I just finished the late Bob Altemeyer's penultimate book, The Authoritarians, and this question was on my mind throughout. Altemeyer developed various tests that he claimed measured predisposition to be an authoritarian leader or follower, then deployed the tests on his psych students in Manitoba. His findings were replicated by colleag…
I just finished the late Bob Altemeyer's penultimate book, The Authoritarians, and this question was on my mind throughout. Altemeyer developed various tests that he claimed measured predisposition to be an authoritarian leader or follower, then deployed the tests on his psych students in Manitoba. His findings were replicated by colleagues who ran tests on their psych students in the USA. [Does testing psych undergrads for course credit count as controlled lab conditions?] His "highly sophisticated tests" seem to be opinion surveys on hot button socio-political issues of the day. He generalizes his results to cover the rest of humanity and says he has discovered a deep truth of social psych. The whole time I'm thinking that what he's done is discovered a deep truth about the socio-political opinions of psych students in Manitoba. How actionable is this insight, really?
To his credit. Altemeyer published the ebook for free and told us to do our own experiments to replicate or falsify his findings: https://theauthoritarians.org/
I just finished the late Bob Altemeyer's penultimate book, The Authoritarians, and this question was on my mind throughout. Altemeyer developed various tests that he claimed measured predisposition to be an authoritarian leader or follower, then deployed the tests on his psych students in Manitoba. His findings were replicated by colleagues who ran tests on their psych students in the USA. [Does testing psych undergrads for course credit count as controlled lab conditions?] His "highly sophisticated tests" seem to be opinion surveys on hot button socio-political issues of the day. He generalizes his results to cover the rest of humanity and says he has discovered a deep truth of social psych. The whole time I'm thinking that what he's done is discovered a deep truth about the socio-political opinions of psych students in Manitoba. How actionable is this insight, really?
To his credit. Altemeyer published the ebook for free and told us to do our own experiments to replicate or falsify his findings: https://theauthoritarians.org/