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RWA is no longer considered a personality trait, but a response to a view of the world as dangerous. The title should not include 'personality'. The 'right-wing' categorization is also problematic. It has been heavily criticized for ignoring left-wing authoritarianism. People with RWA symptoms are likely to support the dominant ideology of their society or group, regardless of whether this is right or left wing. Agnerf (talk) 08:40, 20 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The original poster is correct, at least on his first point. Bob Altemeyer, who coined the term "right-wing authoritarianism" explicitly defined it as a cluster of correlated attitudes, not as a personality trait (this is very clear in all of his books, published in the 1980s and 90s). Since then, Stanley Feldman and Karen Stenner (e.g. Stenner, 2005, The Authoritarian Dynamic) have viewed authoritarianism as a tendency to respond aversively to social threats. Neither of these approaches endorses the view that authoritarianism is a personality trait, which goes back to Adorno et al's original publication, The Authoritarian Personality. The issue is a little complicated by the fact that psychologists tend to use the term alternatively as personality, attitude, predisposition, or ideological tendency, depending on what they are talking about (and in some sense, it is all of these things). For THIS article, since we already have a separate page for authoritarian personality, and since we are using Altemeyer's "right-wing" terminology, I think we should go back to the title "right-wing authoritarianism," as it originally was. The term should be defined as Altemeyer defined it, with an additional explanation of how the term has been used differently by different scholars. But if we are going to call it a personality trait in this article, there is no sense in even having the article, and we should merge it with authoritarian personality. Jcbutler (talk) 19:15, 29 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
