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passive_fist comments on Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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RWA is not listed in the DSM-IV as a mental disorder (and neither is any authoritarian-orientated personality type), so I don't know what basis you have for saying this. Interestingly, though, anti-authoritarian personalities are listed in the DSM-IV, so if anything, the opposite of your point seems true.
You may be correct about bias, but in my view it was certainly the case that post-war psychology was far more open to the idea that all 'psychologically normal' people could display 'evil' behaviors under certain circumstances (Milgram experiment, Standford prison experiment, etc.)
And at any rate, I already mentioned Stenner's work and that characterizing people as RWA or non-RWA is misleading. Again, her work suggests that it should be viewed as a reaction to external forces, similar to what you're saying about 'survivalism.'
I'm not sure why you're associating testosterone with SDO, as testosterone has not yet been convincingly shown to be correlated with SDO. In fact we have had this discussion here before: http://lesswrong.com/lw/84i/social_status_testosterone/
I'm not sure why you're saying this. Why would self-identification make it 'useful'? Certainly few would self-identify as psychopaths (to give an example), even though we know that psychopathy most definitely exists and is quite a useful concept.
That discussion is about aggression. Why confuse aggression with dominance? They are so completely unrelated it is not even funny. Dominance (status-relevant concerns) is an in-group behavior, while aggression is typically directed towards the outgroup.
The link with dominance (again: not aggression) is so well-known that T is used a proxy for dominance-oriented interests (status relevant concerns) in stereotype threat studies: http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org/bibliography_josephs_newman_brown_beer.html
SDO is obviously so much more about status-relevant concerns in-group than aggression towards the outgroup.
Note: SDO is a clearly shitty test and I have specifically mentioned it as a counter-example of how not to do psychology. The question sounds more like a laughable cardboard-cutout parody of a conservative person than something real people would use to describe their views: "It’s OK if some groups have more of a chance in life than others." the problem is obvious - it is the simply reverted form of an egalitarian credo, instead of actually trying to figure out how different people think. For this reason, SDO is pretty much useless, because the researcher just basically inverts what he believes and checks if people agree with the reversed form... so I meant it as a negative example, but so far as it has any utility at all, clearly it is something related to status-relevant concerns?
Bingo! Precisely for that reason. Because psychopathy is a disorder. Once it is turned into something people can identify with, it is probably no longer a disorder. That means charity / understanding was restored, and it is no longer medicalizing differing opinions. Ability to identify with is a measure of to what extent is it treated as a disorder or not.
By your description (I haven't seen the test) it seems like SDO is a test for "nonapples".
(It is not round? Is it not red? Is it not a fruit? Be aware, you may have found a nonapple! People sometimes say that nonapples are useful and necessary, but we have clearly documented examples where nonapples have exploded, damaged property, or even killed people.)
It's in the linked wiki, but yes.
I haven't. Multiple quoted passages in that link talk about dominance.
Testosterone has been shown not to be linked with aggression. The link with dominance is less clear but still not established.
What?
We may be misunderstanding each other. Reworded: testosterone's link with status-related concern is very clear. example Do you think it is not clearly demonstrated enough, or you think status-related concerns are a different thing than dominance? To me they mean the same thing.
I am preparing an article actually that relates to this, so if you have any concerns here please detail.
Sure, this is not a perfect measure. People often accept they have disorders (usually when they actually perceive suffering from them). Still, if you want to remove judgements (like it being seen as a disorder) from a psychological profile, checking whether people could identify with the label sounds kinda like an important milestone in that? If you want to check which words used to describe gay people are not offensive, it is sort of a good idea if they themselves use them?
Thanks for the clarification. Yes, the link with status-related concern is definitely more established than with aggression. I'd be interested in reading your article.
I'm still not convinced that the purpose of SDO is to make behaviors correlated with testosterone look like disorders or that this is the mainstream position of psychology.
It's not obvious to me why it should be important?
Why it should be important to remove these judgements? Plain simply because it is highly uncharitable and hostile to people to basically invalidate their positions saying they don't come from a reasoning process like every other position, but from psychological malfunction.
Of course, we know actually most positions don't come from reasoning processes, but more like affective etc. heuristics and only rationalized with reasoning :) But since the social etiquette is (currently) to give people the benefit of doubt and assume and pretend they arrive to their stances rationally, singling out a few positions and basically saying they are exceptions because they come from specific psychological dispositions is I think hostile or disrespectful.