Ms. Talaifar, Mr. Koch, since the concept of the authoritarian personality was introduced by the sociologist Theodor W. Adorno in 1950, there has been a lot of research into it. What is different about your research?
Psychological research can now study our everyday behavior in much more detail, especially thanks to smartphones that we always have with us. In our study, around 670 participants installed our research app, which collected over 280 million data points over several months. We analyzed these using machine learning for behavioral patterns to predict the authoritarian tendencies among the participants as measured by a questionnaire.
There were several reasons for our focus on this topic: Authoritarianism has been becoming more popular in the US, Germany and other countries for years, and that worries us. We were interested in: What do people with authoritarian tendencies do in everyday life, do they behave differently than less authoritarian people?
What did you find out?
Behaviors recorded with smartphones – such as app use or music listening behavior – significantly predicted authoritarian tendencies, even twice as well as demographic characteristics such as education. On average, participants with stronger authoritarian tendencies used Facebook more frequently. They also listened to music on their smartphones less often, and when they did, it was often European pop music. Analysis of their text input also revealed that, on average, they used more emotional language, both in the positive and negative directions.
How do you interpret these findings?
First of all, we find it fascinating that people with authoritarian tendencies are really different behaved than others. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that these are purely statistical relationships. Although certain behavioral patterns occur more frequently on average among people with stronger authoritarian tendencies, it cannot be deduced from this that a single person is authoritarian if they use Facebook, for example.
Lots of Facebook, little music, highly emotional language – what does that have to do with authoritarian tendencies?
We can only assume that at the moment. On Facebook it may be a selection effect. People with authoritarian leanings may be more likely to encounter disinformation and propaganda from authoritarian actors, which could further reinforce their tendencies. When people with authoritarian tendencies listen to music, they are apparently more likely to turn to something familiar and culturally similar that gives them security. The high emotionality, both positive and negative, expands the existing state of research.
Sanaz Talaifar is a psychologist and assistant professor at Imperial College London.
Timo Koch is a psychologist and researches at the University of St. Gallen.
source
Koch, T. et al. (2025). The digital authoritarian: Smartphones reveal the everyday behavioral patterns of individuals with authoritarian tendencies. PsyArXiv. DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/6mk2a_v2
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