Dr. Bob Altemeyer's freely available online book "The Authoritarians" has given us new and valuable insight into the real and present dangers associated with allowing authoritarianism and authoritarians, to have power over events. In this post, we will explore several experiments from Dr. Altemeyer's work which show in actuality how badly things go when authoritarians are in charge. Let's play some global Risk!
Source: Wikipedia open source image
Briefly, Altemeyer, born and educated in the US is now a psychologist in Canada who has worked on issues of human responses to authority for many years. His work (including previous books and scholarly publications) largely inspired John Dean's book Conservatives Without Conscience. The two have even appeared at DailyKos to answer questions. Altemeyer has even posted a diary, so I suggest you head on over and subscribe in case he posts more. Dean has not posted one as yet, but you can subscribe to him nonetheless in case he does.
Some definitions for those not familiar with Dr. Altemeyer's work:
RWA: Right-Wing-Authoritarian. This is a psychological scale used in Altemeyer's work to measure a person or group's relative responsiveness to authority and to evaluate other common personality traits shared by people who arrive at various points on the scale. The scale runs from 20 (min) to 180 (highest). 100 is the definied mid-point.
High RWA: A person who scores in the top 25% of the scale. The distinction is arbitrary. Research shows the North American average on the RWA scale is 90, so these are people who are significantly above average on the scale. These people tend to believe in the need for a strong leader to guide the nation, in the danger of the other and are in general more prejudiced and fearful than average. They also tend to be more religious and to be in the inflexible fundamentalist religious sects. As you would expect, these people will tend to be conservative Republicans.
Low RWA: A person who scores in the bottom 25% of the scale. By using a full quarter of the population, he avoids experimenting merely on some extremes of human behaviour. If you know 4 (random) people, statistically you know at least 1 "high" and 1 "low" authoritarian. Low-RWAs will tend to be liberal Democrats, people who are more likely to question authority, and be more logical, empirical and open minded. This seems terribly biased, but it actually is empirically justified in Altemeyer's research.
Social Dominance Scale: A second psychological scale used to determine a person's relative desire for power and control over others. High RWAs tend to not score highly on the SDS. Most high-RWAs are better thought of (crudely) as sheep, eager for a shepherd. Donald Trump might be a good example of a social dominator who is not a high-RWA. While the two scales (RWA and SDS) are distinct, they do share quite a few nasty personality tendencies, and SDSs have a few all their own apart from the RWAs. I would stereotype this group as your classic cut-throat business type. People willing to step on others to get that corner office, or perhaps...that oval one. Dick Cheney is almost certainly a high social dominator.
Double-High: A person who scores highly on both the RWA and SDS scales. These people statistically take the subjective worst traits from both Social Dominance and RWA personality traits. They are eager to dominate others, and lack in any genuine scruples over the means to gain that dominance. They are also the very most prejudiced and irrational people. Tom Delay is my personal archetype when I think of Double-Highs, also Bill Donahue, and most televangelists.
The Simulation
Here's how the game works:
The setting involved a rather sophisticated simulation of the earth’s future called the Global Change Game, which is played on a big map of the world by 50-70 participants who have been split into various regions such as North America, Africa, India and China. The players are divided up according to current populations, so a lot more students hunker down in India than in North America. The game was designed to raise environmental awareness, 24 and before the exercise begins players study up on their region’s resources, prospects, and environmental issues.
Then the facilitators who service the simulation call for some member, any member of each region, to assume the role of team leader by simply standing up. Once the "Elites"in the world have risen to the task they are taken aside and given control of their region’s bank account. They can use this to buy factories, hospitals, armies, and so on from the game bank, and they can travel the world making deals with other Elites. They also discover they can discretely put some of their region’s wealth into their own pockets, to vie for a prize to be given out at the end of the simulation to the World’s Richest Person. Then the game begins, and the world goes wherever the players take it for the next forty years which, because time flies in a simulation, takes about two and a half hours.
-ch1, The Authoritarians, p30
The Control Group: When Low-RWAs Run the World
As soon as the simulation began, the Pacific Rim Elite called for a summit on the "Island Paradise of Tasmania." All the Elites attended and agreed to meet there again whenever big issues arose. A world-wide organization was thus immediately created by mutual consent.
So they form a UN and establish diplomatic relations right off the bat.
