Adorno was the first to propose the existence of an authoritarian personality as part of an attempt to explain the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, but his theory fell into disfavor because it was associated with Freudian psychoanalysis.
An aspect of this attitude was the "birther" movement, espousing the conspiracy theory that Obama was actually born in Kenya and had used a forged birth certificate to qualify himself for office (in the United States, only natural-born citizens may serve as president).
Florian Funke showed that it is possible to extract the three underlying dimensions of RWA if the double- and triple-barreled nature of the items is removed.
[21] Work by Winnifred R. Louis, Kenneth I. Mavor and Chris G. Sibley recently demonstrated that the existence of two or three factors in the RWA scale reflects real differences in these dimensions rather than acquiescence response bias.
[22] In 2021, Morning Consult (an American data intelligence company) published the results of a survey measuring the levels of authoritarianism in adults in America and seven other Western countries.
[26] Their tendency to compartmentalize information makes it hard to change the cherished opinion of a high-RWA by telling them evidence that contradicts their beliefs.
Participants who reported a higher sensitivity to body odour were found to agree with more Right-wing associated statements in a shortened version of the RWA scale [30] Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto created the social dominance orientation (SDO) scale, which describes people who crave power over others.
This is measured in one of the items on the RWA scale: "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."
[31] And likewise, social dominators seeking power like to appeal to authoritarians because their loyalty is easy to acquire and hold if the SD just tells them what they want to hear, and they are gullible and will turn a blind eye to his indiscretions.
They might often spout contradictory and illogical things in order to manipulate their RWA followers, but they are usually aware of the bad logic in their arguments, they do not care as long as it gets them what they want.
Generally speaking, autocratic rulers hold power through the support of a smaller fraction of their citizens than leaders in democratic countries do.
The democratic leader is forced to consider the desires of centrists and liberals, and such citizens demand tolerance, liberty, and low corruption.
Supporters of then-U.S. president Donald Trump were more likely than non-Trump-supporting Republicans to score highly on authoritarian aggression and group-based dominance.
[46] A study by Monmouth University found that 40% of people who voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election scored in the highest quartile on the RWA scale.
Stenner argues that conservatives will embrace racial diversity, civil liberties and moral freedom to the extent they are already institutionalized authoritatively-supported traditions and are therefore supportive of social stability.
[50] Measured against other factors of personality, authoritarians generally score lower on openness to experience and slightly higher on conscientiousness.
[49] The RWA scale reliably correlates with political party affiliation, reactions to Watergate, pro-capitalist attitudes, religious orthodoxy and acceptance of covert governmental activities such as illegal wiretaps.
In a study by Altemeyer, 68 authoritarians played a three-hour simulation of the Earth's future entitled the Global Change Game.
Unlike a comparison game played by individuals with low RWA scores which resulted in world peace and widespread international cooperation, the simulation by authoritarians became highly militarized and eventually entered the stage of nuclear war.
However, a 2003 cross-cultural study examined the relation between authoritarianism and individualism–collectivism in samples (1,080) from Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Poland and the United States.
Stenner argues that RWA is best understood as expressing a dynamic response to external threat, not a static disposition based only on the traits of submission, aggression and conventionalism.
[65] This research seemed to show that fundamentalism would be associated with reduced racism once the authoritarian component was removed and this was summarized in a recent review of the field.
[67][68] Even worse is the possibility that the unrecognised dimensionality in RWA can cause a statistical artifact to arise in such regressions which can reduce or even reverse some of the relationships.
Mavor and colleagues have argued that this artifact eliminates or even reverses any apparent tendency for fundamentalism to reduce racism once RWA is controlled.
The implication is that in some domains such as the social psychology of religion it is not only preferable to think of RWA as consisting of at least two components, but it is essential in order to avoid statistical errors and incorrect conclusions.
[72][73] However, Ray's approach is a minority position among researchers[74] and other psychologists have found that both the RWA scale and the original F-scale are good predictors of both attitudes and behavior.
[75] In 2012, the American Journal of Political Science[76] published an article discussing the correlation between conservatism and psychoticism which they associated with authoritarianism, among other traits.
The tendency to support a strong leader when faced with common existential threats has contributed to Darwinian fitness in human prehistory because it helped solve the collective action problem in war and suppress free riders.
[78] In 2019, Ronald Inglehart combined RWA with his theory of postmaterialism, arguing that both reflected the tendency of insecure environments to produce individuals whose worldview values conformism over self-expression.
In addition, RWA is subject to behavioural plasticity and thus can be altered due to an individual's life experiences and environmental contexts.