Politics, Partisanship and Personality Types

The Authoritarians by Bob Altermeyer might be of interest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Altemeyer

My impression as an amateur who’s done some dives into cognitive science literature is that personality typing tends to be regarded more and more skeptically the further you get toward the harder empirical side of experimental psychology, to say nothing of social and cultural psychology where these kinds of traits are understood to be highly contingent. Personality measures like the “big five” might garner somewhat less snickering than more antiquated forms of typography like Adorno’s “f-scale” or Jungian archetypes, which in turn at least have some history of scholarly credibility lacking in Cosmo-quiz quackery like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, but much like the distinctions between alleged personality types themselves, the distinctions between which of these prognostications have scientific credibility and which don’t are more a matter of degree than of rigidly compartmentalized types. (Of course sometimes a certain strain of hyper-empiricism can go too far in the other direction, as in the over-the-top trendiness of fMRI neuroimaging before people started realizing that it doesn’t necessarily always measure the things they thought it does, but that’s another can of worms.)

That being said, I was fond of a neat little study that came out a few years back called “Metaphors We Think With” (alluding to the book Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson) where the experimenters quizzed people on their preferred policy solutions to the issue of crime after priming them with passages invoking either of two metaphors, crime as a “beast” needing to be “hunted” or crime as a “virus” needing to be “cured.” The relevant bit here is that even when they cut out all the flowery metaphorical language and made the passages completely identical apart from the single word choice of “beast” or “virus,” the difference in metaphor invoked was still a better predictor of people’s proposed policy response than the difference between self-identified Democrats and self-identified Republicans. Score one for neuroplasticity and the social construction of human nature!

I want to note that well before Adorno, et al., Erich Fromm and his colleagues conducted pioneering research at the Frankfurt Institute on the “character structure” of the Weimar working class, which was not published in English until 1984 (see the full reference below). I am not an expert on this subject (although I’ve had a longstanding ardent avocational interest), so the following merely reflects what I’ve found helpful. Lacking any academic affiliation for several years now (I was only a very part-time instructor prior to that), I have little or no access to the relevant scholarly literature, hence there are only books listed here. I happen to find much of value in Freudian (and post-Freudian) psychology, as my bibliography for same will attest, and I’ve left out most of the titles that treat Marxist ideology with some psychological sophistication and nuance, as those are found in my bibliography on Marxism (both this and the Freudian psychology bibliography are found on my Academia page).

• Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005).
• Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (Pantheon Books, 1988).
• Burston, Daniel. The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991). See, especially, the respective chapters, “Studies in Social Character,” and “Consensus, Conformity, and False Consciousness: ‘The Pathology of Normalcy,’” pp. 98-158.
• Coady, C.A.J. Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Cohen, Stanely. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Polity Press, 2001).
• Dilman, Ilham. Raskolnikov’s Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding of Good and Evil (Open Court, 2000).
• Elster, Jon. Political Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
• Fontana, Benedetto, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer, eds. Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
• Fromm, Erich (Barbara Weinberger, tr. and Wolfgang Bonss, ed.) The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study (Harvard University Press, 1984).
• Garsten, Bryan. Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Gorringe, Timothy. God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
• Hinshelwood, R.D. What Happens in Groups: Psychoanalysis, the Individual, and the Community (Free Association Books, 1987).
• Iyer, Raghavan. Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979).
• Kakar, Sudhir. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
• Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Miller, William Ian. Faking It (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Reich, Wilhelm (Vincent R. Carfagno, tr.) The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 3rd ed., 1970).
• Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Beacon Press, 1988), in particular, the four chapters in the section, “Community as the Context of Character,” pp. 269-345.
• Rustin, Michael. The Good Society and the Inner World: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Culture (Verso, 1991).
• Wolfenstein, Eugene Victor. The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (Free Association Books, 1989).
• Wolfenstein, Eugene Victor. Psychoanalytic-Marxism: Groundwork (Free Association Books/Guilford Press, 1993).

