A possibly important question is what happened after the findings were reported and the "diagnosis" was applied -- did anyone propose for the high-RWA scorers a direction of treatment? Did this personality type make it into the DSM? Because I don't think we can talk about medicalizing a worldview as long as the medical establishment does not take any action against it whatsoever. Rather, the fact that groups of researchers in psychology wanted to see whether there was such a thing as a dominance-, hierarchy-driven personality -- and then stick a name on it -- does not necessarily mean they were condemning it. Just taking note of it as a phenomenon.
Left-wing bias isn't necessarily evident in this. From the Wikipedia article:
There have been a number of other attempts to identify "left-wing authoritarians" in the United States and Canada. These would be people who submit to leftist authorities, are highly conventional to liberal viewpoints, and are aggressive to people who oppose left-wing ideology. These attempts have failed because measures of authoritarianism always correlate at least slightly with the right. However, left-wing authoritarians were found in Eastern Europe. [19] There are certainly extremists across the political spectrum, but most psychologists now believe that authoritarianism is a predominantly right-wing phenomenon.[20]
Furthermore, while this tidbit indicates that researchers believe high-RWA scorers are more biased (which is the closest to condemnation I could find in the article):
According to research by Altemeyer, right-wing authoritarians tend to exhibit cognitive errors and symptoms of faulty reasoning. Specifically, they are more likely to make incorrect inferences from evidence and to hold contradictory ideas that result from compartmentalized thinking. They are also more likely to uncritically accept insufficient evidence that supports their beliefs, and they are less likely to acknowledge their own limitations.[14] Whether right-wing authoritarians are less intelligent than average is disputed, with Stenner arguing that variables such as high verbal ability (indicative of high cognitive capacity) have a very substantial ameliorative effect in diminishing authoritarian tendencies.
... it doesn't follow that this springs from an equal and opposite bias against RWAs. Who knows, maybe the scientists are right. Maybe high-RWA scorers do exhibit these biases more than the rest. (At least it can be agreed on that either they do or they don't. The position that everyone across the political spectrum is equally wrong doesn't seem likely.)
Also, it might be worth asking whether high-RWA scorers don't necessarily identify with the label of "authoritarian" because the researchers made their result sound like a slur, or because the testers have internalized the widespread societal attitude that authoritarianism is bad and reminiscent of murderous regimes. It takes a step further towards NRx for right-wing authoritarians to remove the last vestiges of lip-service to liberally-slanted feel-good words in Western society of all persuasions (freedom, democracy, rights and so on), which most aren't going to make. (At least not until Moldbug & co. have claimed a larger share of society as their political allies.)
I suspect that the problem with identifying "left-wing authoritarians" could be that when someone becomes too obviously authoritarian, left-wing people who don't agree with them re-classify them as right-wing.
That is, the real problem is not defining "authoritarian personality". I believe such personality type exists empirically, and can hold many kinds of political beliefs (even libertarian beliefs). The real problem is defining "right-wing" and "left-wing" meaningfully, without sneaking in something about authority...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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