Young Authoritarians? Trends and Individual Differences in Preschoolers' Perceptions of Adult Authority

Although traditional stage theories (e.g., Piaget, 1965) postulate that preschool age children are guided entirely by punishment avoidance and absolute deference to authority, more recent research suggests that their concepts of adult authority are complex and vary based on social cognitive domain and the content of the commands (e.g., Tisak, 1986). Also, although past studies have shown that the majority of children will reject adult authority in certain contexts, much individual variation between children has been observed (e.g., Laupa, 1994). The current study expanded upon past research by exposing children to multiple typical and atypical commands across domains, while also testing for individual differences based on two forms of parental authoritarianism. Results showed that children as young as four reject commands that go against established moral or conventional norms, and sometimes reject commands in the personal domain. This pattern grew stronger with age. High right-wing authoritarianism was a significant predictor of more authoritarian parenting style, and also predicted lower child support for authority in typical conventional scenarios. Authority concepts in preschoolers 3 Young Authoritarians? Trends and Individual Differences in Preschoolers’ Perceptions of Adult Authority The president of the United States has seemingly unchecked control over the country’s nuclear arsenal, so much so that President Nixon once bragged that he could bring about the death of millions with a single phone call (Graff, 2017). If this call were to be made, the responsibility would fall on nuclear key operators to unquestioningly carry out said orders. This plan, designed as a deterrent to enemy powers during the Cold War (Graff, 2017), left one major question: what happens if the order is given by a president who is not mentally stable or sane? This was the question that Harold Herring asked in 1973, during his training to be a nuclear key operator, resulting in his unceremonious release from duty (Rosenwald, 2017). In Herrings eyes, if the order from the president were unjust or insane, it would no longer be a legitimate order, and it would be his responsibility to disobey. The government disagreed. In order to be a key operator, Herring needed to provide absolute obedience, without the possibility of rebellion. But how many people would actually provide such unquestioning obedience? The answer, it seems, is many. Power, especially when made salient through formalized structures, as in the military, can be quite persuasive, and real-life incidences of crimes of obedience abound. For example, in March of 1968, Lt. William Calley ordered his platoon members to slaughter hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, and they obeyed. When brought to trial, Calley’s main defense was that he himself had been following orders from a superior officer (Lindsay, 2012). Perhaps even more infamous are the Nuremberg Trials in the wake of World War II, in which prominent Nazi leaders defended their actions by claiming that they were just following orders (King, 2002). Authority concepts in preschoolers 4 Empirical evidence concerning the phenomenon of obedience comes from Stanley Milgram’s (1963) famous experiments, in which participants, told to act as “teachers,” delivered increasingly powerful – if simulated – shocks to a confederate “learner” in response to an experimenter’s commands. Although Milgram went into the study with the goal of comparing American and German participants in order to isolate some quirk of the German psyche that would allow otherwise normal soldiers to follow the horrific directives of the Nazi leadership, what he found instead was that his American participants were willing to follow orders given by an authority even as they strayed increasingly from the realm of normal human behavior. Although there are situations in which individuals may obey an authority figure purely out of fear of the adverse consequences of rebellion, obedience is often at least partially voluntary. When people choose to obey of their own accord, as in the Milgram paradigm, it is theorized that they must be driven by a sense of legitimacy (French & Raven, 1959). When an authority is viewed as legitimate, subordinates have a self-driven feeling of obligation to obey and defer (French & Raven, 1959). Although the sources of legitimacy may vary, there is evidence that people judge legitimacy using both utilitarian, outcomebased, and social, relationship-based criteria (Tyler, 1997). That is, subordinates may obey an authority because the authority knows best and obedience will produce the best outcome, or because they respect and admire the authority and want to please him or her. Some studies distinguish between obligation to obey (OTO) and perceived legitimacy when studying authority (e.g., Darling, Cumsille, & Martínez, 2008), operationalizing legitimacy as a belief in authority’s right