John T. Jost http://psych.nyu.edu/jost/

Cosma Shalizi says most of what you need to know about the Big Five as an aside in one of the IQ posts Henry linked to recently:
http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html

The best thing to keep in mind is effect sizes. With psychology analyzing a bunch of different traits across a bunch of different dimensions, you can often find something with ‘statistical significance’. But you want things with practical significance. A 95% chance that we’ve detected a correlation where 50.5% of people are found in one category and 49.5% are in the other isn’t all that interesting. Those kind of effects don’t need to solve for causation direction, because who cares?

Another thing to look for is international comparisons. If there is a deep psychological fact about how we sort into politics, it shouldn’t just show up in one or two countries.

This looks like a complex cluster of triats which suggest some particular type of brain wiring.

Here is yet another link that suggest a link between Authoritarism and “Type X management”

http://softpanorama.org/Social/Toxic_managers/authoritarians.shtml

It is not easy to detect authoritarian unless you are his/her direct report. They are quintessential “Kiss up, kick down” personalities, so they behave differently to equal and higher up, then to subordinates. To equal and higher up they successfully pretend to be “nice people”.

Here are some warning signs:

1. Narrow, rigid outlook, (“either/or” thinking “With us or against us” view.)

2. Eagerness to apply the punishment even for a minor transgression. Hidden sadism. They want to punish even when there is no proof of committed offense and without listening the other side version.

3. Preoccupation with control and power. Cynicism and arrogance toward lower status people… “Kiss up, kick down” mentality. They despise those who are weak or of lesser status (feature also common to sociopaths)… One of the most telling signs is their attitude toward those of lower rank: they despise those who are weak or of lesser status. Like psychopaths they typically create their own network of sycophants (patsies), who channel information to them about what is happening in the group.

4. The belief that others should see the world as they do. Intolerance to social deviations. “My way or highway” attitude.

5. Lack of introspection and insight

Preoccupation with punishment even for minor transgressions might be a good diagnostic criterion. Authoritarians in management positions tend to abuse performance reviews to inflict revenge on people who are not fully compliant with their wishes and/or tried to demonstrate some independence. They generally rarely give good performance reviews unless this somehow positively reflects on them. By destabilizing relationships among team members, an authoritarian manager tries to stay on top.

Authoritarians have a set of insecurities, and they try to create social systems that they can control and in which those insecurities are suppressed. They are also invariably bullies, often with a very short fuse and temper tantrums (authoritarian anger), but they are directed only to subordinates or family members, never to equal or higher up.

The passive-authoritarian, or in other words, the masochistic and submissive character aims — at least subconsciously — to become a part of a larger unit, a pendant, a particle, at least a small one, of this “great” person, this “great” institution, or this “great” idea. The person, institution, or idea may actually be significant, powerful, or just incredibly inflated by the individual believing in them. What is necessary, is that — in a subjective manner — the individual is convinced that “his” leader, party, state, or idea is all-powerful and supreme, that he himself is strong and great, that he is a part of something “greater.”

The paradox of this passive form of the authoritarian character is: the individual belittles himself so that he can — as part of something greater — become great himself. The individual wants to receive commands, so that he does not have the necessity to make decisions and carry responsibility. This masochistic individual looking for dependency is in his depth frightened -often only subconsciously — a feeling of inferiority, powerlessness, aloneness. Because of this, he is looking for the “leader,” the great power, to feel safe and protected through participation and to overcome his own inferiority. Subconsciously, he feels his own powerlessness and needs the leader to control this feeling. This masochistic and submissive individual, who fears freedom and escapes into idolatry, is the person on which the authoritarian systems — Nazism and Stalinism — rest.

