Personality Test Predicts a Trump Supporter
We at Persona Labs are in the business of predicting personality, using Psychometrics to study and determine different attributes of personality.
It can be very powerful when this science is put to work. Now there’s a personality test that predicts whether you would follow Donald Trump. Off a cliff.
New research shows that Donald Trump’s supporters have a shared type of personality. A poll gave Republicans four questions about child-rearing, asking them which of two traits were more important in children:
- independence or respect for their elders
- curiosity or good manners
- self-reliance or obedience
- being considerate or well behaved
Those who picked the second trait in each set are disposed to favor what experts call “authoritarianism.” The questions about child-rearing were in fact predictive of authoritarian political attitudes.
Psychologists and social scientists’ research on authoritarianism aims to understand how so many people could support repressive, homicidal dictatorships in Europe and elsewhere in the past. For Authoritarians things are black and white. They obey. They seek unity not difference. They readily restrict the rights of anyone whose culture or lifestyle deviates from their own.
Trump’s supporters share this trait. Likely Republican primary voters prefer Trump regardless of their age or sex, income and level of education. Regular churchgoers and evangelicals were no more or less likely to support Trump, either.
But those with authoritarian views on raising children — those who chose the second option in each of the four questions above — have nearly 50–50 odds of supporting Trump. Those who chose the first option on all four questions were just 1 in 6.
That Trump’s support is based partly on personality rather than policy helps explain why his supporters are so enthusiastic, even abiut his widely mocked ideas. “This is in people’s guts, not their brains,” said Marc Hetherington, a political scientist and an expert on authoritarianism at Vanderbilt University. “This is much more primal.”
Authoritarians tend to be set in their ways with an aversion to new kinds of experiences. Trump’s got ’em locked up.
To be determined: what percentage of the population shares this personality? Could Trump use this “Authoritarian Diagnostic” to identify and target likely adherents? Are there enough to decide the election?
It might be horrifyingly effective.”I’m not saying they’re fascists,” Hetherington, said of Trump’s supporters, “but authoritarians obey*
