Deceit and cheating were good tactics because it led to what they wanted.
Taking advantage of “suckers” felt great.
They’ve enjoyed having power and having people afraid of them.
“Losers” deserved what happened to them.
It’s smart to use whatever power you have in a situation to get what you want.
Life boils down to what you can get away with.
People who suffer misfortunes deserve them because they are lazy or dumb or made bad moves.
And of course, they say their lives have taught them that “Life is a jungle.”
These experiences indicate that the future dominator was rewarded earlier in life when he cheated, took advantage of others, made people afraid of him, overpowered others, got away with doing something wrong, or beat somebody to the punch. All of these actions may in turn have been predicated by a “tooth and claw” outlook that he learned from (say) his parents. Or that outlook may just serve as a rationalization for being amoral, unsympathetic, and exploitive because acting this way often pays off. Psychologists talk about the “Law of Effect,” which says you learn to do what works. Being unscrupulous works for social dominators.
Students’ social dominance scores correlate only weakly with their parents’ scores (about .25), so it seems unlikely they learned “Life is a jungle”the same way some high RWA students learned “You are a Baptist”as they grew up. Whatever the parental influence might be, it’s usually strongest between fathers and sons-implicating the Y chromosome, or a lot of cultural shaping on the roles of males.
As I said when we were wondering where authoritarian followers come from, we’d be foolish to dismiss the genetic possibilities here. In most animal species social dominance determines who will reproduce and who will not, (i.e., whose genes will be passed on and whose won’t). So some people may just be born with a greater tendency to try to intimidate and dominate others. If these attempts pay off, these “natural bullies” will be on their way. Others may have the genes but not the “muscle” or the smarts to carry it off. Others may become social dominators strictly through their experiences. Research someday will say, I suspect.
An Experiment Combining Social Dominators and Right-Wing Authoritarians
What happens when social dominators and authoritarian followers meet and begin interacting, not in a coffee shop, but in some sort of structured activity? Imagine you are the General Manager in the Chemical Division of a large multi-national corporation. Your division makes a product called “It’s So Clean” in a plant in France. Unfortunately, manufacturing “It’s So Clean” produces an “it’s so dirty” toxic by-product which you have been storing in cheap containers that, again unfortunately, degrade rather quickly. Your corporation has thus been contaminating the ground water with a poisonous chemical, and various ministries of the French government are suing your pants off because—and this is most, most unfortunate—the cheap containers you have been using turn out to be illegal in France. In fact they are illegal in all of the industrialized world because, duh, they quickly spring a leak!
Your division can get better, legal containers that would add 44% to the waste management costs of making “It’s So Clean,” or it can move to Argentina. Why Argentina? Because, you are told in this exercise, the government there will let you use your leaking containers, and will give you tax breaks as well if you re-locate. Also, your labor costs will go down because wages are low in Argentina and the workers don’t expect benefits or pensions. So what are you going to do?
You don’t make this decision by yourself. There’s another manager from your division, an Operations Officer who is lower on the totem pole than you, and you two are going to talk over the situation. And you yourself, the person who is amazingly reading a book on a computer monitor, don’t have to make any decision at all because you’re just reading a book, right? But many pairs of female students at the Universities of Waterloo and Guelph in Ontario had to hash out this problem as part of a psychology experiment, and decide where “It’s So Clean” should be manufactured.
Some of the women were chosen for this experiment and maneuvered into being the higher-up General Manager because they had scored rather highly (for women) on the Social Dominance Orientation scale. For comparative purposes, other women were recruited and put in the General Manager position because they had scored pretty low in dominance. No matter what, the part of the lower-ranking Operations Officer was played by a confederate who basically did the “Smithers thing” and went along with whatever the boss wanted. And you know what? High social dominators were about three times as likely as low social dominators to move the operation—lock, stock, and leaking barrels—to Argentina where they would poison the groundwater and take advantage of the tax breaks and cheap labor. (Heck, they weren’t going to have to drink the water.)
Given what we know about social dominators, that figures, doesn’t it? All right, let’s do the experiment in a different way. This time the confederate plays the role of the superior General Manager, and she’s “Montgomery Burns” and wants to move the operation to Argentina. Real subjects get to be the underling this time, and they can go along with the boss or try to get the boss to do, in my opinion, the right thing. Some of the real subjects scored highly on the RWA scale. They are thus, we believe almost to the point of dogmatism, authoritarian followers as a group. Other real subjects were recruited because they cranked out low RWA scores; we don’t expect them to be very submissive to authority.
And guess what. The high RWAs went along with the unethical decision a lot more than the low RWAs did. In fact they liked it, they said in private afterwards, it was the right thing to do, and they gave their boss a high rating. The less authoritarian students did not like the boss’s decision and said so, and they did not like the boss either. The confederate who played the role of boss, who never knew whether an underling was a high or low RWA, rated each subject on how compliant the subject had been. High RWAs were judged significantly more compliant than the low RWAs were.
