Authoritarianism research and Bob Altemeyer

Hi, and welcome to my blog. I’m your host, Alan Duval. This blog exists as an outlet for the writing I am doing in service to a book, the working title of which is Politics Now.

The book is in lieu of the PhD I had hoped to do following my MSc in psychology. Over the course of my MSc I discovered that my talents — or rather my enjoyment, any talent remains to be seen — lay more in interpreting and synthesizing the work of others than doing the primary research myself. Both my BSc and MSc theses were devoted to highlighting the myriad flaws that I — and as it turns out, others — had uncovered in the work of Jonathan Haidt, a well-known moral psychologist and regular TED-Talker.

During my BSc I had the option to re-sit one of my exams; that re-sit ended up being in the form of an essay (and I’ve always preferred essays to exams). Among the available topics was Authoritarianism; a subject I was broadly familiar with, due to having focused my studies on moral psychology to that point. It was then that I encountered the work of Canadian-American psychologist, Bob Altemeyer, in the form of his highly digestible book — if you’re OK with the occasional ‘dad joke’ — The Authoritarians. In the years since, I’ve developed my thinking on Authoritarianism, and disagree with Altemeyer on a few things, and we’ve had some brief email discussions on a few of those.

A few weeks ago, whilst going back over The Authoritarians, I discovered that Bob Altemeyer had died, aged 82. This post, on February 7th, 2025, marks the 1st anniversary of his death, and I hope to do him justice by engaging with and commenting on his wider body of work in the coming months.

This blog will mostly be short posts highlighting and commenting on aspects of Altemeyer’s research — a process I’m calling ‘Learning Out Loud’ — before branching out into other Authoritarianism research (especially the work of Karen Stenner), and other research in moral psychology more generally. All of what will be written in this blog will be at least, shall we say, authoritarianism-adjacent.

You can expect posts on strands of research that started in the decade or so following the end of WWII, and the work of researchers who have been re-visiting, re-analysing and updating those strands. Key strands of research being, in particular, Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority research, Gordon Allport’s Contact Hypothesis, and so on, as well as the authoritarianism research that started with Theodor Adorno and colleagues, and culminates (so far, at least) in the work of Stenner and Altemeyer.

Due to work commitments these posts are likely to come out at the rate of one per week, though any current events that are particularly newsworthy and authoritarianism-related may warrant an extra post (this seems rather probable, given the events of the last few months).

It seems appropriate to bring Bob Altemeyer’s voice forward, in the light (or is that the dark?) of Trump’s second term. Altemeyer, writing in 2005, said of George ‘Dubya’ Bush that:

“This is the third time I have referred to George W. Bush, his administration, or his supporters, and we’re only half-way through chapter 1. I am running a risk, in a book I hope will have some lasting value, by anchoring it so much in the here-and-now. I’m doing so partly because the here-and-now naturally appeals to contemporary readers. But mainly I am doing it because the past six years have provided so many examples of authoritarian behavior in American government. There has never been a more obvious, appropriate, and pressing time for this discussion. The threat that authoritarians pose to American democracy has probably never been clearer. It is just a coincidence, but human affairs have provided the foremost example of how badly right-wing authoritarianism can damage the United States at the same time my work has come to an end and I am telling everyone what I’ve found. George W. Bush has been the most authoritarian president in my lifetime, as well as the worst. And that’s not a coincidence.”

– Altemeyer, Bob (2006). The Authoritarians (PDF), p. 47, note 16

 

Altemeyer later said of Trump’s followers that:

“They believe more than most people that members owe extreme loyalty to groups they belong to. One should never criticize them and their leaders, and nothing is lower than a group member who does. So belief that left-wingers staged the January 6th insurrection, that the election was stolen, that climate change is a liberal hoax, that gays have an agenda to make other people gay, that injections against COVID actually put the virus in your veins as well as microchip tracking devices, and that a secret cabal of Jewish financiers and high-ranking Democrats run a white-slavery operation out of a Washington pizzeria and eat babies—these beliefs fly around the Internet among Trump supporters virtually nonstop and unopposed, picking up energy like protons swirling around a nuclear accelerator. And the people who get bombarded by the absurdities and in turn bombard others thrill at being so tightly immersed in the In-group—almost totally, dogmatically beyond the reach of evidence and reason. Where they have been most of their lives.”

– Altemeyer, Bob (2023). Why Do So Many People Still Support Trump?