More difficult than understanding the passive-authoritarian, masochistic character is understanding the active-authoritarian, the sadistic character. To his followers he seems self-confident and powerful but yet he is as frightened and alone as the masochistic character. While the masochist feels strong because he is a small part of something greater, the sadist feels strong because he has incorporated others — if possible many others; he has devoured them, so to speak. The sadistic-authoritarian character is as dependent on the ruled as the masochistic -authoritarian character on the ruler. However the image is misleading. As long as he holds power, the leader appears — to himself and to others — strong and powerful. His powerlessness becomes only apparent when he has lost his power, when he can no longer devour others, when he is on his own.

When I speak of sadism as the active side of the authoritarian personality, many people may be surprised because sadism is usually understood as the tendency to torment and to cause pain. But actually, this is not the point of sadism. The different forms of sadism which we can observe have their root in a striving, which is to master and control another individual, to make him a helpless object of one’s will, to become his ruler, to dispose over him as one sees fit and without limitations. Humiliation and enslavement are just means to this purpose, and the most radical means to this is to make him suffer; as there is no greater power over a person than to make him suffer, to force him to endure pains without resistance.

The fact that both forms of the authoritarian personality can be traced back to one final common point — the symbiotic tendency — demonstrates why one can find both the sadistic and masochistic component in so many authoritarian personalities. Usually, only the objects differ. We all have heard of the family tyrant, who treats his wife and children in an sadistic manner but when he faces his superior in the office he becomes the submissive employee.

Douglas McGregor in his seminal book 1960 book “The Human Side of Enterprise” divided management styles into two main types: Theory X and Theory Y. Here’s how The Economist describes this concept:

“Theory X was the classic command-and-control type of management, the authoritarian style which (McGregor wrote) “reflects an underlying belief that management must counteract an inherent human tendency to avoid work”.

Theory Y is the antithesis of X. It “assumes that people will exercise self-direction and self control in the achievement of organizational objectives to the degree that they are committed to those objectives”.

Theory X is bent on devising the right sticks with which to prod work-shy labor; Theory Y looks for the carrots that will induce them to stay.

McGregor’s dichotomy has been hugely influential in management thinking ever since his death in 1964. The new organization lies firmly at the Theory Y end of his spectrum. It challenges employees, in his words, “to innovate, to discover new ways of organizing and directing human effort, even though we recognize that the perfect organization, like the perfect vacuum, is practically out of reach.”

I havent read it yet but ‘Open versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution’ by Christopher D. Johnston and Howard G. Lavine is meant to be good.

My gut feeling is there’s something in this but all of the stuff I read was a bit disappointing (thought Adorno and Altemeyer were interesting up to a point). Isn’t this Jonathan Haidt’s thing? Thought you’d written about that before.

Did you know about this?

If you look at someone’s class status and their income, and you try and use that to guess whether or not they voted Remain, it turns out it’s not that much better than guesswork. It gives you around 55% accuracy, and obviously a guess would give you 50% accuracy,” Westlake says. … “If you look at attitudes to questions such as, ‘Do you think criminals should be publicly whipped?’ or ‘Are you in favour of the death penalty?’ – those things are much better predictors, and you get over 70% accuracy,” he says.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36803544

I’m as fond of Altemeyer as anyone else, but when I look at the American electoral landscape, and consider my outlier nephew, I’m inclined to favor cultural over psychological explanations. People tend to align with their neighbors. Opinions are contagious.

Consider the opposition to vaccinations, which so far doesn’t divide neatly right and left but clusters in certain communities. Neighbors share stories, and narratives are more convincing than arguments or evidence, so resistance to vaccination spreads, and resistance to pathogens shrinks, leading to outbreaks. In Europe and the U.S. it’s measles, in Pakistan, Syria and the Congo, it’s polio.

Sure, not everyone is wired exactly alike, but we are such social animals that our thinking and our behavior tends not to vary far from its local norm.

There have been a whole bunch of theories bandied about to denigrate the people with whom one disagrees; and that, combined with a strong leftist tilt in the academy has created a cascading problem. Why should you a priori choose to agree with someone who despises you? It’s paradoxical!

As a result, the experts who demand default deference find instead default skepticism and take it as some sort of bizarre rejection of their self-obvious, God-given authority.

