Talk:Bob Altemeyer

Untitled

This article includes criticisms phrased as statement of fact. They should be rewritten and set off with a criticism subhead.

Editor states that "Altemeyer seems to be unaware of that so his work has no current political relevance"

User:Jonjayray recently added a long section of criticism lifted from his own writings. I removed it and he immediately put it back, adding a bunch of so-called citations. I was carefully researching how to correctly and objectively remove this incorrect material when an anonymous user User 2.26.182.95 suddenly did remove it adding the rather harsh comment

Deleted JonJayRay's blatant editorialising. JJR, publish your original research in a paper and get someone else to cite it here. This isn't the place for your indignance.

IAC, these edits showed a lack of objectivity and my removal would have been based on Wikipedia:RELIABLE and Wikipedia:Copyright violations. My research, which I hope will not be necessary now, is shown below. This is just for the record.

about Adorno

There is nothing wrong citing T.W. Adorno although it is hard to see the relevance since his work preceded Altemeyer's by many years.

about John Ray

Several citations are lifted from John Ray's own writings; for example his own review at BOOK REVIEW by John Ray, Enemies of freedom: Understanding Right-wing authoritarianism By R. Altemeyer. Typical copyvios from that source (there are others) are,

After that, Altemeyer more or less gave up his original claim and engaged in a bit of historical revisionism.

So an alleged "Rightist" scale went from being non-political to being a measure of Leftism! If you took it at face-value, it showed Communists were Rightists!"

These statements are not supported by any objective third party source. According to his website, editor John J Ray is a former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party. Another quote from Ray on this website is

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism.

One begins to suspect carelessness.

about Woodly

Another source Ray used is fringe researcher Michael A. Woodley who publishes in Brain Size A blog about IQ, the brain & success. This blog contains this gem

One of the psychometric mysteries is why high IQ people tend to be liberal, even though a lot of liberal ideas are clearly nonsense.

So much for objective third party sources.

about McFarland

Another cited source is Authoritarianism in the Former Soviet Union by Sam G. McFarland, et al. But McFarland pretty much agrees with Altemeyer. Indeed, on page 3 we find this statement by the authors:

In these first studies we were able to develop balanced and internally consistent Russian-language Ethnocentrism and Authoritarianism scales, the latter largely as a translation of Altermeyer's (1988) 30-item Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale.

about Altemeyer

The criticism by Ray contains the statement:

Altemeyer seems to be unaware of that so his work has no current political relevance

If Ray has some source other than his own opinion for this statement, he does not cite it. Altemeyer himself was perfectly aware of this seeming paradox. On page 10 of [The Authoritarians] we find this paragraph:

In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives, so you can call them “right-wingers” both in my new-fangled psychological sense and in the usual political sense as well. But someone who lived in a country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist Party would also be one of my psychological right-wing authoritarians even though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political views. Instead he’s someone who readily submits to the established authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly conventional. It’s an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics. Rightwing authoritarianism is a personality trait, like being characteristically bashful or happy or grumpy or dopey.

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Bob Altemeyer/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

This article links to criticism of Robert Altemeyer's work, by Harvard University and Jon Jay Ray, on an equal basis. Moreover, the fact that the link to Jon Jay Ray's criticism is presented first may even lead some to believe that his judgment is to be preferred. It seems likely that most people are familiar with the stature and reputation of Harvard University but have never [before reading this article] heard of Jon Jay Ray. It therefore seems to be unfair to present the views of Jon Jay Ray without presenting a link to his web site, so that his opinions may be considered within the context of his other writings, and his stature and reputation within the academic community may be evaluated. Doing otherwise seems to amount to including unsourced commentary. Snug 11:40, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Substituted at 21:36, 26 June 2016 (UTC)