anyone awake? need a reality check

This survey showed up on my dash: Right Wing Authoritarian Survey

My--possibly utterly insane and/or ultra-dense tumblr response: read here

Alternately, I'm putting the text of my response under the cut.


4.55% Literally all my answers were very strongly agree/very strongly disagree, which overall bothers me.

Also: what the everloving fuck is this survey?

I get this isn’t meant to be a nuanced view, but–are you kidding me? These questions are geared toward responses from Christians, likely Protestant, and specifically those who go to church regularly not just for spiritual guidance but also as part of their culture and social groups.

Let me repeat: what. the. fuck?

Atheists and others who have rebelled against the established religions are no doubt every bit as good and virtuous as those who attend church regularly.

That question is super wrong on a lot of levels, but just to start: there is no way to answer this without assuming Christian is the ultimate standard and no one can be better but no doubt--no doubt-–they can be equally good. Not are equally; can be equally.

And some, I assume, are good people. In case that wasn’t obvious.

It also assumes no one who goes to church regularly has ever rebelled against established religions, which is not at all the entire basis of the entire fucking Protestant faith.

Context: I’m a devout Christian; my faith was and is a choice I made and still make, blah blah blah, and I don’t go to church (though I used to when a kid; my parents weren’t churchgoers but for reasons I still don’t know I made them get up at seven to take me to Sunday school at the Lutheran church for years. Yeah, they were baffled too but the sleep deprivation made them malleable).

With that context: that question is bullshit.

For that matter, most of them are. Especially when they’re the same damn question with different words.

A. 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.

B. The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas.

C. What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil, and take us back to our true path.

Bolding mine because I’m trying to work out how the fuck anyone would answer these three questions differently. A is probably about homosexuality, B is likely women’s rights/feminism/abortion, C is–’true path’ generally refers to salvation only being found through Jesus Christ so would be anti-everyone-not-that-Protestant-flavor-usually in the Baptist/Pentacostl family, but I could be reading into it way too much from depressing experience with such.

Also: no question that could even vaguely imply a concern regarding race and racism. Homosexuals and Gays (and women) are very well represented and also animal rights, though not anything environmental.

Am I being super dense here and missing something that makes this an actual survey and not what seems to be a loyalty test for Baptists and evangelicals to see how they feel about a Christian-fascist future that is coming? Like, tell me if I’m being stupid because honestly, feeling stupid would be super awesome compared to vaguely uneasy and creeped the fuck out.

I really want to feel stupid, in case that wasn’t clear. Please.


Like, yeah, I get this is a right wing authoritarian tendency survey but...to answer half these questions with any kind of accuracy, you have to already be in a very narrow (very white) Christian Protestant demographic that already is right wing authoritarian (the atheist question alone was ridiculous, but 'homosexuals' and 'gays' gave it that 'oh God what' touch). I'm a white Christian and I can't answer several of the questions as written with any degree of accuracy because of the base assumptions of the questions which is either a.) utterly foreign to me or b.) repulsive is an understatement like you have no idea.

So those familiar with surveys: am I just not getting the methodology here on what it's doing?

Note: I took the Dark Triad test and I'm glad to report my psychopathic tendencies are in the bottom two percent, my narcissism in the eleventh percentile, and my Machiavellian is around the 66th which seems not too worrying but to be fair, I really liked The Prince.

Comments

[twistedchick]

This looked to me as if it were quotes taken from speeches or sermons from the late 1800s thruogh about 50 years ago, and arranged in a certain pattern so that you couldn't just automatically hit agree or disagree. It's sneaky that way. But the terminology is not current at all, the issues aren't current and it is definitely a white-people-only test. Or so it looks to me.

I also got 4.55%

[brooksmoses]

Yup -- digging into it, it looks like it was basically written in 1947, except for the "sneaky that way" aspect which was a 1981 revision.

[timespirt]

I got one of those in the mail a few months ago. I tossed it in the garbage.

[lilacsigil]

It looks like it was originally designed in 1947, so I guess "white, church-going Protestant" is in fact the group of people they see as mainstream and are trying to test. Whether or not it's designed to assess authoritarianism in that culture or that's simply the researcher's cultural blindness, it's hard to say.

[brooksmoses]

Looks like there's rather more on the "California F-Scale" test that this is based on here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-scale_(personality_test). I note in particular this line: "The scale has attracted a great deal of criticism, since it is ideological and associates societal processes with personality characteristics...."

Also looking at the article on Theodor W. Adorno, the person most closely associated with its initial development, I notice that a significant part of the work he was doing at the time was an "analysis of the Californian radio preacher Martin Luther Thomas." (Edit: More on Thomas and Adorno's analysis, here: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=635. Notably, they describe Thomas as active in the 1930s before WWII, not 1940s during it.) I could easily see that affecting the development of the survey as well -- i.e., "how much of what this preacher was saying do you agree with?"

