- Authoritarian submission—a high degree of obedience to authorities who are seen as established and legitimate in the society in which you live.
- Conventionalism—a high degree of adherence to social conventions endorsed by society and its established authorities.
- Authoritarian aggression—aggressive behavior directed especially at unconventional people, and especially when it is seen as approved by established authorities.
Authoritarians
are said to have a “bicyclist's personality,” bowing to those
above them in the social hierarchy, and kicking those below.
Measures of authoritarianism are positively correlated with measures
of political conservatism and prejudice toward racial and cultural
minorities.
A new study by Michal Tagar and others looks at how early authoritarianism
can be detected in children and whether it is related to their
parents' level of authoritarianism. The participants were
pre-schoolers, aged 3 and 4. They completed a task designed to
measure selective trust, which had two parts. In the familiarization
phase, the children watched
twelve short video clips of three unfamiliar adults each labeling
four common objects, such as a shoe. The three adults behaved
differently. One of them, the conventional
speaker, used the conventional names for the four objects, i.e.,
called the shoe a “shoe.” A second, the unconventional
speaker, used novel names for the objects, i.e.,
called the shoe a “ball.” The third, the ambiguous
speaker, used conventional names for two of the objects and
unconventional names for the other two.
This
was followed by a test phase
in which the three adults were shown naming each of four totally
unfamiliar objects, calling them by unfamiliar names. After each
video, the children were asked whether they believed the name given
by the speaker was right. This provided a measure of trust in each
of the three adults—the number of times (out of a possible four)
they believed the speaker was correct.
One of
the parents of each child was tested separately and given two tests
measuring authoritarianism, one related to child-rearing values and
the other measuring social conformity.
Two hypotheses were tested, based on two of the three clusters mentioned
earlier. Conventionalism was measured by comparing trust in the
conventional and unconventional speakers. Of course, you would
expect all the children to trust someone who calls a shoe a “shoe”
more than someone who calls it a “soapdish.” But the authors
predicted that this differential trust would be greater for children
of authoritarian parents. This hypothesis was confirmed for both
measures of authoritarianism, as shown in the chart. (In these analyses, the children's gender and IQ were statistically controlled.)
The second hypothesis tested authoritarian submission as measured by a general tendency to respect adult authority. They predicted that the children of more authoritarian parents would be more likely to trust the ambiguous speaker than children of less authoritarian parents. This too was confirmed for both measures of authoritarianism.
I have
some concerns about they way they manipulated conventionalism. While
it's true that our names for everyday objects are arbitrary,
using “correct” names is not optional. If you are to
function in society, you must call things as others call them. I
would have preferred them to define unconventional behavior in terms
of something more discretionary, such as clothing or hair style.
Discrimination against people with a nonconforming appearance is more
consistent with the everyday meaning of authoritarianism. In
addition, in order to demonstrate that authoritarian kids are more trusting of adult
authority, it would have been better to show that they trust adults more than other children.
These
results are broadly consistent with George Lakoff's theory of political socialization in which parents transmit their political
ideologies to their children through the use of two child-rearing
styles. In the Strict Father family, moral authoritarity resides
with the father, who teaches his children obedience to authority
until they have enough self-discipline to function independently. In
the Nurturant Parent Model, both parents are equally responsible for
the nurturance of children, who are taught that empathy and
cooperation with others are the ways to happiness. Most families
fall somewhere between these extremes, but the Strict Father family
would presumably be more likely to reproduce authoritarianism.
As Tagar and his colleagues point out, authoritarianism is usually
assumed to develop during late adolescence, around the same time that
political socialization takes place. But their study suggests that
political orientation is determined at a much earlier age. It
reminds me of recent studies by Mahzarin Banaji using the Implicit
Association Test, a subtle measure of unconscious racial bias.
(Please see my earlier post about how implicit racial bias is
measured.) She found that children aged 6 and 10 show about the same
amount of preference for White over Black faces as adults do. Using
a slightly different measure, she was able to detect significant
own-race bias as early as age 3. (On the other hand, when asked to
bluntly state whom they prefer, stated preference for Whites declines
from age 6 to age 10 to adulthood.)
If authoritarianism and racism are taught at an early age, they may be more of a cause of political party affiliation than a consequence.
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