Right Wing Authoritarianism

Theory of the Authoritarian Personality

This individual-difference dimension of RWA attitudes was originally identified in the 1930s by social scientists such as Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich. They suggested that these attitudes have their psychological basis in a particular kind of personality characterized by underlying needs for strong national authority and hostility to outgroups or minorities. This, they suggested, helped explain the rise of right wing fascist movements and virulent anti-Semitism in Europe at the time. The theory was developed and furnished with [Page 706]some empirical support in 1950 in a classic volume, The Authoritarian Personality, by Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford.

Their research showed that prejudiced attitudes, such as anti-Semitism, were not held in isolation but were part of a broader ethnocentric pattern involving a generalized dislike of outgroups and minorities. Together, these attitudes formed part of the broader right wing authoritarian social attitude dimension. The authors classified these authoritarian social attitudes into nine categories or hypothesized traits that they assumed together constituted the authoritarian personality dimension. These nine traits were conventionalism (rigid adherence to conventional middle-class values), authoritarian submission (submissive, uncritical attitudes toward authorities), authoritarian aggression (tendency to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values), anti-introspection (opposition to the subjective, imaginative, and tenderminded), superstition and stereotypy (belief in mystical determinants of the individual's fate, disposition to think in rigid categories), power and toughness (preoccupation with the dominancesubmission, strong weak, leaderfollower dimension; identification with power, strength, tough ness), destructiveness and cynicism (generalized hostility, vilification of the human), projectivity (disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outward of unconscious emotional impulses), and finally an exaggerated concern with sexual goings-on.

Adorno and colleagues' theory of the authoritarian personality suggested that these traits arose from underlying psychodynamic conflicts originating from harsh, punitive parental socialization in early childhood. This was presumed to create underlying feelings of resentment and anger toward parental authority, later generalized to all authority, and feelings that were repressed and replaced by deference and idealization of authority, while the underlying repressed anger and aggression were displaced as hostility toward deviant persons, outgroups, and minorities.

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