Satel, (2021) offers an insightful look into the one-sided history of research into Right Wing Authoritarian personality. She notes:
An ambitious new study on the subject by the Emory University researcher Thomas H. Costello and five colleagues should settle the question. It proposes a rigorous new measure of antidemocratic attitudes on the left. And, by drawing on a survey of 7,258 adults, Costello’s team firmly establishes that such attitudes exist on both sides of the American electorate. the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.
Costello’s research suggests that right wing and left-wing authoritarianism share many similar traits, but that LWA simply has been largely ignored by researchers. One of the reasons for this is the reality that most academic researchers tend to be liberal, thus making right wing an out-group phenomenon – psychologist and researchers fall blindly into the in-group/out-group trap and unknowingly point to others as being the problem.
While this appears compelling, Costello does identify some significant differences between Right Wing and Left-Wing beliefs and thinking:
Relative to right-wing authoritarians, left-wing authoritarians were lower in dogmatism and cognitive rigidity, higher in negative emotionality, and expressed stronger support for a political system with substantial centralized state control. Our results also indicate that LWA powerfully predicts behavioral aggression and is strongly correlated with participation in political violence.
In summary, a tendency towards authoritarianism places individuals and groups at risk because they are more likely to avoid critical thinking, believe conspiracy theories and misinformation that supports their in-group beliefs and disbelieve objective experts and leaders attempting to inform and protect the public.
Follow-up I: Authors of the California Study
What happened to authors of The Authoritarian Personality? Each of them continued their contributions to the field—and each confronted troubling experiences that all too often (and tragically) aligned with and provided real-life evidence of destructive outcomes associated with the phenomenon they were studying.
Theodore Adorno
It is often not acknowledged that he was not really the major figure in preparation of this book. He is only the one with name starting with “A” and was best known at the time. A famous and controversial member of the Frankfort school which blended Freudian and Marxist thought. He definitely was not a “neutral” observer. He returned to Europe soon after this book was completed and continued to be a major contributor to the field that is often identified as “social-critical theory.” For many of those aligned with this field, Adorno is much better known for his writing in areas other than the study of authoritarian personalities.
