Exposure to Authoritarian Values Leads to Lower Positive Impact, Higher Negative Impact, and Higher Meaning in Life

Release date: September 15, 2021

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256759

Commentary

Five studies tested the effects of exposure to authoritarian values on positive affect (PA), negative affect (NA), and meaning in life (MIL).

Study 1 (N = 1,053) showed that simply completing a measure of right-wing authoritarianism prior to assessing MIL resulted in higher MIL.

Study 2 (N = 1,904) showed that reading speeches by real-world authoritarians (e.g., Adolf Hitler) resulted in lower PA, higher NA, and higher MIL than control passages.

In Study 3 (N = 1,573) and Study 4 (N = 1,512), Americans read authoritarian, egalitarian, and controlling messages, rated their mood, MIL, and rated the passages. Both studies showed that egalitarian messages lead to better mood and authoritarian messages lead to higher MIL.

Study 5 (N = 148) replicated these results directly with Canadians.

Aggregating the five studies (N = 3,401), a moderate analysis showed that meaning of life, post-operation, was associated with more favorable ratings of authoritarian passages.

Furthermore, PA was a stronger predictor of MIL in the egalitarian and control conditions than in the authoritarian condition.

These results provide no evidence that negative mood spurred the boost in MIL, and provide an explanation for the impact and future directions.