Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers

by John W. Dean

We know this because of a trail-blazing researcher at the University of Western Kentucky, Sam McFarland, and his collaborator Sherman Adelson. In 1996 they produced one of the most remarkable discoveries in the history of the social sciences that you never heard about. They “pitted” eighteen different personality tests against one another to see which could best predict prejudice against Black people, women, and homosexual people. The personality measures were chosen because past studies indicated they could predict prejudice, however weakly. The results could not have been clearer: Only two of the scales in the studies climbed victoriously out of the pit: the Social Dominance Orientation Scale and the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale. The sixteen other tests could add barely a penny to what these two tests revealed together when it came to predicting prejudice. The results were quickly confirmed.23 Furthermore, the two tests could explain most of the prejudice against Black people, women, and homosexual people. These results verified one of the earliest discoveries in social psychology to a degree not previously seen, namely that prejudice results mainly from the personalities of the discriminators, not the behavior of the disliked group.