Authoritarians would rather remain prejudiced than confront their own bias.

Evidence

To summarize, then, while authoritarians tend to insist they are quite honest with themselves, and ready to admit any failing, the evidence indicates the contrary. The self-esteem experiment showed that many Highs wanted to avoid dealing with personally distressing feedback. They did not even want to examine the evidence to see if they bad a reason to be worried. Instead one can easily imagine that, had they not been dehoaxed, many Highs would just have put their “low self-esteem” scores in a mental box and locked it tight. The “Suppose you’re prejudiced” studies go a step farther and show that many Highs have so much trouble dealing with unpleasant personal truths, they would keep from learning them. Highs usually think they are average in prejudice or even unprejudiced. But if they are wrong, many prefer to stay prejudiced rather than try to change. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1868

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that people claim self-honesty while systematically avoiding self-knowledge has wide explanatory reach beyond this experiment.
• ADDENDUM: Not a direct match to the three articles, but offers a psychological mechanism relevant to why moral panics and scapegoating persist.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1868