Regions set to work on their individual problems. Swords were converted to ploughshares as the number of armies in the world dropped. No wars or threats of wars occurred during the simulation. [At one point the North American Elite suggested starting a war to his fellow region-aires (two women and one guy), but they told him to go fly a kite--or words to that effect.]
No wars. The one peron who agitates for it in a leadership position is rebuked by his subordinates, who as low RWAs do not merely accede to his authority on demand.
An hour into the game the facilitators announced a (scheduled) crisis in the earth’s ozone layer. All the Elites met in Tasmania and contributed enough money to buy new technology to replenish the ozone layer.
Hole in the Ozone? Solved.
Populations had grown and by the time forty years had passed the earth held 8.7 billion people, but the players were able to provide food, health facilities, and jobs for almost all of them. They did so by demilitarizing, by making a lot of trades that benefited both parties, by developing sustainable economic programs,
So by the end of 40 years, 400 million people had died of starvation or disease. However it's clear everyone had tried their best and the failures were the result of difficult intractable problems having no simple solutions.
Oh, and remember the bit about a reward for the richest man?
and because the Elites diverted only small amounts of the treasury into their own pockets. (The North American Elite hoarded the most.)
I do find it funny the same North American elite who had agitated for war was the most greedy/selfish of the bunch. Ok, so being a Low RWA doesn't make you a saint. The Professor Summarizes:
One cannot blow off four hundred million deaths, but this was actually a highly successful run of the game, compared to most. No doubt the homogeneity of the players, in terms of their RWA scores and related attitudes, played a role. Low RWAs do not typically see the world as "Us versus Them." They are more interested in cooperation than most people are, and they are often genuinely concerned about the environment. [...] The game’s facilitators said they had never seen as much international cooperation in previous runs of the simulation.
ch1, 30-31
So keep in mind this game wasn't developed by Altemeyer and was usually used as a teaching tool for students without any psychological testing aspects. It was just Altemeyer using it to test people he had already managed to separate by their scores on the RWA scale. The facilitators themselves (not familiar with Altemeyer's work) were impressed at the results.
When High-RWAs Run the Show
Next he had a set of ~70 high RWAs play the game (note: neither group knows they are high or low RWAs at the time they play the game) I cannot add anything to the horror of the result:
As soon as the game began, the Elite from the Middle East announced the price of oil had just doubled. A little later the former Soviet Union (known as the Confederation of Independent States in 1994) bought a lot of armies and invaded North America. The latter had insufficient conventional forces to defend itself, and so retaliated with nuclear weapons. A nuclear holocaust ensued which killed everyone on earth--7.4 billion people--
Contrast the immediate instincts of these people. Gauge. Pilfer. Invade. Retaliate. Escalate. Annihilate. The End.
Image in public domain
Ok, but no point ending the game there, so let's give them another chance:
When this happens in the Global Change Game, the facilitators turn out all the lights and explain what a nuclear war would produce. Then the players are given a second chance to determine the future, turning back the clock to two years before the hounds of war were loosed. The former Soviet Union however rebuilt its armies and invaded China this time, killing 400 million people. The Middle East Elite then called for a "United Nations" meeting to discuss handling future crises, but no agreements were reached.
So one attempt to create a UN to prevent this from happening again, but none of them can even reach an agreement as simple as "let's not nuke each other, ok?" And a nuclear power continues to start wars with other nuclear powers anyway.
At this point the ozone-layer crisis occurred but--perhaps because of the recent failure of the United Nations meeting--no one called for a summit. Only Europe took steps to reduce its harmful gas emissions, so the crisis got worse. Poverty was spreading unchecked in the underdeveloped regions, which could not control their population growth. Instead of dealing with the social and economic problems "back home," Elites began jockeying among themselves for power and protection, forming military alliances to confront other budding alliances. Threats raced around the room and the Confederation of Independent States warned it was ready to start another nuclear war. Partly because their Elites had used their meager resources to buy into alliances, Africa and Asia were on the point of collapse. An Elite called for a United Nations meeting to deal with the crises--take your pick--and nobody came.
Hole in the Ozone? No solution. No attempt at a solution. Are you surprised anymore why these people drag their feet on climate change? And no, when the ice sheet of Greenland slides fully into the sea sometime around 2050, these people will not relent or "come around" to the need for change. We even have more rumblings of another nuclear war, even after the first one worked out so well! And every attempt at diplomacy is an abject failure, a failure to even talk. Any wonder Bush doesn't want to talk to Syria or Iran? Or that Pelosi does want to talk to them, and that they hate it when she does? Diplomacy itself is a problem for these people.
