Authoritarians flee unpleasant self-relevant information that nonauthoritarians will confront

Evidence

In a nutshell, the two groups of Low RWAs showed practically no difference in their desire to see the summary of the literature on the self-esteem scale. I can easily imagine their different motivations. Those told they were great might have been after the thrills. Those told they had crummy selfesteem might have wanted to review the literature for themselves, and perhaps dump all over it. But the latter did not particularly flee from an unpleasant truth. By contrast, over half of the authoritarians given the same bad news “ran away, ran away.” So much for being completely willing to deal with I next wondered if Highs would directly tell me they flat out did not want to receive bad news about themselves. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1858

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the vault’s claim that authoritarianism predicts prejudice with a mechanism: authoritarians avoid threatening self-knowledge rather than weigh evidence.
• DEFINE: Operationalizes defensive avoidance in concrete experimental terms, linking the construct to measurable behavior.