Authoritarianism as a Social Attitude: Field Experiment in the Norwegian Military

• In Event: New Frontiers in Experimental Design: Conjoint, Field Experiments, and Beyond

Abstract

The recent popularity of strongman rule even in democratic societies raises questions about the origins of authoritarian attitudes among ordinary citizens. Scholarly research often points to early socialization as the roots of authoritarianism. In this view, authoritarianism is a deeply held attitude that is difficult to change. Here, we propose an alternative perspective. As a hyper-social species, human beings are malleable to social influence and individuals often adapt the views of those around them. As most other attitudes, we argue that to a substantial degree authoritarian attitudes can be understood as social attitudes. As a social norm, they reflect a person's perception of what is adequate in a given social setting. Therefore, how authoritarian a person describes herself depends on how authoritarian that person perceives her peers. We test this proposition in a pre-registered field experiment in the Norwegian Armed Forces. In identifying the causal effect of peers on authoritarian attitudes, the experimental setting allows us to rule out self-selection into social circles as a confounder that often plagues the study of social influence. Specifically, we randomly assign soldiers to different dorm rooms for the period of eight weeks during bootcamp. As a consequence, some soldiers are randomly assigned to peers with high or low levels of authoritarian attitudes which we measured before and after bootcamp. We find that random assignment to room mates with higher levels of authoritarian orientations make soldiers more authoritarian. The effect size is eight percent of a standard deviation which corresponds to 76 percent of the gender difference of authoritarianism in our sample.

Authors

• Alexander Wuttke, LMU

• Andreas Kotsadam, The Frisch Centre

• Sirianne Dahlum, University of Oslo