The Psychology of Bigotry 509relate to attitudes toward a variety of issues and objects (e.g.,
attitudes toward sex, power, and political-economic issues)
that would otherwise appear unrelated to prejudice and to one
another because their interrelations reflect deeper, uncon-
scious processes and connections. (OTAP’s tenet that preju-
dice is rooted in unconscious processes is clearly echoed in
contemporary theories of prejudice emphasizing automatic
cognitive processing, described later, as an important feature
of individuals’ prejudicial beliefs and their expression.) Sec-
ond, the authoritarian personality would be prejudiced to-
ward a wide variety of target groups. If an authoritarian
person’s prejudice toward one group were somehow blocked,
it would presumably be expressed, in a process of symptom
substitution, toward other groups. Third, if prejudice is in-
deed deeply rooted in a personality structure, it should be dif-
ficult to change and would require depth-oriented techniques,
such as psychotherapy and insight, that promote and produce
profound personality change in the bigoted individual.
Adorno et al. (1950) attempted to validate the OTAP, in
good part, by developing a personality scale, the California
F(for fascism) scale, whose items were constructed to tap
the right-wing political ideology and belief syndrome that
they theorized as comprising the authoritarian personality.
U.S. respondents’Fscale scores correlated positively, as hy-
pothesized, with their scores on other attitude scales de-
signed to assess anti-Semitism, negative attitudes toward
Blacks and other U.S. minority groups, and U.S. ethnocen-
trism. TheFscale was subsequently incorporated into nu-
merous studies in the 1950s and 1960s. Though criticized at
the time of its initial appearance and later for keying all its
items in one direction and not correcting for acquiescence
response set, theFscale was still sporadically used by psy-
chological and survey researchers well up to the 1980s. It re-
mained for Altemeyer (1981, 1988, 1996), in a trilogy of
books reflecting often painstaking psychometric research, to
demonstrate conclusively the CaliforniaFscale’s serious in-
adequacies as a measure of proneness to prejudice and to
refocus the conceptualization of the authoritarian personality
into a more rigorously defined construct and scale of right-
wing authoritarianism.
The Theory of Right-Wing Authoritarianism
Altemeyer (1981) persuasively detailed the inadequacies of
the California Fscale, most notably its lack of scale homo-
geneity and its saturation with response sets, especially ac-
quiescence. Even more important, however, he created a
psychometrically and conceptually appropriate scale of
right-wing authoritarianism(RWA) that he has continued to
refine (see Altemeyer, 1996). Altemeyer defined RWA as the
covariation of three attitudes: (a) authoritarian submission
(i.e., ready submission to societally established authorities),
(b) authoritarian aggression (i.e., aggression sanctioned
by established authorities toward defined targets or social
groups), and (c) conventionalism(i.e., adherence to con-
ventions endorsed by societally established authorities).
Altemeyer (1981, 1988, 1996) has extensively documented
RWA’s correlates, often with numerous replications. For ex-
ample, RWA is concentrated more among politicians of the
right, fundamentalist Protestants, and the poorly educated.
Also, parents outscore their university-age offspring in RWA.
Altemeyer’s approach to RWA differs from the OTAP in
several important regards (Dion, 1990). By contrast to the
OTAP’s psychoanalytic perspective, Altemeyer has favored
social learning theory as an explanation for the development
of RWA in individuals, especially Bandura’s versions with
their emphases on vicarious learning and self-regulation
by cognitive processes. Social learning theory has provided
Altemeyer with a heuristic framework for explaining the con-
tribution to RWA of personal experiences in one’s adoles-
cence, of parents and peers, of university education and
parenthood, and the paradoxical role of religion in fostering
RWA by creating a sense of self-righteousness. Second,
whereas the OTAP portrayed authoritarianism as a personal-
ity dimension with its developmental roots in infancy and
early childhood, Altemeyer has viewed RWA as an attitudinal
orientation that emerges and crystallizes in early adoles-
cence, suggesting that it may be more readily amenable to
change within the individual.
Finally, in addition to documenting its empirical links to
prejudice, Altemeyer (1988, 1996) has particularly focused
on the political correlates of RWA. He has shown repeatedly
that individuals (usually university students) scoring high on
the RWA scale are reportedly more than willing and ready to
punish others and to infringe upon and curtail their civil
rights, especially those who threaten the social order. RWA
scale scores have also been found to discriminate well be-
tween provincial and state legislators in Canada and the
United States belonging to right- and left-wing political par-
ties. Knowing politicians’ RWA scale scores appears to be a
useful piece of information for predicting their attitudes and
behaviors.
Research by Altemeyer and others indicates that the RWA
scale correlates between .30 and .50 with measures of pre-
judice toward racial and ethnic minorities and ethnocentrism
scales. RWA correlates negatively with internal motivation
(e.g., personal standards) and positively with external moti-
vation (e.g., social or peer pressure) by White people to