The skepticism isn’t people being per se anti-science. But a close observation of the state of science today doesn’t end up working out too well for scientists demanding deference to all randomized clinical trial conclusions, either.

That leads us to the problem of using science to judge how people who disagree with us politically are foolish, overwhelmed by fear, rigid in their thinking, using outmoded ideas, etc. It’s largely motivated reasoning. Experts in prediction are debating these issues right now and having a hard time finding solid ground in the polarization debates. People are more heterogeneous than one would imagine.

When someone asks ‘what’s the matter with Kansas’ the right response is not a reflex slap on the back and a reinforcing judgement of Kansas, but a puzzled reproach about the assumptions underlying the question – and the appropriateness of the condemnation implicit in the question.

Chris Mooney’s The Republican Brain is a pop science account, which John Quiggin once reviewed on here.

I probably pick among this literature based on my priors. There is at least one study that argues people are more right wing when they are “cognitively overloaded”. One way to be so overloaded is to be drunk. So that study includes fieldwork in a bar.

There’s an unrelated study in economics with another interesting setting. Lotteries and gambles look different because of framing effects. Experimental subjects would willingly sign up to a money pump they could not perceive. Such an experiment was conducted outside a Las Vegas casino.

These must have been interesting experiments to propose.

@ 22 mclaren
Just in passing, for anyone in the psychometrics business it has been clear for at least 30 or 40 years that the Myers-Briggs is crap. It is something like homeopathy, a true believer knows it works. I would have just as much faith in Tarot cards.

a82 @8 posted a link to an interview with Bob Altemeyer and, at one point, the interviewer, a former US diplomat, mentioned that the US State Department used or had used it! But then, the last I heard, the US Gov’t uses polygraph testing too.

It seems to me that the characteristics Altemeyer lays out for authoritarian followers are nice-to-have characteristics for a species busy nucleating ethnic societies out of a generic herd of simians, as a driver for cultural development; the wonder is that we aren’t all like that all the time. In these days of advanced cognition authoritarianism can coalesce around relatively abstract ideas such as Nationhood or Secularism or Niceness; Trump is more of an authoritarian follower than a leader himself. A leader would be more deliberate.

The lack of self-awareness … blind-sight … is a critical feature, ensures against impersonation and that citizens will feel good about the pro patria mori thing and like altruisms when called upon. When times are sweet we are easy and like to mingle with the neighbors, but as whatever stress accumulates not so much. The point being, this isn’t just a right-wing thing although in the present situation they are the vanguard. Apparent “personality” issues are highly contingent. Humans are human, mainly.

Responding to John Quiggin @24: Maybe. Looking at vaccination rates at different schools and pre-schools in Southern California, it was clear that attendees of Waldorf schools are especially at risk; fine, that’s anthroposophy at work.

What’s going on in my wealthy, liberal town is less clear; of our two primary schools, one boasts a vaccination rate of over 90%, the other just over 60%. The various campuses of the liberal pre-school my nieces and nephews attended are all over the lot. Two of my family members, liberal mothers with college degrees, exhibit at least some vaccine skepticism.

Should anyone be interested, I have since expanded my list and prefaced it with an introduction and apologia (which makes clear my differences with the standard political science and ‘scientific psychology’ literature on this topic) and posted it on my Academia page.

Polygraphs obviously work, as showing in this documentary:

Paul de Man might be an interesting case study/counterexample to the idea that personality types fall naturally into political parties. A very active Nazi collaborator and propagandist in Europe but more on the left in the US.

But with that history (combined with the fact that he lied his way into various prestigious professorships) one of the champions of irreducible interpretive undecidability feels like an excellent case for investigating motivated reasoning.

