Psychology Department, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
Int J Psychol. 2013;48(1):6-17. doi: 10.1080/00207594.2012.696651.
Most theories addressing the topic have proposed that threat and fear underlie right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and many empirical findings have been consistent with this proposition. Important questions, however, remain unanswered, such as whether RWA is associated with fear and threat in general or only specific kinds of fear and threat. Theories of RWA generate markedly different predictions on this issue, particularly with respect to social or personal fears, and whether the association would also hold for the closely related construct of social dominance orientation (SDO). We investigated the issue by asking 463 undergraduate students to rate their feelings of fear, concern, and anxiety to a comprehensive 93-item list of potential fears and threats, which were formulated as either personal or social. Exploratory factors analysis identified five distinct fear-threat factors: harm to self, child, or country; personal and relationship failures; environmental and economic fears; political and personal uncertainties; and threats to ingroup. All the fear-threat factors were correlated with RWA, with the strongest correlations being for threats to ingroup, and with stronger effects for social than for personal fears. None of the fear factors correlated with SDO. These relationships were not affected by controlling for social desirability or emotional stability (EMS). When the intercorrelations between fear factors and EMS were controlled using ridge regression, only threats to ingroup predicted RWA. Structural equation modeling indicated good fit for a model in which low levels of EMS had a significant path to threats to ingroup, which in turn had a significant path to RWA, and EMS having a significant though weak indirect (fully mediated) inverse effect on RWA. Implications of these findings for theories of authoritarianism and future research are discussed.
大多数涉及该主题的理论都提出，威胁和恐惧是右翼威权主义（RWA）的基础，许多实证研究结果也与此假设一致。然而，仍有一些重要的问题没有得到解答，例如 RWA 是否与一般的恐惧和威胁有关，还是仅与特定类型的恐惧和威胁有关。RWA 理论在这个问题上产生了明显不同的预测，特别是在社会或个人恐惧方面，以及这种关联是否也适用于密切相关的社会支配倾向（SDO）结构。我们通过要求 463 名本科生对他们对潜在恐惧和威胁的 93 项综合清单的恐惧、担忧和焦虑程度进行评分，来研究这个问题，这些恐惧和威胁被表述为个人或社会的恐惧和威胁。探索性因素分析确定了五个不同的恐惧-威胁因素：对自己、孩子或国家的伤害；个人和人际关系失败；环境和经济恐惧；政治和个人不确定性；以及对群体内的威胁。所有的恐惧-威胁因素都与 RWA 相关，与 RWA 相关性最强的是对群体内的威胁，与社会恐惧的相关性比与个人恐惧的相关性更强。没有任何恐惧因素与 SDO 相关。当控制社交期望或情绪稳定性（EMS）时，这些关系不受影响。当使用脊回归控制恐惧因素与 EMS 之间的相互关系时，只有对群体内的威胁预测 RWA。结构方程模型表明，对于一个模型来说，EMS 水平较低对群体内的威胁有显著的影响，而群体内的威胁对 RWA 有显著的影响，EMS 对 RWA 有显著但较弱的间接（完全中介）负向影响。这些发现对威权主义理论和未来研究的意义进行了讨论。