Well that figures too, right? But maybe all we’ve found is another example of how high RWAs put dollars ahead of the environment. So let’s do the experiment one more time, only we won’t use confederates at all. Instead we’ll pair up two female students, both real subjects, one of whom is a high social dominator, while the other is a high RWA—our two kinds of authoritarians. Half the time we’ll arrange things so that the social dominator is the boss, and the authoritarian follower is the underling. But in the other pairs of subjects, we’ll declare the high RWA the boss, and the social dominator has to be the underling. Now, where is that plant going to go? The pairs were much more likely to reach an unethical decision and head Down Argentina Way when a social dominator was boss and the high RWA was the underling.
This is now called the “lethal union” in this field of research.[7] When social dominators are in the driver’s seat, and right-wing authoritarians stand at their beck and call, unethical things appear much more likely to happen. True, sufficiently skilled social dominators served by dedicated followers can make the trains run on time. But you have to worry about what the trains may be hauling when dominators call the shots and high RWAs do the shooting. The trains may be loaded with people crammed into boxcars heading for death camps.
And of course this lethal union is likely to develop in the real world. Authoritarian followers don’t usually try to become leaders. Instead they happily play subservient roles, and can be expected to especially enjoy working for social dominators, who will (you can bet your bottom dollar) take firm control of things, and who share many of the followers’ values and attitudes. The “connection” connects between these two opposites because they attract each other like the north and south poles of two magnets. The two can then become locked in a cyclonic death spiral that can take a whole nation down with them.
Double Highs: The Dominating Authoritarian Personality
In the “It’s So Clean” experiment ju
st described, the high social dominators were not also high RWAs. They were just ordinary social dominators, the sort we’ve been talking about so far in this chapter, who we know seldom score highly on the RWA scale because there’s just a small correlation between RWA and Social Dominance scores. But you’ll recall that at the beginning of this chapter I said this small relationship is stuffed with significance. It’s time for me to put up or shut up.
The small correlation exists because 5 to 10 percent of my samples score highly on both tests. I call these folks “Double Highs,” and while you only find them by the handful, they are a fascinating group to study.[8] For starters, they win the gold medal in the Prejudice Olympics, whether you’re talking about prejudice against racial and ethnic minorities, hostility toward homosexuals, or men-who-hate-women-who-wantto-control-their-own-lives. They also score higher than anyone else on a “Militia” scale I developed after the Oklahoma City bombing which measures belief that a Jewish-led conspiracy is plotting to take over the United States through such dastardly devices as gun control laws and the United Nations.
So Double Highs have stronger prejudices than do commonplace social dominators (i.e., the ones who don’t score highly in right-wing authoritarianism, the silver medal winners). And they are more prejudiced than ordinary high RWAs (i.e., the ones who don’t score highly in social dominance, the ones who get the bronze). They seem to have piled the prejudice of the high RWA atop the prejudice of the social dominator and reached new depths.
But if you are the careful, critical reasoner we earlier agreed you are, the following thought is zinging around in your brain now: “How can somebody score highly on both tests? One measures an inclination to submit to authority and the other measures a drive to dominate. How can one be a submissive dominator?”
Very well put. You are good. The vast majority of people who score highly on the RWA scale can be called submissive followers, champing at the bit for their champion. But aspiring dictators can sometimes score highly on the RWA scale too. Consider the first item on the measure: “Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.” Couldn’t an authoritarian follower and an authoritarian leader both agree with this? The follower would say, “Yes, yes. Oh please let him appear,” and the wannabe leader would say, “Yes, yes. Behold, here I am.” And it’s clear that Double Highs want to dominate, not submit. They score as high on both the “How much power would you like to have at age 40?”question and the “Power-Mad” scale as the rest of the social dominators do—which is much higher than ordinary high RWAs do.
So who are these Double Highs? Simply put, they are “religious” social dominators. They usually had much more religious upbringings than social dominators typically had, or they may have “got religion” as adults. As a group their fervor does not quite reach the levels found among ordinary right-wing authoritarians. But they go to church much more than most people in my samples do. Ditto for being religious fundamentalists. Ditto for being religiously ethnocentric. They thus respond to the religious content on the RWA scale, which ordinary social dominators do not, and that helps make them Double Highs.
But how are they going to answer the Exploitive-MAD scale? It would seem difficult for a religious person who goes to church fairly regularly to rack up a high score on this measure, wouldn’t it? Indeed, ordinary high RWAs score rather low on this test. But not the Double Highs, who score way way up there when it comes to exploitation, manipulation, and so on. Their (anonymous) answers to two items in particular wave a huge red flag:
“The best reason for belonging to a church is to project a good image and have contact with some of the important people in your community.” And,
“It is more important to create a good image of yourself in the minds of others than to actually be the person others think you are.”
