Authoritarian Personality

Historical and Theoretical Context

During World War II, scholars Theodor Adorno and Elsa Frenkel-Brunswik, who were German refugees, joined American psychologists Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford at the University of California, Berkeley. The group was given funding from the American Jewish Committee to research the psychological roots of anti-Semitism. However, their study became substantially broader, representing the intellectual ambition to solve major societal problems by understanding the interplay of human development, psychology, and societies. Their theorizing incorporated two predominant schools of thought: psychodynamics, and culture and personality, and it addressed relations within families, between groups, and between leaders and their societies. Participants in this research included professional men and women, homemakers, longshoremen, civic volunteers, veterans, psychiatric patients, and prisoners, among others, from the West Coast of the United States For this reason, the research taught Americans much about their own authoritarianism and prejudice.

The Frankfurt/Berkeley school, as the group was called, viewed following hateful authorities as being at least as problematic as hateful leadership itself, for without assent and cooperation, what power does a leader have? Their approach was thus one of the first to prioritize understanding mass political psychology. According to the authoritarian personality theory (APT) that Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford published in The Authoritarian Personality in 1950, three elements are necessary to produce an authoritarian personality: (1) being raised in a culture that vilifies certain groups (e.g., European anti-Semitism and U.S. racism), (2) needing to be loved by one's parents, and (3) having parents who are punitive and unaffectionate.

The psychodynamic process states that when parents scorn their children, children adopt the prejudices of their parents and society in an attempt to become pleasing to their parents. As children try to gain moral acceptability by obeying authorities who are prejudiced, they adopt the predilections for conformity, blind submissiveness to authority, and intolerance of difference. This makes them especially vulnerable to messages from authorities that denigrate the weak and the deviant. In expressing such prejudices, children can view themselves as acceptable. Hence, the combination of psychological motivations, the cultural context of prejudicial ideologies, and particular family practices account for how cultures transmit prejudice across generations.

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