On March 9, 2015, 47 Republican Senators signed a letter to the government of Iran. Its goal was to disrupt negotiations over Iran’s nuclear energy program and the international sanctions intended to keep that program verifiably peaceful. It proved to be a spectacle of incompetence on the international stage. They were wrong about the international context of the negotiations, wrong about our own Constitution, and they even violated the Logan Act. It’s as if Beavis and Butthead had spray-painted on the Halls of History grafitti denouncing peace.
The letter and its authors brought to mind a topic in Bob Altemeyer’s book, The Authoritarians (free PDF online). The book gives us an overview of a field of serious studies of the psychology and sociology of the Authoritarian personality—the followers and the leaders. These 47 Senators have just demonstrated the importance and relevance of these studies. More below the fold...
In this book, Altemeyer discusses some metrics used in studies to identify Right Wing Authoritarians (RWAs). Games of international strategy simulation showed researchers that those with high scores as RWAs respond to perceived or potential threats far more aggressively than do the rest of us, reproducibly.
[Researchers] had five-man teams of male introductory psychology students role-play NATO in an “international simulation” involving (they thought) another team of students playing as the Warsaw Pact. Some of the NATO teams were composed entirely of low RWA students, and other NATO teams were stocked entirely with highs. (We experimenters secretly played the Warsaw Pact.) The simulation began with a couple of ambiguous moves by the Warsaw Pact, such as holding military exercises earlier than anticipated, and withdrawing divisions to rear areas (possibly for rest, or --as Dr. Strangelove might argue--possibly for redeployment for an attack). The NATO teams could respond with nonthreatening or threatening moves of varying magnitudes. But if they made threats, the Warsaw pact responded with twice as much threat in return, and the NATO team would reap what it had sown as an escalation of aggressive moves would likely result.
The low RWA teams did not interpret the ambiguous moves at the beginning of the game as serious threats and thus seldom made threatening moves. The high RWAs on the other hand usually reacted to the opening Warsaw Pact moves aggressively, and sowed a whirlwind. Over the course of the simulation, the high RWA teams made ten times as much threat as the low teams did, and usually brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. (page 26)
Similarly in the Global Change Game, the low RWAs were most successful. They seemed all to agree: “Let’s Work Together and Clean Up This Mess.” The high RWAs nuked the whole simulated world in short order (pages 30, 182).
But Altemeyer was reporting on games. These 47 Republican Senators are actively tampering with the real world.
Altemeyer wrote of his experience watching RWAs play out these games:
But some of what happened in this experiment rang true to me. I especially thought, “I’ve seen this show before” as I sat on the sidelines and watched the high RWAs create their very own October crisis (page 34).
And so this letter from these 47 Republican Senators made me think, “I’ve seen this show before”—in Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians. They have reacted to a perceived threat—the threat of the success of the negotiations!—with a reckless level of aggression.