Anti-democratic attitudes are highly contagious, new psychology study finds

A new study published in the American Journal of Political Science suggests that support for authoritarian leaders can spread socially among citizens in established democracies. By exposing individuals to peers with varying political views, researchers found evidence that people tend to adjust their own preference for strongman rule to match the attitudes of those around them. This social contagion effect provides insights into how anti-democratic sentiments can suddenly surge in modern societies.

The rising popularity of leaders who bypass democratic institutions has prompted experts to examine how everyday citizens form their political preferences. In recent years, many contemporary democracies have experienced a noticeable increase in public tolerance for authoritarian governance. This shift is often measured by observing citizens’ willingness to support a strong leader who ignores traditional democratic rules, such as regular elections or parliamentary oversight.

Previous explanations for this trend have heavily focused on broad structural conditions. Scholars frequently look to economic instability, rising inequality, or cultural differences as the primary drivers of anti-democratic attitudes. Another popular approach traces these views back to deeply ingrained personality traits or early childhood upbringing, suggesting that an authoritarian mindset is relatively stable and unchanging.

The authors of the current study noticed a gap in these traditional explanations. “Much of the existing research explains support for authoritarian rule by looking at factors such as economic insecurity, ideology, personality, or upbringing,” said Andreas Kotsadam (@kotsadam.bsky.social), a senior researcher at the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research and co-author of the study. He noted that the team wanted to know whether these preferences are also socially shaped and whether people become more or less accepting of strongman rule in response to the views of those around them.

To explore this idea, the research team designed an ambitious set of field and survey experiments. Their goal was to isolate the effect of social influence from other factors that might cause people with similar views to cluster together. In everyday life, individuals typically choose their own friends and communities, making it difficult to determine whether social groups share opinions because they influence each other or because they naturally gravitate toward like-minded people.

To overcome this hurdle, the researchers collaborated with the Norwegian Armed Forces to conduct a field experiment during an eight-week basic training camp. “The Norwegian military provided an unusually good opportunity to investigate this because recruits were randomly assigned to rooms and then lived and worked closely with their roommates during eight weeks of boot camp,” Kotsadam explained. This setting ensured that the composition of each room was left entirely to chance.

On the first day of military service, over 1,300 recruits completed a baseline survey before receiving their room assignments. The survey measured their initial support for authoritarian rule by asking how strongly they agreed or disagreed with a specific statement. The statement asked if it is important to have a strong leader who gets things done, even if that means bypassing parliament and elections.

Because room assignments were randomized, some recruits ended up living with peers who strongly favored authoritarian leadership. Others were placed with peers who strongly opposed it, and most were assigned to groups with moderate views. After eight weeks of sharing living quarters and cooperating on daily duties, the recruits completed a follow-up survey. This follow-up assessment allowed the researchers to track how individual attitudes shifted after prolonged exposure to a specific social climate.

The statistical models revealed that recruits adapted their personal attitudes to align with the average views of their roommates. Recruits randomly placed in rooms with higher baseline support for authoritarian rule became significantly more supportive of strongman leadership by the end of the camp. The effect was symmetric, meaning that those placed in rooms with highly anti-authoritarian peers became more opposed to strong leaders over the same timeframe.

To better understand how this attitude transmission works, the team conducted a second experiment embedded within the final survey given to the military recruits. They randomly divided the participants into two groups and provided them with different, yet factually accurate, summaries of their peers’ baseline survey responses. The goal was to see if simply learning about the prevailing opinions of others could directly trigger a change in personal political beliefs.

One group read a prompt stating that authoritarianism was somewhat popular among the recruits, noting that only a minority strongly disagreed with the statement. The other group received a message highlighting that authoritarianism was somewhat unpopular, emphasizing that more respondents disagreed with the statement than agreed with it. Following this informational prompt, the recruits were asked once again to state their own preferences regarding strong leaders.

The data indicated that reading about the popularity of authoritarianism caused individuals to shift their own reported attitudes in the corresponding direction. “I was struck that the influence was not confined to people who were already sympathetic to authoritarian rule,” Kotsadam said. “Even some participants who initially strongly rejected the idea of a leader bypassing parliament or elections became more accepting when they were told that such views were relatively common.”

Those who read that strong leaders were unpopular adjusted their views to become more anti-authoritarian, providing evidence that political preferences can be highly responsive to social cues. Kotsadam noted that information indicating that authoritarian views were unpopular moved attitudes in the opposite direction. He explained that social influence is not necessarily a one-way path toward authoritarianism.

To test whether these findings apply outside the military context, the scientists replicated the survey experiment using a representative sample of 1,500 general Norwegian citizens. The participants received similar prompts about the popularity of strongman leadership in a recent public opinion poll. A control group answered the questions without receiving any prior information about the views of others.

The findings in the general population closely mirrored the results from the military recruits. When ordinary citizens were informed that authoritarian views were widespread, they reported higher levels of personal support for strong leaders. The researchers then conducted a final replication using a massive cross-national sample of over 25,000 respondents from more than 29 different countries, which yielded the same pattern of social influence across diverse cultural contexts.

Kotsadam pointed out that one distinctive feature of the study is that it combines naturally occurring face-to-face social interaction with more controlled survey experiments. “The field experiment shows that attitudes can converge among people who actually live together, while the survey experiments indicate that simply learning what other people believe can itself alter stated preferences,” he told PsyPost. “More broadly, the findings suggest that the stability of democracy depends not only on what citizens privately believe, but also on what they think their fellow citizens believe.”

The authors suggest that attitudes toward democracy and authoritarian rule are not necessarily fixed private convictions. “They can be influenced by the surrounding social climate,” Kotsadam said. He added that this raises the possibility that social influence can amplify authoritarian movements, but it also provides some grounds for optimism. “Making support for democratic principles visible may help reinforce those principles,” he explained.

One potential misinterpretation of this study is the assumption that the exact psychological mechanism behind the attitude shift is fully understood. “The word ‘contagious’ should not be taken to mean that authoritarianism spreads automatically, or that having one authoritarian friend inevitably changes someone’s politics,” Kotsadam clarified. He emphasized that the researchers do not yet know how persistent the changes are or exactly whether they reflect conformity, persuasion, learning, or some combination of these processes.

The field experiment also involved young adults in the unusually intensive environment of military boot camp. This demographic group tends to be more impressionable and open to changing their worldviews than older populations. “It is also important that we did not find that boot camp itself made recruits more authoritarian on average,” Kotsadam noted, adding that the result concerns differences in the social environments recruits happened to encounter within boot camp.

Future research could expand on these findings by tracking individuals over longer periods. “An important next step is to determine how long these effects last and whether they influence consequential political behavior rather than only survey responses,” Kotsadam said. He added that the team would also like to identify the mechanisms more precisely.

This could include determining whether people conform to perceived social norms, infer that widely held views must be valid, or are persuaded through discussion. “Similar field experiments in workplaces, schools, communities, and online networks would help establish when social influence produces broader political cascades and when visible democratic norms can prevent them,” Kotsadam explained. Understanding the longevity of these attitude shifts would provide deeper insights into the broader stability of democratic societies worldwide.

The study, “Is support for authoritarian rule contagious? Evidence from field and survey experiments,” was authored by Sirianne Dahlum, Torbjørn Hanson, Åshild Johnsen, Andreas Kotsadam, and Alexander Wuttke.