Education correlates weakly with authoritarianism and does not confound its effects

Evidence

This result reveals a larger self-selection bias for education than occurs in my parent studies. The strong correlation with education means some RWA Scale findings may really be due to low education, not authoritarianism per se. There is a statistical way, called a “partial correlation,” to set aside the effects of education and then see how well authoritarianism correlates with things by itself. Partialling out the effects of education in this study reduces the correlation between RWA scores and sentences from . to .43. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3903

University students differ little among themselves in educational attainment, so there is no risk that findings obtained with students have been confounded by years of schooling. On the other hand, many studies of nonstudent samples have shown that authoritarians tend to be less educated. But the RWA-education relationships have almost always ranged between . and .30. Controlling for this connection reduces RWA-criterion coefficients very little. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 554

Categorization

• XREF: Directly qualifies the vault’s Whitehead & Perry and Christian-nationalism claims that treat authoritarianism itself as the driver — worth checking whether those studies partial out education.
• QUESTION: Does the 0.43 residual correlation after partialling education still hold up, and how does this bear on Cooper’s class-based account?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3903; Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 554