Right-wing authoritarians apply harsher judgments to low-status or out-group offenders for identical acts.

Evidence

We often do not realize our double standards because we compartmentalize our thinking, keeping matters that ought to be connected unconnected. Since High RWAs compartmentalize their thinking a lot, we can expect them to have lots of double standards. Thus we saw in Chapter 1 several criminalsentencing experiments that uncovered bad faith in right-wing authoritarians’ attitudes toward justice. Recall how High RWAs punished a prisoner who beat up another prisoner more than they punished a police chief who did the same thing. They punished a hippie who started a fight with an accountant more than the accountant if the roles were reversed. And they sentenced a gay activist who led an attack on opponents more than an anti-gay activist who did the same in a flip-flop situation. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1457

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Rehabilitative sentencing collapsed under attacks from left, right, and empirical research. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1910