So let's summarize this round of the game:
By the time forty years had passed the world was divided into armed camps threatening each other with another nuclear destruction. One billion, seven hundred thousand people had died of starvation and disease. Throw in the 400 million who died in the Soviet-China war and casualties reached 2.1 billion. Throw in the 7.4 billion who died in the nuclear holocaust, and the high RWAs managed to kill 9.5 billion people in their world--although we, like some battlefield news releases, are counting some of the corpses twice.
Utter disaster. The real world parallels are obvious. The Bush Administration has put this very personality type in command. And they perform to type. They withdrew from the ABM treaty. Pursued foolish and provocative missile defence shields. Promoted the theoretical use of "tactical" nuclear weapons at the battlefield level. Named enemy states provocatively. Treated long standing allies with suspicion. Took an all-or-nothing approach, and treated ambiguous moves by other states to be "threatening" and even formalized it all as the "1% Doctrine." The only blessing here is that Bush's team is just in charge of one country. Plenty of other country have lower RWA leadership to help keep the world from this disaster - but as the second game shows, the Soviet elite was still rumbling about nukes even after experiencing a nuclear disaster and seeing the consequences. It only takes one nut to screw it up for all the sane ones.
The authoritarian world ended in disaster for many reasons. One was likely the character of their Elites, who put more than twice as much money in their own pockets as the low RWA Elites had. [...] But more importantly, the high RWAs proved incredibly ethnocentric. There they were, in a big room full of people just like themselves, and they all turned their backs on each other and paid attention only to their own group. [...]
That is, [the high-RWAs] didn’t care much about the long-term environmental consequences of their economic acts. For example a facilitator told Latin America that converting much of the region’s forests to a single species of tree would make the ecosystem vulnerable. But the players decided to do it anyway because the tree’s lumber was very profitable just then. And the highs proved quite inflexible when it came to birth control. Advised that "just letting things go" would cause the populations in underdeveloped areas to explode, the authoritarians just let things go. ch1 - pp32-34
Later, Alteymeyer repeats this experiment controlling for the Social Dominance scale also (hint: High-RWAs never even come close to the low-RWA result). If this diary generates any interest, I'll be happy to synopsize those experiments too. However, I do think it would be a fair assumption both of Altemeyer's groups will have likely included a few high SDS types. In a group of ~70 people, it's reasonable to assume there will be at least 1 or 2. So that greedy North American elite from the Low-RWA game might have been a social dominator. But even when he wanted to take his country to war for his benefit, his low RWA citizens rejected the idea. Similarly in the high RWA game, it's likely that only a couple of the elites were actually double-highs, but having their "populations" all consisting of high-RWAs, there was no one with the inkling to resist their meglomanical behaviour, such as the Soviet elite invading Russia or the Middle Eastern elite doubling the price of oil.
So that's what happens when we let things get to the extreme. Double-highs leading high-RWA bleating sheep. We've seen it in action for 6 years of a roll-over congress blindly following orders from the White House. Even when the polling showed them that they were killing their re-election chances, they were too strongly authoritarian to even know how to stand up to the White House before it was too late. It's continuing even now, as most of the endangered Republicans from the Senate can't even muster the guts to make a few meaningless symbolic votes against the White House position. Now with a Democratic congress we have low(er)-RWAs responding to a double-high White House, hampered by the remaining high-RWAs and double-highs of the Republican congressional delegation. And they'll most likely bleed some more in 2008, because for many of them, they are mentally incapable of rejecting the authority inherent in their President.
We sometimes make the mistake of assuming every politician is some cynical machevellian character, slyly playing to the polls, and merely shifting in the wind. High-RWAs lack both the intellectual resources to make the rational determinations that necessitate a change in behaviour, even when self-interest is so clearly at stake. The game high-RWAs couldn't act on ozone, and couldn't change course on birth control. Both "policies" were failing badly, and yet they persisted in them. Thus it is with the Republicans. A few of the more devious types like perhaps Rove might shift tactics a bit, but overall these people cannot "blow" in the wind even to save their skins.
They. Must. Go. For the good of the planet. Liberals (low RWAs) aren't perfect, and even in our "ideal" situation, we're going to fail and lose 400 million people to famine and disease. But at least we won't start a nuclear war, or let more than 2 billion die to war, famine and disease.