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Comment by fortythirteen | Hacker News Reader

For reference, I got a 59, which is securely within the supposed "non-authoritarian" side. That being said, the questions in that test are quite binary and, The RW in RWA being for "Right Wing", heavily biased towards "authoritarianism" being a solely right wing, religiously conservative thing, which it is most certainly not.

There were no questions on the test that would capture a pure Stalinist/Maoist as the obvious authoritarian he/she is. This throws the entire study into question on its claims.

Also, with regards to the original study, the high degree of neuroticism in remainers could easily be characterized as them being susceptible to fear based propaganda.

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Thanks for the mention of this test. I scored 51, but for some reason I am known as the 'right wing conservative AWM' in some circles.

I just suppose that even liberal people judge by looks (I do look like the prototypical AWM) and by small disagreements about some liberal thesis (e.g. I don't agree with 100% with current feminism mantras, yet in absolute terms I agree 90% with feminists in general and disagree 99.9% with barefoot&pregnant types). There is a lot of cargo cult among liberals.

Like most situations, you learn more about someone from the questions they ask than the answers they give. The creator(s) of that survey have some extremely binary world views.

I'd be very hesitant to make that conclusion. Much more likely is that more nuanced middle-ground questions are a lot more open to individual interpretation than the "extreme" statements, and thus give you a lot less "signal" in what you are trying to measure - even some of these could be seen as widely open to interpretation.

I'm guessing the scale (rather than agree/disagree) is attempting to compensate for this somewhat.

(Caveat: I'm a scientist but not with a background in anything close to Psychology; I've seen but not written these sorts of tests).

It sounds like you have views that are controversial in your social environment. That's not authritarian - that's anti-authoritarian.

If you had those views because everyone around you had them, and didn't like people disagreeing because it was outside social norms, then you would be authoritarian.

In Germany, people with high RWA are probably very anti-rascist for instance. It's an interesting metric.

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