You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Larks comments on Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Gondolinian 13 April 2015 12:19AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (319)
Tags: open_thread

Comments (319)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: passive_fist 13 April 2015 02:49:42AM *  1 point [-]

I'm personally not entirely convinced about the usefulness of personality variables, but I've lately become interested in Altemeyer's concept of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). RWA is characterized by submission to authority and strong defense of established norms.

RWA is unsurprisingly correlated strongly with conservatism and right-wing orientation in politics, but characterizing people as RWA or non-RWA may be misleading. Karen Stenner suggested that "RWA is best understood as expressing a dynamic response to external threat, not a static disposition based only on the traits of submission, aggression, and conventionalism." It was shown that when faced with possible future threats or fears, people tended to display RWA tendencies more strongly. For instance, when told there will be droughts or mass migrations in the future, people tend to be more strongly RWA.

This may help explain why talking about the damaging future effects of maintaining the status quo does not seem to be effective in bringing about change to address problems. My reasoning is this: The threat of future disaster causes people to become more RWA and this may in turn paradoxically cause them to adopt a stance more strongly in favor of established ways, hampering change. This may explain the current situation with climate change and other things.

Comment author: Larks 13 April 2015 10:49:24PM *  2 points [-]

RWA is unsurprisingly correlated strongly with conservatism and right-wing orientation in politics

This is so only because the researcher chose biased questions.. See also this

Comment author: passive_fist 14 April 2015 01:55:00AM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the links. Friedman's criticism seems to be that the questions were politically biased because they chose examples such as the church for right-orientated authorities.

When the question is of the form "We should follow authority X," X just happens to be a source of authority, such as the church, more popular on the right than on the left.

Altemeyer's response is:

"When one is measuring submission to established authority in a society, one has to mention those authorities, their views, etc. in the items."

Do you have a criticism of Altemeyer's response? Because it seems that it makes sense. RWA is supposed to be about adherence to established authorities, not hypothetical authorities. Friedman says:

Suppose, for instance, that one of the questions asked whether a worker should be willing to cross a picket line and go to work if he disagreed with the decision to call a strike. Labor unions are established authorities.

This is certainly a far more contentious proposition than the one he's rejecting, if the premise is that labor unions have the same level of established authority as the church.

My answer to Friedman would be: come up with established authorities that are left-wing and just as established as right-wing ones. Of course this may be impossible almost by definition, leading to a "loaded by default" personality assessment, but that's another discussion entirely.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit