Friday, February 28, 2014

Mommy and Daddy's Little Authoritarians

Authoritarianism is a set of attitudes that are associated with three related clusters of behavior:
  1. Authoritarian submission—a high degree of obedience to authorities who are seen as established and legitimate in the society in which you live.
  2. Conventionalism—a high degree of adherence to social conventions endorsed by society and its established authorities.
  3. 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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