Authoritarians fail to challenge their own contradictory reasoning

Evidence

If we look back at the findings in this section, we can see afterimages of some of our earlier discoveries about authoritarians. For example, we saw in the attribution error research that they do not reflect much about other people’s ideas. Well, here we see that they do not appear to reflect much upon their own ideas either. In particular, High RWAs do not seem to challenge their own thinking, to get outside themselves and ask, “Wait a minute. If it’s all right for Montreal to leave Quebec, why is it wrong for Quebec to leave Canada?” — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1566

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the moral-foundations find-my-own-blindspot literature on self-reflection deficits and to motivated reasoning research.