Can Authoritarianism Lead to Greater Liking of Out-Groups? The Intriguing Case of Singapore

Authoritarianism refers to the individual’s willingness to submit to authorities that are perceived as established and legitimate and to conform to social norms and traditions endorsed by society at large, as well as a general aggressiveness toward groups that deviate from the modal norm (Altemeyer, 1981). Since the publication of The Authoritarian Personality, the seminal work by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950), numerous empirical studies have consistently demonstrated the seemingly inextricable link between authoritarianism and negative attitudes about out-groups (for a meta-analysis, see Sibley & Duckitt, 2008). Indeed, in the authoritarian mind, minorities are readily perceived as “bad, disruptive, immoral, and deviant” people who do not fit into society (Duckitt, 2001, p. 85). However, what if authoritarians live in a society in which a very strong and established authority most explicitly endorses diversity and multiculturalism, thereby enforcing a social norm that is in direct opposition to authoritarians’ “natural” negative attitudes toward minorities? Over the past 50 years, the Singaporean government (run by the People’s Action Party) has been highly committed to regulating its ethnically diverse society and promoting multiculturalism through a variety of ingenious yet most consequential measures. A prime example is the imposition of strict ethnic quotas in public residential estates (i.e., Housing and Development Board flats, which house more than 80% of the population): The ethnic distribution of residents (95% of whom are owners) in every apartment block is required to reflect the ethnic distribution in the nation to safeguard against the formation of residential enclaves and stereotypes (for a more elaborate account of the Singaporean government’s measures to endorse diversity and multicultural interaction, see Noor & Leong, 2013). The potential influence of such institutionalized intergroup ideology on individuals’ attitudes is generally neglected in psychological research (Guimond, de la Sablonnière, & Nugier, 2014). We hypothesized that in the Singaporean context, the very strong social norm enforced by the authority may curb or even reverse the relationship between authoritarianism and negative attitudes about out-groups that is consistently observed in all other countries. Demonstrating that authoritarianism can be positively related to outgroup-friendly attitudes would be unique; to the best of our knowledge, no such finding has ever been reported or even considered as a possibility. As an underlying mechanism for this reversed relationship, we propose a mediating role for citizens’ perception of the government’s unambiguous position toward multiculturalism. We analyzed data from 249 Singaporean students (the target sample; mean age = 21.63 years, SD = 1.50; 32.5% male) and 245 Belgian students (the comparison group; mean age = 19.16 years, SD = 2.50; 37.5% male). 1 These students anonymously completed a questionnaire; 16 Singaporean respondents and 26 Belgian respondents were excluded from the analyses because they were not citizens belonging to the ethnic majority group. To obtain a broad measure of authoritarianism, we used nine traditional right-wing authoritarianism items2 (Altemeyer, 1981; 7-point Likert scales) as well as nine items from the Refined Schwartz Value survey (Schwartz et al., 2012; 6-point Likert scales) that tap into the core values of authoritarianism (see Altemeyer, 1998): conformity (conformity to rules: three items; interpersonal conformity: three items) and tradition (three items). We combined 605271 PSSXXX10.1177/0956797615605271Roets et al.Authoritarianism and Attitudes About Out-Groups in Singapore research-article2015