Authoritarians over-attribute sincere belief to assigned viewpoints, especially viewpoints they agree with

Evidence

We might guess that Lows in turn would show some attribution error on the anti-homosexual essay. And they did, as you can see. Their mean in the “Assigned” condition was (5.00 — 3.24 =) 1.76 units away from the sensible “Can’t say” neutral point. The Lows who read the “Choice” version ended up (5.00 — 2.20 =) 2.80 units away from neutral. So 1.76 divided by 2.80 equals a 63% FAE. But High RWAs still made a bigger one: 2.75 divided by 2.84, a 97% FAE. What do all these numbers boil down to? Simply this: compared to Lows, High RWAs tended to ignore the fact that the essayist in the “Assigned” condition had to express the point of view assigned. They thought the essayist really meant it. They particularly thought the essayist was sincere when writing an anti-homosexual argument. This of course is what most High RWAs would write themselves. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1401

Categorization

• XREF: Direct causal mechanism for the vault’s claims linking authoritarianism to motivated reasoning and rigid belief — connects to the reader’s Cooper and Whitehead & Perry materials on authoritarianism predicting prejudice.