Authoritarianism declines with age and even more with parenthood

Evidence

Transposing the means to equivalence with a thirty-item test answered on a —4to +4 basis, the 86 alumni had a mean score of 153.5 in 1976, and a significantly lower mean of 140.0 in 1994, The 24 alumni who were not parents (who had gone to school for 18.0 years on average) showed a significant drop of 28.3 points, from 158.9 to 130.6 (or 18%). The 62 alumni who had experienced the bliss of 2:00 a.m. feedings, tooth eruption, and the Terrible Twos, who had 17.8 years of education, also showed a drop, of 7.8 points, from 151.3 to 143.5 (or 5%), which also was significant (t = 2.06; p < .05). (But the drop among the nonparents was significantly larger.) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1129

Because of the large amounts of university experience these people had, their RWA scores dropped a lot. Parenthood ratcheted these scores back up, but even the parents remained significantly less authoritarian than they were as young adults. Although this may disappear once the children hit adolescence, I find it remarkable that these “thirty-somethings” were still less authoritarian than they had been at age eighteen. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1140

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on right-wing authoritarianism as a social learning phenomenon rather than a fixed trait.
• QUESTION: Does adolescent upheaval actually reverse the gains of university liberalization for these parents? Altemeyer flags it as a possibility worth checking in a follow-up.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1129; Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1140