Authoritarians fail at drawing correct inferences even with evidence in view

Evidence

I was particularly interested in the results of the “inferences test,” because I thought people accustomed to agreeing with authorities would be weak at drawing their own conclusions. So in 1991 and 1992 I gave the correctinferences test Wegmann had used to over 800 students. Both times I found Highs did significantly worse on it than others. The relationships came in somewhat smaller than those Wegmann had found, but in my experiments subjects could look back in their booklets at the evidence under discussion whereas in Wegmann’s study that information had been replaced on the computer screen. (And Highs still had trouble making correct inferences.) In both experiments, High RWAs particularly had trouble recognizing decidedly false inferences. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1205

Categorization

• XREF: Direct empirical mechanism for the vault claim that authoritarian/Christian-nationalist populations accept false beliefs — shows the deficit persists even when evidence is available, not merely under misinformation conditions.