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.