Liberals Are as “Obedient” to Authority as Conservatives

It is a truism among academics that political
conservatives like to be ordered around. A new study, “Political
Conservatives’ Affinity for Obedience to Authority is Loyal, Not
Blind,” by published by researchers from the University of
Winnipeg in the journal Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin looks more deeply at how “obedience” works among
conservative and liberals. One confounding problem they discover
with prior research is that when researchers simply ask people
about how to respond to “authorities,” research subjects typically
infer “authority” means “conservative authority.”

To get around this problem, the researchers ask subjects sorted
along the typical two-axis political spectrum how they feel about
being obedient to specific authorities. Guess what? It turns out
that conservatives think that people should obey conservative
authorities, e.g., religious leaders and traditions, whereas
liberals think that people should obey liberal authorities, e.g.
civil rights leaders and environmentalists. Shocking, no?

The study concludes:

The findings suggest that obedience itself is not ideologically
divisive. Counter to the intuition that obedience itself is a mode
of conduct that conservatives preferentially champion, these data
suggest that liberals and conservatives have the same sentiments
about obedience. Conservatives only favor obedience when they
perceive the authority to be a conservative. Liberals also favor
obedience when the authority shares their ideology…

…the Occupy Wall Street movement justified ignoring police and
court orders on the grounds of justice, democracy, and protection
of individual rights. Conservative groups such as the U.S. Tea
Party and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood too have challenged
authorities. Both liberals and conservatives have the moral
psychology for flaunting the orders of authorities. Preference for
obedience is contextually bound; both liberals and conservatives
call for rebellion when the authorities are from the “other
team.”

By the way, some
earlier research finds that …

…libertarians appear to live in a world where traditional
moral concerns (e.g., altruism, respect for authority) are not
assigned much importance.

In addition, recent research suggests that
libertarians are smarter than both liberals and
conservatives.