Head-scratcher: Anti-authoritarian Programs Produce... Authoritarianism?

DEI content may not only increase the hostile attribution bias but converges with outcomes produced by authoritarian traits themselves. NCRI

A recent study published under the auspices of the Rutgers University Social Perception Lab evaluates equity, diversity and inclusivity programs (EDI or DEI).  The study found that decent people, "as a result of these programs, have experienced undue duress, social ostracization, or even termination of employment."

The research team that compiled the data is not asking whether or not DEI programs produce a hostile attribution bias.  They are stating the fact that such programs can and often times do produce and increase a hostile attribution bias.

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INSTRUCTING ANIMOSITY
HOW DEI PEDAGOGY PRODUCES THE HOSTILE ATTRIBUTION BIAS
NCRI | Rutgers University Social Perception Lab

https://www.openread.academy/en/paper/reading?corpusId=513675482

Equity Extremists: How Anti-Oppressive Narratives Converge with Authoritarian Intolerance (p.13)

While DEI initiatives typically affirm the laudable goals of combating bias and promoting inclusivity, an emerging body of research warns that these interventions may foster authoritarian mindsets, particularly when anti-oppressive narratives exist within an ideological and vindictive monoculture. Scholars like Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker have cautioned that extreme egalitarian rhetoric, especially when framed as moral imperatives, can encourage coercive control, intolerance, and punitive attitudes—practices and mental habits that echo the psychological dynamics of historical authoritarian movements.  The push toward absolute equity can undermine pluralism and engender a (potentially violent) aspiration of ideological purity.  We therefore sought to assess whether outcomes from our experiments such as increased hostility attribution or willingness to punish, might converge with authoritarian traits and tendencies.  By exposing people to politicized DEI content and measuring participants’ responses, we also assessed whether these narratives could go beyond the heightening of racial tensions described earlier in this report, to fuel coercive mindsets that resemble the very authoritarianism that anti-oppressive training purports to combat.

In our Rutgers sample, we found that similar to DEI interventions, participants’ levels of left wing authoritarianism (LWA) predicted increased willingness to punish and higher hostile attributions.  The LWA scale measures tendencies toward coercive control, anti-hierarchical aggression, and endorsement of radical egalitarianism.  These results suggest that DEI content may not only increase the hostile attribution bias but converges with outcomes produced by authoritarian traits themselves.  If authoritarianism increases the hostility and punitiveness introduced through DEI anti-oppressive pedagogy, then it may further create a culture of fear and rigidity instead of constructive change.

Conclusion: A Self Reinforcement Process Model for Anti-Oppressive DEI Interventions. (p.14)

The evidence presented in these studies reveals that while purporting to combat bias, some anti-oppressive DEI narratives can engender a hostile attribution bias and heighten racial suspicion, prejudicial attitudes, authoritarian policing, and support for punitive behaviors in the absence of evidence for a transgression deserving punishment.  Although not addressed in the studies reported herein, it is also possible that these factors are mutually reinforcing and spread through social contagion.  Our findings raise this possibility which we offer here in the form of a post-hoc process model (to be investigated in future studies):

1. Anti-Oppressive Intervention: DEI training rooted in anti-oppressive rhetoric introduces narratives that lead people to assume that certain groups are inherent oppressors and others as inherent victims.
2. Increased Racial Suspicion: Exposure leads to hostile attribution bias, causing participants to see discrimination when there is no evidence that discrimination has occurred, driving racial prejudice, intergroup hostility, suspicion and division.
3. Authoritarian Policing: This heightened suspicion triggers authoritarian policing tendencies, leading people to endorse surveillance and purity testing, strict social controls, and escalating responses from corrective to coercive.
4. Punitive Retribution: Participants show greater support for extreme punitive measures against perceived oppressors as well as those seen as ideologically impure.
5. Calls for More Interventions: The heightened punitive atmosphere feeds back into demands for more anti-oppressive DEI training, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of suspicion and intolerance.

Taken in its entirety, this research demonstrates a pressing need for data-driven pressure testing of DEI interventions to examine potential harms.  In spite of the serious consequences we outline above, DEI offerings have no independent, scientific review board for objective evaluation and no standards of transparency for the materials themselves.  Offerings at major corporations for example, were nearly impossible to collect because these materials are not publicly available, and thus the full implications and spread of potentially harmful content is currently impossible to examine.

This research raises critical questions about how many individuals, as a result of these programs, have experienced undue duress, social ostracization, or even termination of employment.  The hostile attribution bias revealed in NCRI’s study appears readily transmissible by the DEI pedagogy above, much of which is inserted into recommended or mandatory readings and trainings that are widely adopted at present.  This suggests the potential for a far broader scope of harm than previously considered, underscoring the urgency of rigorous evaluation of anti-oppressive, DEI interventions to identify unintended and damaging consequences, and, ultimately, to prevent them.

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The authors of the NCRI-Rutgers study conclude their findings by noting that the study is not meant to evaluate "the efficacy of an entire industry."  That restrained claim is necessary these days to avoid having the results of a study (that exposes the serious deficiencies of a very lucrative industry) disregarded in its entirety because a part of a study may depend on emerging information that requires additional analysis.  By limiting their claims to results that expose the problems with "training programs that subscribe to anti-oppressive frames," the authors may have unintentionally affirmed the dangerous nature of the programs exposed by the study.

Virus mentis

A perilous shift toward a form of fascism, a fascism of the left, has metastasized into a nihilism that is consuming innocence and destroying lives.

A dictatorship of relativism is being constituted that recognizes nothing as absolute and which only leaves the “I” and its whims as the ultimate measure. George Cardinal Pell

Remedy

The disciple of Jesus Christ must embody truth, loving kindness, forgiveness and resilience, and be willing to walk with those wounded by cruel ideologies.  Only Jesus can restore to life those in most need of His mercy.  Bring the recovering soul to Jesus Present in the Mass, in the communion of the People of God.

For Consideration

• https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2022/10/24/transsexual-relativism/