(On the other hand, one of the collaborating organizations on the project was the American Jewish Committee, which makes that bias in the questions rather interesting.)

It also sounds like the refactoring that Bob Altemeyer did in 1981 was mostly just to make it statistically more accurate, rather than any substantial changes to the content.

So, yeah -- this survey should probably be viewed in the context of the state of the art of survey design in 1947, and also in the context of the fact that it was a direct and immediate response to the authoritarianism driving WWII written in part by someone who had studied fascist radio preachers of the 1930s.

(Also the dogwhistles in the questions were probably calling different dogs at the time the questions were written than they would today.)

[ruric]

As a Brit I'm not totally sur ehow my answers translate and am vaguely horrified to find I scored 6.25% (where did I go wrong)!

Also the "further questions" bit was hilarious. What does whether I'm left or right handed have to do with anything or if I know the definitions of "florted, cuivocal and verdid" - that'd be a big No. (Also interestingly google shows those words and some of the questions in the final bit of the survey were used in research about establishing whether people were Nerdy personality types in a New Zealand study in 2015.

[grammarwoman]

My previous company built and electronically distributed tests, and had a couple of psychometricians (people who study the science of tests and testing) on staff. Just from the few questions you listed here, their professional opinion would be that this test is psychometrically INVALID (and my boss would call it a crock of bullshit). This also means that I have been known to get worked up when taking random multiple-choice tests and surveys, where there were no options of "This question is jacked-up six ways to Sunday and I refuse to answer it on the grounds that you are an idiot for even writing it."

[cathyw]

if it's any consolation the fact that you're going "whatttt?" about the questions means you're probably not a right-wing authoritarian, since RWAs don't typically traffic in nuanced thinking. What their Authority Figure tells them is true, is true, end of story.

...you may note that this way of thinking is, in fact, not uncommon among Christians of the Baptist/Pentecostal/Evangelical family. Right-wing authoritarian personality is a thing, even if this test is too loaded with the assumption that the test-taker is an American Christian to really detect it well.

It turns out there's a shorter test:
"he asked whether it is more important to raise a child to be (1) respectful or independent; (2) obedient or self-reliant; (3) well-behaved or considerate; and (4) well-mannered or curious." - he being Matthew MacWilliams of the University of Massachusetts, with the questions asked as part of a political survey in Dec. 2015. I might quibble with #3 in that being considerate is part of being well-behaved IMO but, unsurprisingly, people who picked the first answer to all four tended to support Trump in the Republican primary.

[seperis]

I might quibble with #3 in that being considerate is part of being well-behaved IMO

Actually, that works pretty well if you use considerate's less-popular definition: after consideration, or reflection

Someone well-behaved follows all the rules because they're rules and that's it; a considerate person, though, would wonder why the rules exist and why they're supposed to follow them.

[cathyw]

heh. I suppose I was judging "well-behaved" by my own more or less non-authoritarian tendencies - probably also "respectful". It's that "respect my humanity" versus "respect my authority" thing you see a lot on Twitter...

I got an 8%, I suspect because I "agree/disagree"d rather than "strongly agree/strongly disagree"d with some of the statements. (I strongly disagree with the entire premise that church-going god-belief represents some kind of admirable moral position. On the other hand my position regarding "tradition" is that it should be evaluated rather than thrown out wholesale...)

I've read Bob Altemeyer's book "The Authoritarians" and I refreshed my memory of it yesterday - he talks about this test and scoring it (he uses a point scale, not a % scale, when he was giving it to college students they tended to score ~75, their parents around 90, RWAs much higher). He does note that almost nobody is 100% non-authoritarian-followery - very few people respond to stop signs by yelling "YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME" and gunning the engine.

[cathyw]

also again the fact that I'm thinking about the questions rather than knee-jerk reacting to "respectful" "obedient" "well-behaved" "well-mannered" as things children are supposed to be probably says a lot right there.

[seperis]

Okay, I kind of thought something like that but thought I was being unfair, but--I mean, yeah, that's honestly the most likely explanation.

Then again, I'm the parent that told my son and his friend (who is Muslim and sometimes wears a light headcovering) when they're out that if anyone made trouble for her for her to get behind him so he can get a good sucker punch before they run quickly away. (Note: she's tiny, so unless she thought she could get the guy's balls and get away safely, easier for Child to do it. He's six feet tall and comes from German stock with the bone mass to prove it; I'm not entirely sure he even knows how to throw a punch, but not entirely surprisingly, no one's decided they want to test it).

So not the best judge. But seeing the word well-behaved may be giving me hives, so.