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Transcript

Robert Altemyer, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba and is the world’s leading authority on The Authoritarian Personality, a topic he has researched and written on extensively. In fact, he has made a book on this topic available for free . He describes himself as follows: “Who am I? I’m a nearly retired psychology professor in Canada who has spent most of his life studying authoritarianism. I got into this field by being lazy. When I took the exams for getting a Ph.D. at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1965, I failed a question about a famous early effort to understand the authoritarian personality. I had to write a paper to prove I could learn at least something about this research, which had gotten itself into a huge hairy mess by then. However, I got caught up in the tangle too. Thus I didn’t start studying authoritarianism because I am a left-winger (I think I’m a moderate on most issues) or because I secretly hated my father. I got into it because it presented a long series of puzzles to be solved, and I love a good mystery.”

(Psychology podcast by David Van Nuys, Ph.D.)