Fear and self-righteousness together largely explain authoritarian aggression

Evidence

So anger, envy, pain, drunkenness, deindividuation, and diffusion—not to mention the greatest disinhibitor of all, safety from retaliation—may cause some acts of authoritarian aggression. But, by and large, fear puts the High RWA’s finger on the trigger, and self-righteousness releases the safety. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 546

If you are trying to predict the variance of one variable from another, then that is r-squared. If you are trying to explain variance shared (which I certainly was in my analysis of authoritarian aggression), then that is r. I have since learned from Ozer (1985) that this point was made earlier by Jensen (1980). The upshot is that my partialling out the “explanatory variables” of fear and selfrighteousness did not explain most of the RWA-aggression variance, as | claimed—just a lot of it. So I have made a less striking imitation of a puffer fish in this book and given a more subdued statement of the finding. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3963

By way of cross-validation, data on these measures were collected for me at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Houston in 1990. At both sites, Fear of a Dangerous World and Self-Righteousness explained RWA ties with Attitudes toward Homosexuals, Trials, Ethnocentrism, and Posse-Radicals as well as, or better than, they had in Manitoba. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 547

Categorization

• XREF: Gives the causal mechanism (fear + self-righteousness as trigger and disinhibitor) that corroborates the vault’s Christian-nationalism/authoritarianism claims about threat perception driving prejudice.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the r vs r-squared distinction in variance-explanation accounting.
• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 546; Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3963; Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 547