The Authoritarian Personality
Encyclopedia
The Authoritarian Personality (TAP, published 1950) is an influential 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
.
TAP "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
)." 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-intellectualism
, anti-intraception, superstition
and stereotypy
, power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex.
Though strongly criticized for bias and methodology, TAP 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 [i.e., in 1954].”
by Adolf Hitler
's National Socialist party. Adorno had been a member of the "Frankfurt School
", a predominantly Jewish group of philosophers and Marxist theorists who fled Germany when Hitler shut down their Institute for Social Research
. Adorno et al. were thus initially motivated by a desire to identify and measure factors that were believed to contribute to antisemitic and fascist traits. The book was part of a "Studies in Prejudice" series sponsored by the American Jewish Committee
's Department of Scientific Research.
Marxism were now associated with support for democracy
. Second, TAP abandoned and/or modified traditional Marxist sociological and economic explanations for human behavior in favor of psychological explanations, earning scorn from more orthodox Marxists.
Generally, Adorno et al. took an antipositivist position; they did not believe their theories required external verification or falsification
.
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, TAP 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.
This hypothesis was consistent with prevailing psychological theories of the time, and even though Frenkel-Brunswik reported some preliminary support, empirical data have generally not confirmed this prediction. 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.
The initially planned title for the book was The Fascist Character and the Measurement of Fascist Trends, but as early as 1947 Adorno feared that the assistants at Berkeley would try to edulcorate it to a more innocuous title like Character and Prejudice. The final title was the result of a compromise.
, sociology
, and political science
during the 1950s and early 1960s on the relation between personality traits, behavior, and political beliefs. TAP has often provoked polarized responses: “The Berkeley study of authoritarian personality does not leave many people indifferent.”
The study "has been subjected to considerable criticism" since the 1950s, particularly for various methodological flaws, including sample bias
and poor psychometric
techniques.
In 1973, Gaensslen et al. found that, contrary to predictions by Adorno et al., rigidity/dogmatism is not intrinsically maladaptive; e.g., rigidity can be associated with discipline and productivity
.
In 1980, sociologist J.J. Ray argued that the TAP project was seriously flawed on several points: for not asking questions regarding libertarian
politics (which according to Ray are typically more anti-authoritarian than right- or left-wing politics); for failing to demonstrate that authoritarian/right-wing beliefs are correlated with psychopathology
; and, most importantly, for failing to demonstrate that authoritarian beliefs are associated with authoritarian behavior. In 1993, over a decade later, the latter point was also criticized by Billings, et al.
TAP’s concludes that right-wing, authoritarian governments produce hostility towards racial, religious or ethnic minorities. Psychologist Altemeyer argued against that conclusion, saying that Fascist Italy was not characterized by antisemitism, and that Jews occupied high positions in Mussolini’s government until pressure from Hitler disenfranchised these Jews.
Though TAP was intended to identify antisemitism by its posited association with right wing politics and authoritarianism, Rubenstein’s research in Israel revealed that that Orthodox Jews scored higher on the these traits than Reform Jews, and that both groups scored higher than secular Jews.
Some observers have criticized what they saw as a strongly politicized agenda to TAP. Social critic Christopher Lasch
argued that by equating mental health with left-wing politics and associating right-wing politics with an invented “authoritarian” pathology, TAP’s goal was to eliminate antisemitism by “subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy—by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum.” Similarly, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek
wrote, “It is precisely the kind of group loyalty, respect for tradition, and consciousness of differences central to Jewish identity, however, that Horkheimer and Adorno described as mental illness in Gentiles. These writers adopted what eventually became a favorite Soviet tactic against dissidents: anyone whose political views differed from theirs was insane. […] Christian self-denial, and especially sexual repression, caused hatred of the Jews [according to Adorno et al.].”
TAP remains widely-cited in the social sciences and continues to inspire research interest today.
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
book
Book
A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
by Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society....
, Else Frenkel-Brunswik
Else Frenkel-Brunswik
Else Frenkel-Brunswik was a Polish-Austrian Jewish psychologist.- External links :* http://www.kfunigraz.ac.at/sozwww/agsoe/bestand/25_agsoe/25bio.htm...
, Daniel Levinson
Daniel Levinson
Daniel J. Levinson , a psychologist, was one of the founders of the field of Positive Adult Development.-Early life and education:...
, and Nevitt Sanford
Nevitt Sanford
Nevitt Sanford was professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. He studied ethnocentrism and antisemitism, and was one of the authors of The Authoritarian Personality. His co-authors in this work were Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik and Daniel Levinson...
, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, during and shortly after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
TAP "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
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
)." 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-intellectualism
Anti-intellectualism
Anti-intellectualism is hostility towards and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectual pursuits, usually expressed as the derision of education, philosophy, literature, art, and science, as impractical and contemptible...
, anti-intraception, superstition
Superstition
Superstition is a belief in supernatural causality: that one event leads to the cause of another without any process in the physical world linking the two events....
and stereotypy
Stereotypy
A stereotypy is a repetitive or ritualistic movement, posture, or utterance, found in people with mental retardation, autism spectrum disorders, tardive dyskinesia and stereotypic movement disorder. Stereotypies may be simple movements such as body rocking, or complex, such as self-caressing,...
