The white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend were not ashamed when they shouted, “Jews will not replace us.” They were not ashamed to wear Nazi symbols, to carry torches, to harass and beat counterprotesters. They wanted their beliefs on display.

It’s easy to treat people like them as straw men: one-dimensional, backward beings fueled by hatred and ignorance. But if we want to prevent the spread of extremist, supremacist views, we need to understand how these views form and why they stick in the minds of some people.

Recently, psychologists Patrick Forscher and Nour Kteily recruited members of the alt-right (a.k.a. the “alternative right,” the catchall political identity of white nationalists) to participate in a study to build the first psychological profile of their movement. The results, which were released on August 9, are just in working paper form, and have yet to be peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal.

That said, the study uses well-established psychological measures and is clear about its limitations. (And all the researchers’ raw data and materials have been posted online for others to review.)

So while it is a preliminary assessment, it validates some common perceptions of the alt-right with data. It helps us understand this group not just as straw men but as people with knowable motivations.

A lot of the findings align with what we intuit about the alt-right: This group is supportive of social hierarchies that favor whites at the top. It’s distrustful of mainstream media and strongly opposed to Black Lives Matter. Respondents were highly supportive of statements like, “There are good reasons to have organization that look out for the interests of white people.” And when they look at other groups — like black Americans, Muslims, feminists, and journalists — they’re willing to admit they see these people as “less evolved.”

But it’s the degree to which the alt-righters differed from the comparison sample that’s most striking — especially when it came to measures of dehumanization, support for collective white action, and admitting to harassing others online. That surprised even Forscher, the lead author and a professor at the University of Arkansas, who typically doesn’t find such large group difference in his work.

There was a time when psychologists feared that “social desirability bias” — people unwilling to admit they’re prejudiced, for fear of being shamed — would prevent people from answering such questions about prejudice truthfully. But this survey shows people will readily admit to believing all sorts of vile things. And researchers don’t need to use implicit or subliminal measures to suss it all out.

How Forscher and Kteily surveyed the alt-right

Forscher and Kteily got a sample of 447 self-identified alt-righters in an online survey on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (an online marketplace for gathering study participants and people for quick paid tasks) and led them through a barrage of psychological survey questions. They then compared the alt-righters to an online sample of 382 non-alt-righters. (See the demographic breakdown of the samples here.)

A note on some limitations: This survey was not designed to be representative of the entire “alt-right” movement or to generalize to other right-wing-leaning groups. It’s a convenience sample of alt-righters on the internet who were willing to take a survey for a small cash reward.

Even so, it’s instructive. The people who answered this survey are people who stood up and identified as alt-right, similar to the marchers in Charlottesville who put themselves out there in the public eye. Even if this survey only represents a small portion of the people who adhere to this ideology, it’s useful for understanding exactly how they are distinct as a group and what’s behind their divisive views.

Here are some of the biggest differences between the alt-right and control group the researchers found.

The alt-right has high support for groups that support and work for the benefit of white people

This is — unsurprisingly — the largest difference Forscher and Kteily found in the survey. They asked participants how much they agreed with the following statement: “I think there are good reasons to have organizations that look out for the interests of whites.”

And the differences between the alt-right and the control sample were about as big as you could possibly find on such a survey. The average difference was 2.4 points on a 1-to-7 scale. That’s nearly a full 1.5 standard deviations. “In my work, I’ve never seen a difference that big,” Forscher says.

Here’s what those distribution look like plotted. The green on the right represents the answers of the alt-right. The red on the left represents the comparison group. They’re mirror images.



The alt-right wants and supports organizations that look out for the rights and well-being of white people.
Historically, such groups have done so by striking fear in the hearts of immigrants, Jews, and minorities.

The alt-right is more willing to express prejudice toward black people

These survey questions ask respondents the degree to which they agree with statements like, “I avoid interactions with black people,” “My beliefs motivate me to express negative feelings about black people,” and, “I minimize my contact with black people.”

Again, these questions showed huge differences. Forscher explains it like this. When he runs these questions on samples of college students, he usually sees average scores around 2 (out of 9, meaning people largely don’t agree with these questions.) “In the alt-right samples, I’m seeing numbers around 3 or 4, relatively close to the midpoint. In all the samples I’ve worked with, I haven’t seen means at that level.”

In other words, members of the alt-right are unabashed in declaring their prejudices.

Alt-righters are willing to report their own aggressive behavior

The survey also asked participants to state how often they engaged in aggressive behaviors, like doxxing, the releasing of private information without a person’s permission. They also asked about how often respondents physically threatened another online, or made offensive statements just to get a rise out of people.

Here, too, the alt-righters were much more likely to admit to engaging in these behaviors.

“In the comparison sample, people basically never did those things, or reported [doing them],” Forscher says. But it wasn’t like the alt-righters were uniformly admitting to these behaviors.

“We found evidence that there’s a much more extreme group of [alt-right] people who are reporting harassing and being offensive intentionally,” he says. He calls them “supremacists.”

“But there’s a group of people who doesn’t do that that much, or not that much at all,” he says. Forscher and Kteily label this less extreme group “populists.” They’re less aggressive and dehumanizing overall, and more concerned with government corruption. But even these milder “populists” are as supportive of collective white action, and as opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement, at the supremacists.

Personality traits that frequently show up among alt-righters: authoritarianism and Machiavellianism

Alt-righters in the survey scored higher on social dominance orientation (the preference that society maintains social order), right-wing authoritarianism (a preference for strong rulers), and somewhat higher levels of the “dark triad” of personality traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism.)

Yawn the lefties are really scrambling to discredit the proud white man lately....you can practically smell their fear.

Prime Minister for Canyons wrote on Aug 16^th, 2017 at 12:28pm:


Not at all, the good Dr Mengele is responsible for numerous medical breakthroughs, not to mention he managed to thwart the lefties trying to capture him for their kangaroo courts.

He will forever be a hero and inspiration for white nationalists. 

It was all necessary to advance medical science. It's not like the patients were important anyway.

Untermensch.

Dr Mengele wrote on Aug 16^th, 2017 at 12:23pm:


smell the fear ......... you need a bulldozer to move it

you lost me at the word Psychologist..

Like all Progs mothra needs to keep beating others to lift herself up.
She'll believe any nonsense and post it...

Rather pathetic really, I have met more Thugs and Neanderthals in Unions and Labor than in any other party.

By a country mile.