Towards New Understandings of Authoritarian Personality Traits in Authoritarian Regimes

The final speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Maxim Alyukov, whose focus is on the political psychology of authoritarian environments. He begins by noting the gaps in the available literature; there is a pressing need to further examine the psychologies of such authoritarian environments. An authoritarian environment is defined here as lacking political alternatives; featuring information manipulation; and involving overt or covert forms of violence as part of its political processes.

Individual authoritarian personalities are commonly seen as involving a range of key personality traits: these involve right-wing authoritarian views, orientation towards social dominance, conservatism, low openness to new ideas, etc. But in authoritarian environments, the lack of political alternatives and feeling of threat generated by regime violence can lead to very different patterns; openness is irrelevant, for instance, as dissent is risky here.

Similarly, personal political and cognitive heuristics, which normally help people process information, will work differently too: in an ideologically driven authoritarian regime, for instance, ideological alignment is useless as an information heuristic; and if state media cannot be trusted, then media reputation heuristics are not relevant either. Personal experience, personal political views, and recommendations from others become more important here.

This means that we need new frameworks for understanding authoritarian behaviours in such authoritarian environments. There may be more focus on group authoritarianism instead of individual authoritarian traits, for instance, and greater attention to situated knowledge in information heuristics.