Right-wing authoritarians are defensively self-deceiving yet score low on social desirability scales

Evidence

The usual approach has been to develop surveys that assess people’s tendencies to say “goody-goody” things about themselves and deny “nasty-nasties.” The 33-item Marlowe- Crowne scale (Crowne & Marlowe, 1964) comes to mind, and Paulhus (e.g., Paulhus & Reid, 1991) has developed 20-item measures of Impression Management, Self-Deceptive Enhancement, and Denial. However, High RWAs, who ought to rack up big numbers on measures of social desirability because of their conventionalism, and who we know from experiments are highly defensive and reluctant to admit bad news about themselves to themselves have never scored highly on such instruments. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1046

Categorization

• QUESTION: A genuine puzzle: if high RWAs are demonstrably defensive in experiments, why do the self-report social desirability instruments fail to catch them? Points to a measurement blind spot worth chasing.
• XREF: Connects to broader critiques of self-report personality scales and response bias literature in psychological measurement. — connects to: Right-wing authoritarians resist learning they are prejudiced. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 916