The Authoritarian Personality is a 1950 sociology book by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley, during and shortly after World War II.
The Authoritarian Personality "invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the 'F scale' (F for fascist)."Codevilla, Angelo (16 July 2010) America's Ruling Class , The American Spectator The personality type Adorno et al. identified can be defined by nine traits that were believed to cluster together as the result of childhood experiences. These traits include conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex.Adorno and the political By Espen Hammer p.62
Though criticized at the time for bias and methodology, the book was highly influential in American social sciences, particularly in the first decade after its publication: "No volume published since the war in the field of social psychology has had a greater impact on the direction of the actual empirical work being carried on in the universities today."Glazer, Nathan. (1954). "New light on The Authoritarian Personality: A survey of recent research and criticism." Commentary 17 (March), pp. 289–297.
Institutional context Theodor Adorno and a team of researchers Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford working at University of California, Berkeley, produced The Authoritarian Personality as part of the "Studies in Prejudice" series sponsored by the American Jewish Committee's Department of Scientific Research.American Jewish Committee News, 15 March 1950. From 1936 to 1945, American social scientists conducted over 400 surveys on antisemitism as part of a larger goal of fortifying democracy in the United States against fascism. In 1943, the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) initiated a comprehensive study of the prevalence of antisemitism among American workers. Max Horkheimer, from the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, and Adorno, conducted the research for these studies. Starting in 1944, the exiled Institute was hired by the JLC to conduct a study led by Leo Löwenthal and others, with assistance from Adorno. Their 1500-page report based on empirical data on "Antisemitism among American Labor", found that American workers held strong antisemitic tendencies and were drawn to fascism. This labor study, which was never published, has been identified by some scholars as the "conduit" between Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Authoritarian Personality.
The research was conducted during and after World War II and the Holocaust the genocide of European Jews by Adolf Hitler's National Socialist regime a period when significant concerns about the origins of fascism and authoritarianism had been raised. Adorno had been a member of the "Frankfurt School", a group of philosophers and Marxist theorists who fled Germany when Hitler shut down their Institute for Social Research. Adorno et al. hoped to identify and measure factors that were believed to contribute to antisemitic and fascist traits.
Sources and influences The Authoritarian Personality was based in part on earlier Frankfurt School analyses undertaken in Germany, but with a few key changes. First, their Marxist and radical roots were downplayed. For example, the earlier "authoritarian personality / revolutionary personality" axis was changed to an "authoritarian personality / democratic personality" axis in America. Thus, values and behaviors earlier associated with revolutionary Marxism were now associated with support for democracy.Jay, Martin (1973). The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950. London: Heinemann. , p. 273 Second, the book abandoned and/or modified traditional Marxist sociological and economic explanations for human behavior in favor of psychological explanations, earning scorn from more orthodox Marxists.Jay 1973, 227.
Generally, Adorno et al. took an antipositivist position;Adorno stated: "[The TAP questionnaire] was produced in a manner which does not correspond at all to the usual image of positivism in social science…" quoted in Wiggershaus, R. (1994). The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, translated by M. Robertson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 373."[W]e never regarded the theory simply as a set of hypotheses but as in some sense standing on its own feet, and therefore did not intend to prove or disprove the theory through our findings but only to derive from it concrete questions for investigation, which must then be judged on their own merit and demonstrate certain prevalent socio-psychological structures" Adorno, T. W. (1969). "Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America" In The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, eds. D. Fleming & B. Bailyn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press., p. 363. More generally, the Frankfurt School has been critical of reductionism and the third-person perspective in the social sciences. Instead, it recognizes that social science research is inevitably value-laden, which calls for a model of scientist who is a self-reflective interpreter, rather than a technical problem-solver. Furthermore, it assigns a practical purpose in social science. Following a Marxist tradition, it requires that theories in social science should not only describe and explain the social world, but also should serve a human emancipation agenda in all circumstances of oppression and dominance. This is a different approach in philosophy of science than falsification, more popular in the natural sciences.
