Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Prejudice

Core Idea

Right-wing authoritarianism is characterized by strong deference to established authority, strict adherence to traditional group norms, and aggression toward those perceived as threatening group values or deviating from norms. This personality dimension strongly predicts prejudice against multiple outgroups and is conceptually distinct from social dominance orientation—authoritarian individuals emphasize loyalty to ingroup authority while SDO emphasizes hierarchy itself.

How It's Best Learned

Examine how authoritarianism and SDO independently predict prejudice, sometimes in opposite directions for specific targets, to understand that different personality ideologies drive prejudice through different psychological mechanisms.

Common Misconceptions

Students think authoritarianism is purely about obedience to any authority; actually, it involves strong identification with and conformity to one's own ingroup's traditional authority and norms, with hostility directed at outgroups perceived as threatening those traditions.

Explainer

Your study of prejudice and discrimination established the basic phenomenon: people form negative attitudes toward outgroups and treat their members unequally. But not all people are equally prejudiced, and not all prejudice targets the same groups. Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), as formulated by Bob Altemeyer, offers one of the strongest individual-difference predictors of generalized prejudice — the tendency to be prejudiced against many different outgroups simultaneously. Understanding it requires seeing it not as simple obedience but as a particular relationship with one's ingroup's social order.

RWA is defined by three correlated clusters. Authoritarian submission is deference to established authorities within one's own group — political leaders, religious institutions, traditional social hierarchies. Authoritarian aggression is the endorsement of punitive treatment toward people who violate group norms or who are perceived as deviant, dangerous, or threatening to the group's values. Conventionalism is strong adherence to the norms and morality endorsed by the ingroup's authorities. Notice that all three components are oriented around the *ingroup's* authority structure, not authority in general. A high-RWA individual is not submissive to all authority figures — they may actively resist authorities who challenge their group's traditional values. The defining feature is loyalty to one's own group's established order.

This is why RWA predicts broad-spectrum prejudice: any group perceived as threatening traditional values or flouting group norms becomes a target of authoritarian aggression. Empirically, high-RWA individuals show more prejudice against racial minorities, sexual minorities, immigrants, and people with criminal records — groups that vary enormously in their actual characteristics but share the property of being perceived (in certain cultural contexts) as threats to traditional social order. Threat perception is the psychological link: RWA predicts prejudice most strongly when the outgroup is framed as dangerous or immoral.

The conceptual distinction from social dominance orientation (SDO) — which you will encounter in the builds-toward topics — sharpens the picture. SDO is about endorsing group-based hierarchy itself: the belief that some groups should dominate others. SDO predicts prejudice through a different mechanism (support for inequality) and targets different groups (particularly low-status groups, regardless of perceived threat). Authoritarian individuals emphasize moral conformity and norm protection; socially dominant individuals emphasize status hierarchy. For some targets these predict prejudice in the same direction; for others they diverge. Understanding the two mechanisms separately explains why prejudice is not a single, unified phenomenon but a cluster of related attitudes driven by distinct underlying motivations.