부당한 권위를 따르기 위한 우파권위주의자의 동기화된 추론

초록

In the past decade, democratic backsliding by democratically elected leaders has become increasingly prevalent worldwide, drawing renewed attention to right-wing authoritarianism (RWA; Altemeyer, 1996). To examine whether and how high-RWA individuals support authorities they themselves judge to be unjust, we conducted a survey experiment with 267 Korean adults. Participants first read a scenario and indicated what they believed to be an appropriate sentence for the perpetrator. They were then randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the experimental condition, but not in the control condition, participants received additional information that the authority figure had imposed an unduly lenient sanction on the perpetrator. We predicted that high-RWA individuals would justify the authority’s unjust decision, reflected in higher victim blaming. Results showed that high-RWA individuals did not automatically accept unjust authority. Their victim blaming, however, increased after they reviewed neutral case information, indicating that they were motivated to interpret the information in ways more favorable to the authority. These results imply that high-RWAs tend to support unjust authority even when they themselves perceive it as unjust.

키워드