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.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Implicit Association Test:  Racial Bias on Cruise Control

Symbolic Racism and Gun Ownership

Old-Fashioned Racism

Protesting Too Much

It's always good for a laugh. Some prominent homophobe, usually from the fields of government or religion, is caught soliciting or having sex with another man. Homophobia is serious, however, sometimes leading to murder and other hate crimes. A new series of four studies by Netta Weistein and five colleagues, conducted in the U. S. and Germany, appears to confirm what gay rights advocates have long suspected—that homophobes and anti-gay activists are secretly attracted to the same sex. This study is gated, but you can get a lot of information about it here.

To present this study, I need to talk about subliminal priming. First of all, priming refers to the process by which a recent experience increases the availability of a concept. For example, if you had recently seen or heard the word “eat” and I asked you to fill in the blank in “S O _ P,” you'd be likely to say the word “soup.” But if you had recently seen the word “wash,” you'd fill in “soap.” Subliminal means below the level of conscious awareness. Priming can occur subliminally as well as consciously. For example, if I showed you a picture on a computer screen for 4/1000 of a second, you'd see a flash of light and be unable to identify the object in the photo. But it might influence your behavior. In one study, researchers subliminally primed photos of smiling or angry faces, followed by a picture of a Chinese ideograph (or letter). Participants were asked how much they liked each ideograph. Those ideographs primed with happy faces were liked more than those with no prime, and those primed with angry faces were liked less.

Priming can have socially important consequences. Priming the concept of money causes people to work harder on difficult tasks, but to be less helpful to other people and donate less to charity. In 2008, when white students from Florida were shown a subliminal prime of a confederate flag, they indicated they were less likely to vote for Barack Obama (but not any other candidates).

The studies by Weinstein and her colleagues attempted to measure whether people experienced conflict between their implicit and explicit sexual orientation. The measure of implicit sexual orientation—the tricky part—involved subliminal priming. Subjects were shown slides of four words (“gay,” “straight,” “homosexual” and “heterosexual”) and of same-sexed or opposite-sexed couples. They were asked to classify each word or image as either gay or straight as quickly as possible. Before each trial, they were subliminally primed with either the word “me” or “others.” Those participants who showed more rapid identification of gay stimuli when they were preceded by the word “me” than by “others” (and a slower identification of straight stimuli when preceded by “me” than by “others”) were assumed to have an implicit attraction to the same sex. Participants were also asked their sexual orientation, and the measure of interest was the discrepancy between their implicit and explicit sexual orientation.

If you're troubled by this measure of implicit sexual orientation, one of the studies used a more face valid measure of implicit attraction and obtained the same results. In this measure, subjects were left alone and free to browse same-sex and opposite-sex photos. It was assumed that differences in exposure time would indicate their implicit sexual orientation.

The study looked at both the causes and effects of a conflict between one's implicit and explicit sexual orientation. The effect was predicted to be homophobia. Overt homophobia was measured by questionnaires that looked at such things as participants' self-reported attitudes toward gays, their attitudes toward social policies affecting gay people, and the discriminatory bias of assigning harsher punishments to gay people than straight people for the same offense. Their measure of implicit hostility toward gays also involved subliminal priming. Participants were either primed with the word “gay” or not, and were asked to complete blanks such as “K I _ _.” Filling in more aggressive words such as “kick” after the gay prime was taken as an indicator of covert hostility to gays. Both the overt and covert measures showed greater homophobia among the sexually conflicted participants.

This finding supports one of Sigmund Freud's unconscious defense mechanisms against anxiety, reaction formation. In reaction formation, people experience anxiety caused by an unconscious desire to engage in some behavior that is unacceptable to them, such as having gay sex. They defend against this anxiety by engaging in exaggerated behaviors that imply just the opposite of their unconscious feelings, such as becoming an anti-gay crusader.

These researchers were interested in the child rearing practicies that produced conflicts between implicit and explicit sexual orientation. The studies tested a proposition from Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory which asserts that controlling parents will produce children who are less in touch with their feelings than than parents who encourage autonomy. This is similar to the distinction between authoritarian vs. democratic child-rearing. Participants were asked questions about their family such as “I felt controlled and pressured in certain ways,” or “I felt free to be who I am.” Those participants who reported coming from authoritarian families were more likely to experience conflict in their sexual orientation.

The researchers also asked participants about their parents' homophobia. Homophobic fathers (but not mothers) were most likely to produce young adults with this discrepancy in their sexual orientation. Here's a video explaining the studies by one of the authors, Richard Ryan.

What are we to make of these studies? They are heavily dependent on questionnaire measures, which are subject to distortion when dealing with sensitive subjects. I'm particularly skeptical of college students' reports of their parents' child-rearing practices. I'm more impressed with the subliminal priming measures, both of implicit same-sex attraction and covert hostility to gay people. If subsequent studies find a consistent association between these two measures, we may have to acknowledge that Freud got something right.

There is another study by Henry Adams and others that supports the association of male same-sex attraction with homophobia. The participants were college men who were previously classified as high or low in homophobia by their answers to questions such as “I would feel nervous being in a group of homosexuals.” Subjects then watched three types of hard core pornography: heterosexual, gay male and gay female. Sexual arousal was measured using a plethysmograph, a rubber strain guage which fits tightly around the penis and measures its circumference. (Isn't research fun?) Both the groups high and low in homophobia showed increases in arousal to the heterosexual and lesbian videos, but only the homophobes were also aroused by the gay male videos.

Maybe these folks are on to something.