What is the impact of dictatorships on postdictatorial civil societies? Bottom-up theories suggest that totalitarian dictatorships destroy civil society while authoritarian ones allow for its development. Top-down theories of civil society suggest that totalitarianism can create civil societies while authoritarianism is unlikely to. This article argues that both these perspectives suffer from a...

Two studies examined correlates of belief in a Jewish conspiracy theory among Malays in Malaysia, a culture in which state-directed conspiracism as a means of dealing with perceived external and internal threats is widespread. In Study 1, 368 participants from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, completed a novel measure of belief in a Jewish conspiracy theory, along with measures of general conspiracist i...

The present study investigated the relationship between cognitive development and political and religious ideology, and whether there are gender differences in formal thinking which may be related to right-wing authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism. The conceptual and empirical literature suggests that many aspects of cognition which play a role in the formation of conservative politica...

Are the sources of ethnocentrism rather more sociological than psychological in nature? In order to answer this question, we review a classic debate between sociologists and psychologists. From this debate we distil two implicit theoretical models which are transposed into explicit and competitive models. A number of lacunas are filled with recent theoretical contributions and, subsequently, th...

The significance of high or low right-wing authoritarianism on rape myth acceptance in female college students was investigated. One hundred and fifty-eight college undergraduates answered an anonymous questionnaire containing a modified version of Altemeyer’s (1996) Right-Wing Authoritarian Scale (RWA) and Burt’s (1980) Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (RMA) and related subscales: acceptance of inte...

Nurse Ratched or 'Big Nurse' in Ken Kesey's counter-culture novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of popular culture's most arresting and memorable images of the nurse. She is, however, deemed to be remarkable primarily for her malice and authoritarianism. This paper argues that such a purely realist reading fails to fully appreciate the significance of the character of Nurse Ratched. A ...

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