Sorry, liberals: Conservatives don't mindlessly follow authority any more than you do

It’s no wonder, then, that if you ask people whether they think “authorities” should be heeded, that you’ll tend to find conservatives are more in favor than liberals.

Control for this, as the researchers did by getting a bit more careful and specific in their questioning of study participants (What happens when the authority figure in question is an environmentalist? A civil rights leader?), and those differences disappear:

“The findings suggest that obedience itself is not ideologically divisive. Counter to the intuition that obedience itself is a mode of conduct that conservatives preferentially champion, these data suggest that liberals and conservatives have the same sentiments about obedience. Conservatives only favor obedience when they perceive the authority to be a conservative. Liberals also favor obedience when the authority shares their ideology.”