Content A central idea of The Authoritarian Personality is that authoritarianism is the result of a Freudian developmental model. Excessively harsh and punitive parenting was posited to cause children to feel immense anger towards their parents; yet fear of parental disapproval or punishment caused people to not directly confront their parents, but rather to identify with and idolize authority figures. Moreover, the book suggested that authoritarianism was rooted in suppressed homosexuality, which was redirected into outward hostility towards the father, which was, in turn, suppressed for fear of being infantilized and castrated by the father."The forbidden action which is converted into aggression is generally homosexual in nature. Through fear of castration, obedience to the father is taken to the extreme of an anticipation of castration in conscious emotional approximation to the nature of a small girl, and actual hatred to the father is suppressed." See Adorno 1950 (1991) Frenkel-Brunswik's account spread through culture to become a stereotype, though subsequent research produced inconclusive or contradictory results. Authoritarianism was measured by the F-scale. The "F" was short for "pre-fascist personality." Another major hypothesis of the book is that the authoritarian syndrome is predisposed to right-wing ideology and therefore receptive to fascist governments.
Methodology The study employs both quantitative and qualitative components. The first part of the research resembles a survey type of research with structured questionnaires. Based on the scores on the questionnaires, a smaller number of participants was elected for clinical interviews and administration of the Thematic Apperception Test. Interviews were coded with the techniques of content analysis.
Sample
"The majority of the subjects could be characterized as white, non-Jewish, native-born, middle-class Americans and the authors guessed that their findings would hold for this population"
[Critique point]: The individuals were sampled from formal organizations. There are reasons to believe that there are systematic differences between such a sample and the aforementioned population (see section Overall Criticism).
Response format
Likert type items ranging from −3 to +3 without a middle point.
Psychometric scales
Anti-Semitism Scale Ethnocentrism Scale Political & Economical Conservatism Scale
Anti-Semitism scale
This is a listing of the content categories featured in the items. These traits are attributed to Jewish people.
Offensive (conceited, sensual, dirty) Threatening (ruthless, competitive, radical) Attitudes (discriminative action to be taken) Seclusive (clannish, keeping apart from gentiles) Intrusive (desire to intrude where not welcome)
All items were phrased in affirmation of the Anti-Semitic sentiment. Brown (2004, p. 48), together with many others, criticizes this choice as "unwise".
The items were phrased in a superficially moderate language, which nonetheless conveyed the saliency of Jews to the respondent and a negative sentiment towards them
Ethnocentrism
Split-half reliability for the scale was .91 (high). The correlation between Ethnocentrism and Anti-Semitism scales was .80 (relatively high). This result is "evidence that antagonism to the culturally unlike is a generalized sentiment"
Political and economical conservatism
Split-half reliability for PEC scale was .73 (moderate). The scale's correlation with A-S and E was not strong, but in none of the groups was it negative. "[...] neither ethnocentrism nor Anti-Semitism ever showed a tendency to go with leftist liberal views."
F Scale
The F scale targets an authoritarian, anti-democratic personality profile that makes a person susceptible to Fascist propaganda. The items were written in accordance to fascist propaganda materials as well as priory held TAT protocol data and interviews with ethnocentric participants.
Conventionalism: Adherence to conventional values. Authoritarian Submission: Towards ingroup authority figures. Authoritarian Aggression: Against people who violate conventional values. Anti-Intraception: Opposition to subjectivity and imagination. Superstition and Stereotypy: Belief in individual fate; thinking in rigid categories. Power and Toughness: Concerned with submission and domination; assertion of strength. Destructiveness and Cynicism: hostility against human nature. Projectivity: Perception of the world as dangerous; tendency to project unconscious impulses. Sex: Overly concerned with modern sexual practices.
Across various participant groups, the average item-total correlation was 0.33. Subsequent factor analysis confirmed a one-dimensional structure of these content subsets of items (Eysenck 1954, p 152, ref by Brown, p. 53). The first form of the F-Scale correlated 0.53 with A-S, 0.65 to E and 0.54 to PEC. The scale was revised by dropping items with low item-total correlations and/or low predictive value of A-S and E scores. The revised form correlated by 0.75 to a combined A-S/E scale, and 0.57 to PEC. Ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism and potentiality for fascism were inter-related to each other, as well as to conservatism, although not as prominently.
Correlations with IQ, SES, and education
Ethnocentrism is negatively correlated with both IQ and years of education. Subsequent analyses by Christie showed that education is the mediating factor in this set of relationships. Intelligence is not as strongly correlated to E per se if years of education are partialed out, the partial correlation being as small as -.20. Christie also estimated the expected correlation between "either IQ and F scores or years of education and F scores for a representative cross-sectional sample, range between -.50 and -.60".
Clinical and projective data
Interviews
The interviewers were instructed to obtain information of the following areas. There were more specific instructions and points of emphasis within each of these areas.
Vocation Income Religion