Double Highs tend to say yes to these items much more than garden-variety authoritarian followers do. Why would they strike the pose then, to the extent that it is a pose? As one of the Exploitive-MAD items goes, “One of the best ways to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear.” Or, as Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have put it, “You can fool some of the people all of the time.” [9]
The Worst of the Lot. One thing has struck me as I’ve studied Double Highs. They’ve usually combined the worst aspects of being a social dominator with the worst aspects of being a high RWA. Thus we saw that when it comes to prejudice, they pack an extra load of hostility toward their many targets. And they’re just as power hungry as the rest of the social dominators are, rather than being uninterested in personal power as ordinary RWAs are. But when they land in between ordinary dominators and ordinary high RWAs, they usually land closer to the worse outcome.
Thus they could have low Exploitive-MAD scores the way most right-wing authoritarians do, but instead they pile up big numbers the way social dominators usually do. And they could have the low religious fundamentalism and low religious ethnocentrism scores of other social dominators, but instead they look much more like the fundamentalist, ethnocentric RWAs. The same goes for dogmatism. They could have low self-righteousness scores as most social dominators do, but instead they are as highly self-righteous as the rest of the high RWAs. They could have the cool, calm, collected responses to the Dangerous World scale that ordinary social dominators have, but instead they see the world as much more dangerous, the way most high RWAs do.
All in all, they exhibit an amalgam of bad traits and inclinations. They’re like a child who’s got Uncle Harry’s splotchy skin and Aunt Mildred’s difficult temperament and Grandpa Pete’s bow legs and… But don’t feel too sorry for them. With their followers’ eager help, they’re ruining America.
The Particular Threat Posed by Double Highs. We likely have lots of ordinary social dominators in our midst who want to run their clubs, their workplaces, the PTA, their local government, and so on, as their personal kingdom.[10] They’re the people who want to be the sole “deciders” about things. (Don’t get ahead of me here.) They’re probably the people who keep interrupting others during a discussion. I’ve long thought, as I’ve sat fuming, they’re most of the people who jump queues in traffic so they can get ahead of others. I’ll bet they’re the people who get you to do the work while they take the credit. It’s hard not to hypothesize that they make up a lot of the Little League coaches who teach kids that winning is everything, no matter how you have to do it. I’ll wager they make lots of promises in the moonlight that they never intend to keep. I’m willing to bet they’re major purchasers of hard core pornography that shows women being abused. I suspect they’re more likely to be rapists than most men. There even seems to be a whiff of the sociopath about the social dominator. Somebody do the studies and see if any of these hunches is right.
Ordinary social dominators may meet with only limited success in life. Their biggest obstacle in an organizational structure, besides the animosity they create for themselves, will predictably be other social dominators reaching for the top, to whom they might lose out and have to play a subordinate role, biding their time. There’s only one Big Cheese in most outfits. Just because one wants power doesn’t mean one is shrewd enough, attractive enough, well-connected enough, etcetera, to get it. Or they may go too far and get caught in their manipulations, in their lies, in their illegalities-and not be able to squirm their way out of it.
Double Highs, however, have a big head start over ordinary social dominators in politics, because they are the consumate leaders of a readily-formed army of zealots longing for a great warrior. Ordinary authoritarian followers, we have seen, tend to be highly religious (in a fundamentalist way), and their highly ethnocentric minds probably evaluate people on religious grounds more than any other. Ordinary social dominators, who have little religious background or impulse, will have to fake being super-religious to get these followers’ support. They might succeed if they are good actors and clever,
especially since RWAs throw the door open to whoever tells them their beliefs are right.
But a Double High has the best chance of attracting this army of yearning and loyal supporters. He comes packaged as “one of our own,” one of the in-group. He not only shares their prejudices, their economic philosophy, and their political leanings, he also professes their religious views, and that can mean everything to high RWAs. He too may be faking his religiousness to some extent, but he will have the credentials up front, and the phrase-dropping familiarity with the Bible to pass the test with flying colors. He’ll know the code words of the movement. He’ll appear to believe everything “all the good people” believe about Satan, being born again, evolution, the role of women, sex, abortion, school prayer, law and order, “perverts,” censorship, zealotry, holy wars, America-as-God’s-right-hand, and so on. Given this head start, you can expect to find a Double High leading most of the right-wing authoritarian groups in our country.
Ex-president Jimmy Carter, in describing the fundamentalist movements that have taken control of the Republican Party, recently wrote, “Almost invariably, fundamentalist movements are led by authoritarian males who consider themselves to be superior to others and, within religious groups, have an overwhelming commitment to subjugate women and to dominate their fellow believers.”[11] They’re probably even worse than Carter stated. But basically the data I’ve collected say he hit the nail, with his Habitat carpenter’s skill, smack on the head.
An Experiment Testing the Interaction of Authoritarian Leaders and Followers
The Authoritarians Page 19