Dr. Hilarius @ 34, not only is polygraph testing junk, so is the vast majority of “forensic science” as used by law enforcement, so is a great deal of eyewitness testimony as used by prosecutors and law enforcement (not to mention testimony from police officers themselves), and even DNA testing can be questionable depending on how well or badly law enforcement understands the methods they’re using. Rule of thumb, if you’ve ever seen a method used by the “good guys” on CSI or NCIS, it’s probably bullshit.

Here’s a possible take-home lesson from that set of facts about “forensic science”: we should be deeply suspicious whenever a small group of scientific practitioners takes broad methods and conclusions from a scientific field or set of fields, uses them as raw material to create a more narrowly “practical” applied subfield with clear instrumental utility for a set of wealthy and/or powerful actors in the broader society, and over time begins to associate their reputational and financial interests more and more with these outside actors at the expense of their credibility within the field of scientific research itself.

Wait a sec, I thought this thread was supposed to be about the issue of politically-driven personality psychology as advanced by figures like Jonathan Haidt… how did I manage to drift so far off topic?

WLGR @43

DNA testing has been used not only by police and prosecutors but also by groups like the Innocence Project (I think that’s the name) whose mission is freeing those who have been wrongly convicted of crimes, including those wrongly convicted of capital crimes. No doubt DNA testing can be used well or badly (haven’t followed the link yet), but it has helped overturn some wrong convictions (as well as probably helping to generate some justified convictions).

how did I manage to drift so far off topic?

Said no one ever at Crooked Timber. o 8

@34 Dr. Hilarius

Indeed. Polygraph sessions can work but as you say. “People, fearful of a polygraph, will often volunteer damaging information just prior to taking one”. One of my professors pointed out that a psychopath should be able to ace something like a polygraph.

But they can, I think, work in actual use. I believe the key issue is the operator. A good “reader”, I’m groping for a term here, let’s say a good poker player as polygraph operator, is likely to obtain great results just as a witch doctor can. There is, likely an excellent chance that a good operator can discriminate truthfulness in many cases just as the witch doctor can. In both cases, it is the subject’s belief not the tool that is the key.

As a university student several (cough, cough) years ago I remember a TA telling me that, amazingly, Dr. X, a local academic clinical psychologist, was obtaining excellent results in identifying and locating brain tumors using the Rorschach. He was rivaling the results of medical specialists. He, then, mentioned that he figured a cigarette package would be just as good as the Rorschach.

@30: Here’s a link re the :

Unfortunately, the ~1000 students in the follow-up were doing a routine class bonus survey and had not signed any sort of consent for publication.

@30 Whoops. That link obviously didn’t work. Try
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201702/childrearing-beliefs-were-best-predictor-trump-support
for an open starter toward the paper.

I’m reminded of something I read once about criminal procedure in edo japan: they needed confessions to punish, apparently, but most people didn’t confess voluntarilly, so they had to be encouraged. By, you know, brutal torture. Which we know now is worthless as evidence, but… they couldn’t just torture anybody, obviously. They needed good reason to suspect somebody, which they got by, you know, investigating, as conscienciously as they could given the tools and framework they had.

Pretty bad by modern standards, of course, but we’re supposed to get better at these things.

And then they’d say, “we reckon this guy did it”, and they’d torture him, and they’d get a confession. But they thought that it was the confession that mattered, not the conclusion that lead to the decision to torture… and so every so often it’d all go horrifically wrong for reasons they weren’t really equipped to handle.

I think forensic science serves the same role as torture here.

A few years ago I read Vance Packard’s “The Hidden Persuaders”, having seen an extract from it in a school “comprehension” exercise long before.

What I learnt from it was that in the 50s quite a few people with connections to psychoanalysis and related fields could get nice consultancy work purporting to explain how advertising could and should work with various audiences, with absolutely no validation of whether their ideas were even vaguely correct.

The most interesting aspects of the book are the incidentals and background details mentioned in passing – for example, that there was already a “woman problem” about female roles and identity, created by the workforce expansion during WW2. And also that quite a few Americans didn’t like being reminded of F.D.Roosevelt, possibly because he was associated with a bad period of history.