Social Influence Drives Shifts Toward Authoritarianism, New Study Finds

A field experiment conducted with the Norwegian Armed Forces placed >1,300 basic-training recruits in randomly assigned rooms for eight weeks. Participants completed a baseline survey measuring agreement with the statement “it is important to have a strong leader who gets things done, even if that means bypassing parliament and elections.” After living with peers whose average views were either more supportive or more opposed to strong-man rule, a follow-up survey showed that recruits adjusted their own attitudes to align with the prevailing room climate. The effect was symmetric: exposure to pro-authoritarian roommates increased support, while exposure to anti-authoritarian roommates decreased it.

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The researchers replicated the survey experiment with a representative sample of 1,500 Norwegian citizens and later with a cross-national panel of >25,000 respondents from 29 countries. In both cases, informing participants that authoritarian views were popular raised their personal support for strong leaders, whereas indicating that such views were unpopular produced the opposite shift.

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• Participants: 1,300 military recruits; 1,500 Norwegian citizens; 25,000+ international respondents.

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• Duration: Eight-week boot-camp exposure; single-session survey manipulations for civilians.

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• Effect: Statistically significant movement of individual attitudes toward the average opinion of the assigned group, regardless of initial stance.

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Andreas Kotsadam, senior researcher at the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research and co-author of the study, emphasized that the findings reveal “the stability of democracy depends not only on what citizens privately believe, but also on what they think their fellow citizens believe.” He cautioned that the term “contagious” should not be taken to imply an automatic spread of authoritarianism and noted that the durability of these attitude shifts remains unknown. The authors suggest that making democratic norms visible could counteract such social influence.

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• “I was struck that the influence was not confined to people who were already sympathetic to authoritarian rule,” — Andreas Kotsadam, Senior Researcher

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• “The word ‘contagious’ should not be taken to mean that authoritarianism spreads automatically, or that having one authoritarian friend inevitably changes someone’s politics,” — Andreas Kotsadam

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• “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.” — Andreas Kotsadam

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• “Making support for democratic principles visible may help reinforce those principles,” — Andreas Kotsadam

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