The Motivational Role of Threat on Authoritarian Attitudes

The concept of authoritarianism is most closely associated with the political right-wing and often described as a set of immutable traits. In more recent times, a competing conceptualisation has emerged that considers authoritarianism as a set of three attitudinal clusters; Aggression towards outsiders, submission to leadership, and adherence to conventional views and beliefs. The motivational model of authoritarianism hypothesises that environmental factors can elicit changes in the three attitudinal clusters as a means of controlling societal threats with group-wide coping mechanisms (Duckitt & Sibley, 2010). In this line of reasoning, when people are presented with a societal threat, they are motivated to adopt more authoritarian tendencies to feel safer.

In the present thesis, we sought to explore the recent motivational explanation of authoritarianism and its multidimensional construction. We did this by drawing on the COVID-19 pandemic as a world-wide societal threat that we believed would motivate people to adopt authoritarian responses in a protective manner. First, we validated the first English scale of COVID-19 fear to quantify the perception of threat. Second, we conducted a cross- sectional study to understand whether the three authoritarian dimensions can present differently from one another statistically, challenging the widely held belief that dimensions are highly correlated and do not deviate from one another. Third, we conducted a longitudinal study to demonstrate how authoritarianism diminishes within the same individuals as threat abates. Fourth, and finally, we conducted an experiment to understand how the relationships between COVID-19 threat and authoritarianism would be similar or different to a different kind of threat, i.e., domestic terrorism, while also determining whether changes in authoritarianism in responses to these threats can be elicited on a very short timescale. Our findings highlighted that authoritarianism is not exclusively a right-wing phenomenon with left-wing individuals reporting higher levels of submission relative to aggression and conventionalism in the face of COVID-19. We believed that this effect was due to the perception of COVID-19 as a societal threat, eliciting high levels of submission due to the tendency for left-wing individuals to also have a high trust in science (whereby scientists are the main actors in communicating the threat of COVID-19). As the threat of COVID-19 abated, so too did the levels of submission we observed in left-wing individuals. Using a new sample from the United States rather than our initial New Zealand-based sample, we measured participants’ levels of authoritarianism before and after priming them with a threat of domestic terrorism, threat of COVID-19, or a neutral condition. Replicating our longitudinal effect, we observed an increased level of submission after a domestic terrorism and a COVID-19 prime. Thus, we conclude that authoritarianism is a malleable construct that is, to some extent, context dependent. People in a society will adjust the authoritarianism they manifest at a specific dimension level in response to a perceived threat.

The present body of research forms a significant milestone in authoritarian research. The foundations questions we were able to address have allowed us to look towards future lines of research with greater clarity. Foremost, it is apparent that the psychometric validity of the most established scale for authoritarianism be assessed and potentially adapted to suit a range of cultures and political spectra. We suggest a second line of research which would investigate who or what is seen as a leader to authoritarian followers. In the case of COVID-19, we suspected that left-wing-oriented individuals perceived science and scientists as their preferred authoritarian leadership, and they seemed to sacrifice their autonomy to support the scientific advice of the day. Lastly, it is our hope that these future lines of research will build on the present thesis by explicating how the three different authoritarian dimensions can interact with the environment or within the individual over time. One explanation we put forward is a temporal interpretation, whereby submission changes first in response to threat, and aggression or conventionalism can follow if a threat is not appropriately addressed. The research presented here was conducted to understand how people respond to threat so that we as a society can best anticipate and regulate these belief systems and behaviours.