Authoritarian Personality

Describing the Study

An authoritarian personality was described as an individual who unquestioningly conforms to social norms and is prone to stereotyping, emotional coldness, identification with power, and general destructive-ness. The variable authoritarianism was investigated, and the attitudinal components made up the “F scale”—a personality structure rendering a person “receptive to antidemocratic propaganda.” Although the focus of the study was a type of personality related to “various manifestations of prejudice,” the authors stressed the need to focus on both the social and psychological structures and processes involved in the mechanisms of domination because “these are the products of the total organization of society.”

The study involved the development of a questionnaire (2,099 respondents living in California), follow-up interviews, observations, and subsequent analysis that uncovered inclinations toward authoritarianism—belief in a system where some people control while others are controlled and involving domination and submission; members of in-groups hold negative attitudes about out-groups such as seeing them as less deserving or less human than themselves. The research team devised a set of interpretive techniques that included a series of scales by which a cluster or constellation of related attitudes could be measured—A-S, anti-Semitism; E, ethnocentrism; PEC, political, economic, conservatism; F, fascism. The F scale, or “Implicit Antidemocratic Trends” scale, was made up of the following variables.

• Conventionalism: A rigid adherence to conventional middle-class values
• Authoritarian submission: A submissive uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the in-group
• Authoritarian aggression: A tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish, people who violate conventional values
• Anti-intraception: An opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded
• Superstition and stereotypy: The belief in mystical determinants of the individual's fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories
• Power and “toughness”: Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis on the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness
• Destructiveness and cynicism: A generalized hostility; vilification of the human
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• Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outward of unconscious emotional impulses
• Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual “goings-on”

In The Authoritarian Personality, psychoanalytic categories were used to interpret the results. The major hypothesis was that the political, economic, and social convictions of an individual often form a broad or coherent pattern that is, in turn, an expression of deeper lying trends in the individual's personality. The study disclosed a high degree of anti-Semitic prejudice and a significant number of people who scored high on the scale that measured authoritarian potential in individuals. The study suggests that the knowledge gained through the study could prove to be useful in combating the political-social trend of fascism and that action research/education might prevent a repetition of the European experience.

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