Authoritarians’ punitive-justice stance reverses when the criminal attacked a disliked group

Evidence

It appears, then, that believing in punishment as they do and enjoying dishing it out as they do, High RWAs are more likely in general to sentence wrongdoers to long prison terms. But this is not true if the wrongdoers are officials whom the authoritarian admires, or if the crime involved attacking someone Highs believe should be attacked (the child molester, the hippie, the uppity demonstrator, Vietnamese peasants, and gay activists). In these cases the usual positive RWA Scale correlation drops and may even become negative. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 306

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the author’s earlier criminal-status chapter and to the target-group psychology of vigilantism in Things Fall Apart’s colonial justice and The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s punitiveness.
• DEEPTHINKING: A paradigm-level insight: authoritarian punitiveness is not principled justice but loyalty-threat policing, which upends the ‘law and order’ self-image.