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.
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.'
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.
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/
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.
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.
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/
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-know...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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