. The data were once again collected from groups of 10 to 15 subjects in small class;rooms. As usual, the participants provided their informed consent and then received a packet containing Altemeyer's (1996) RWA Scale, and the Positive and Negative Affect Scales (PANAS; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988). The latter is composed of two 10 item scales on which subjects rate the extent to which they feel positive affect (PA; e.g. proud, enthusiastic, inspired) and negative affect (NA; e.g. distressed, hostile, ashamed) on a 5-point scale. Participants gave their ratings as a state measure. That is, they were asked to report how they "generally feet," or how they feel "on the average," To provide multiple measures of emotional state and well-being, several additional instruments were included, namely the 5 item Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS; Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985; Pavot and Diener, 1993), the 20 item Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Test (CES-D; Radloff, 1977), and a single-item measure of general happiness developed by Fordyce (1977).