Authoritarians, the Next Generation: Values and Bullying Among Adolescent Children of Authoritarian Fathers

The author comments on an article by Altemeyer (2003). The implications of authoritarianism to social phenomena are extended to the values and bullying behaviors of adolescent children of authoritarian fathers. Eighty-two authoritarian and 252 nonauthoritarian Israeli fathers participated with their adolescent children. Authoritarian fathers expected their children to give high importance to power, tradition, and conformity values and lower-than-average importance to benevolence, universalism, and self-direction values. In comparison with offspring of nonauthoritarian fathers, offspring of authoritarian fathers gave more importance to power values and less importance to universalism values. Offspring of authoritarian fathers also tended to associate more with bully friends. The combination of high adolescent power values and their fathers' authoritarian parenting was associated with the highest degrees of bullying by adolescents. The social implications of the findings are discussed.