to command, while OTO is the belief that a subordinate should or must follow said command. Others, however, have used them Authority concepts in preschoolers 5 interchangeably (e.g., Tyler, 1997). Because OTO is a natural result of perceived legitimacy, it is unsurprising that they are highly related constructs, and legitimacy is a strong predictor of OTO (Darling et al., 2008). Moreover, because perceived legitimacy concerns only the perception of an authority, whereas OTO taps subordinates’ own relationship to said authority, they are often used concurrently to measure attitudes toward authority (e.g., Darling et al., 2008; Smetana, Wong, Ball, & Yau, 2014). The clear OTO felt by Milgram’s (1963) participants, then, also implies a high degree of perceived legitimacy in regard to the experimenter’s authority. Third-party observers who have not directly experienced such a scenario, however, might be expected to be critical of the teacher’s willingness to obey violent orders due to the actor-observer effect, in which people tend to attribute others’ actions more to stable internal traits, and their own actions to external influences (Jones & Nisbett, 1971; Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, & Marecek, 1973). Consistent with this theory, Drout and Vander (1993) found that when participants who watched Milgram’s filmed scenarios were asked to determine who would be responsible if the learner died from the electric shocks, they split the responsibility for the hypothetical death fairly equally between the experimenter and teacher/participant, determining that both were equally guilty. However, even these objective, uninvolved observers attributed less responsibility to the teacher when they were obeying an authority than they did when asked to imagine the teacher acting independently. In addition, those who only read about the scenarios without watching the film tended to rate the experimenter (authority figure) as significantly more responsible (Drout & Vander, 1993). Additionally, other studies have found that, even after watching the film, participants on average assign more responsibility to the experimenter (Blass, 1995). Even in the face of actor-observer bias, third parties view the Authority concepts in preschoolers 6 commands of an authority as a strong mitigating factor in a subordinate’s guilt, making the subordinate less than fully responsible for his or her own actions. This mitigation likely indicates that in the participants’ eyes the experimenter’s commands were legitimate, and that the teacher did have an obligation to obey, resulting in a lack of personal responsibility on the teacher’s part – he was “just following orders. ” In a similar pattern, Hamilton (1978) found that in a jury simulation of a trial for a crime of obedience in war, participants assigned more overall blame to the superior, even when many chose to convict the subordinate. This indicates that his power was legitimate. However, the authority’s status seemed to affect his perceived legitimacy, as those who were told the orders came from a military captain assigned less relative blame to the subordinate than did those who were told the orders came from a lower-status sergeant (Hamilton, 1978). Overall, however, it does appear that even third-party observers are sensitive to the strong influence of a legitimate authority on a subordinate’s behavior, even when that behavior breaches the bounds of socially acceptable and moral behavior. Authority Legitimacy in Children The question of legitimacy has also been of great interest in a different context – that of child development. From as early as 17 months of age, children are highly attuned to social dominance. For example, they expect established power dynamics between two puppets to remain consistent and to dictate resource distributions, such that “dominant” puppet receive a greater share of a desirable reward than does its submissive counterpart (Enright, Gweon, & Sommerville, 2017). Logically, an attunement to dominance and authority seems useful in young children, as success during the first decade or two of life is Authority concepts in preschoolers 7 largely dependent on successful interactions with authorities in the form of parents and later teachers. The majority of research on legitimacy and family dynamics has focused on adolescence, perhaps because the perceived legitimacy of parents as authorities tends to enter into a steady decline during these years (Darling et al., 2008). This decrease in legitimacy may lead adolescents to lose their internally-driven feelings of obligation to share personal information with their parents and to obey their commands (Darling et al., 2008; Smetana, Metzger, Gettman, & Campione-Barr, 2006), and has been linked to delinquent behavior (Trinkner, Cohn, Rebellon, & Gundy, 2012), making it an obvious candidate for study. However, far less is known about perceptions of legitimacy at the earlier end of childhood, when children may be less capable of functioning independently or distancing themselve