Everything you ever wanted to know about Republican (authoritarion) thinking.

[Wilber_Stool]

Chapter Three

How Authoritarian Followers Think

We meet again. If you are keeping track of my promises, as we roll along
together on the internet, I said in the Introduction that we would figure out why
authoritarian followers think in the bizarre and perplexing way they so often do. The
key to the puzzle springs from Chapter 2's observation that, first and foremost,
followers have mainly copied the beliefs of the authorities in their lives. They have
not developed and thought through their ideas as much as most people have. Thus
almost anything can be found in their heads if their authorities put it there, even stuff
that contradicts other stuff. A filing cabinet or a computer can store quite inconsistent
notions and never lose a minute of sleep over their contradiction. Similarly a high
RWA (right wing authoritarians) can have all sorts of illogical, self-contradictory, and widely refuted ideas
rattling around in various boxes in his brain, and never notice it.

So can everybody, of course, and my wife loves to catch inconsistencies in my
reasoning when we’re having a friendly discussion about one of my personal failures.
But research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence
of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning,
highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a
profound ethnocentrism, and--to top it all off--a ferocious dogmatism that makes it
unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic. These seven
deadly shortfalls of authoritarian thinking eminently qualify them to follow a would be
dictator. As Hitler is reported to have said,“What good fortune for those in power
that people do not think.”

The Authoritarians
Bob Altemeyer
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Canada

30 years of reasearch into how they know what they know and think what they think. Very entertaining and it's free. Short (for a book) too.

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

[baby_mouse]

1. They really are just no use to anyone, are they? They just waste oxygen.

Really, one would have thought evolution would have had the good grace to weed these clowns out by now.

[Fridays Child]

2. As we evolve, selecting for higher functions is probably just as slow as it was for bipedalism.

[MedleyMisty]

3. Have you ever looked into models of moral development?

You can probably find the most information on Kohlberg's, and then maybe Dabrowski's.

But they're all basically the same, just they split the stages different ways and call them by different names and have different theories about progression through the stages. I have to say that the people who think it's based on nothing but age are dead wrong, but I keep an open mind on the other stuff. I like Dabrowski's idea of positive disintegration.

The majority of the species never makes it much above egocentric reasoning. The hardcore authoritarians are probably in the bottom half or so of stage one. Extreme stage one would be sociopaths like Bush, etc.

It actually dovetails quite nicely with the authoritarian stuff. I read the book you linked a while ago and it says that people become less authoritarian during college and then slide back when they have kids. I read on some site about moral theory that some people start to develop during their young adult years but then go back to stage one or maybe two afterwards because they can't handle the higher levels of moral reasoning.

But the authoritarian study says that they don't slide back all the way after college and their kids are usually less authoritarian than they were. So I figure, get a culture that values knowledge and education and reason and compassion and send everybody to college for free (with the focus of college being more on new experiences and meeting new people and opening your mind than on getting high paying corporate jobs) and we can knock authoritarianism out in a few generations. At least to the point where maybe the authoritarians wouldn't be running things and destroying the world. Of course, that's sort of putting the cart before the horse and I'm not really sure how to go about creating a culture with higher level moral values out of a species that's mostly at the lower levels.

[Wilber_Stool]

7. Free education for the qualified.

Not too surprising all the cuts for education at every level.

[Triana]

4. The Milgram Experiments in the 60's explains a lot about human behavior

when told to do something by an "authority" which is against their own moral sense. I haven't read all this 'book' yet but I bet the author references that data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Edit to add link + correct spelling.

[rucky]

5. Zimbardo, too. n/t

[C_U_L8R]

6. authoritarian just screams insecure

something's definately small there...
intellect, conscience, penis...

they can holler all they want
to try to make up for what they lack
but it just gets smaller and smaller