, power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex.
Though strongly criticized for bias and methodology, TAP 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 [i.e., in 1954].”
Institutional context
The impetus of TAP was the Holocaust, the attempted genocidal extinction of European JewsJews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
by Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
's National Socialist party. Adorno had been a member of the "Frankfurt School
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
", a predominantly Jewish group of philosophers and Marxist theorists who fled Germany when Hitler shut down their Institute for Social Research
Institute for Social Research
The Institute for Social Research is a research organization for sociology and continental philosophy, best known as the institutional home of the Frankfurt School and critical theory....
. Adorno et al. were thus initially motivated by a desire to identify and measure factors that were believed to contribute to antisemitic and fascist traits. The book was part of a "Studies in Prejudice" series sponsored by the American Jewish Committee
American Jewish Committee
The American Jewish Committee was "founded in 1906 with the aim of rallying all sections of American Jewry to defend the rights of Jews all over the world...
's Department of Scientific Research.
Sources and influences
TAP 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 anti-liberalClassical liberalism
Classical liberalism is the philosophy committed to the ideal of limited government, constitutionalism, rule of law, due process, and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets....
Marxism were now associated with support for democracy
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
. Second, TAP abandoned and/or modified traditional Marxist sociological and economic explanations for human behavior in favor of psychological explanations, earning scorn from more orthodox Marxists.
Generally, Adorno et al. took an antipositivist position; they did not believe their theories required external verification or falsification
Falsification
Falsification may refer to:* The act of disproving a proposition, hypothesis, or theory: see Falsifiability* Mathematical proof* Falsified evidence...
.
Content
A central idea of TAP is that authoritarianism is the result of a FreudianSigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
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, TAP suggested that authoritarianism was rooted in suppressed homosexuality
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
, which was redirected into outward hostility towards the father, which was, in turn, suppressed for fear of being infantilized and castrated by the father.
This hypothesis was consistent with prevailing psychological theories of the time, and even though Frenkel-Brunswik reported some preliminary support, empirical data have generally not confirmed this prediction. 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
Right-wing politics
In politics, Right, right-wing and rightist generally refer to support for a hierarchical society justified on the basis of an appeal to natural law or tradition. To varying degrees, the Right rejects the egalitarian objectives of left-wing politics, claiming that the imposition of equality is...
ideology and therefore receptive to fascist
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
governments.
Authors and conflicts
Sanford and Levinson were both psychology professors at Berkeley. They did much of the preliminary work on ethnocentrism and statistical measurement. Frenkel-Brunswik examined personality variables and family background with a series of interview studies. Adorno provided a political and sociological perspective to the book. Although Adorno's name heads the alphabetical list of authors, he arrived late to the project and made a relatively small contribution. Adorno, in a 1947 letter to Horkheimer, said that his main contribution was the F-scale, which in the end was the "core of the whole thing." An agreement among the authors held that each one was to sign the individual chapters to which he had contributed, and that all four were to sign the chapter on the F-scale; Adorno was credited in 5 of the 23 chapters.The initially planned title for the book was The Fascist Character and the Measurement of Fascist Trends, but as early as 1947 Adorno feared that the assistants at Berkeley would try to edulcorate it to a more innocuous title like Character and Prejudice. The final title was the result of a compromise.
Responses
The Authoritarian Personality inspired extensive research in psychologyPsychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, and political science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
during the 1950s and early 1960s on the relation between personality traits, behavior, and political beliefs. TAP has often provoked polarized responses: “The Berkeley study of authoritarian personality does not leave many people indifferent.”
The study "has been subjected to considerable criticism" since the 1950s, particularly for various methodological flaws, including sample bias
Biased sample
In statistics, sampling bias is when a sample is collected in such a way that some members of the intended population are less likely to be included than others. It results in a biased sample, a non-random sample of a population in which all individuals, or instances, were not equally likely to...
and poor psychometric
Psychometrics
Psychometrics is the field of study concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement, which includes the measurement of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, and educational measurement...
techniques.
In 1973, Gaensslen et al. found that, contrary to predictions by Adorno et al., rigidity/dogmatism is not intrinsically maladaptive; e.g., rigidity can be associated with discipline and productivity
Productivity
Productivity is a measure of the efficiency of production. Productivity is a ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce it. Usually this ratio is in the form of an average, expressing the total output divided by the total input...
.
In 1980, sociologist J.J. Ray argued that the TAP project was seriously flawed on several points: for not asking questions regarding libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
politics (which according to Ray are typically more anti-authoritarian than right- or left-wing politics); for failing to demonstrate that authoritarian/right-wing beliefs are correlated with psychopathology
Psychopathology
Psychopathology is the study of mental illness, mental distress, and abnormal/maladaptive behavior. The term is most commonly used within psychiatry where pathology refers to disease processes...
; and, most importantly, for failing to demonstrate that authoritarian beliefs are associated with authoritarian behavior. In 1993, over a decade later, the latter point was also criticized by Billings, et al.
TAP’s concludes that right-wing, authoritarian governments produce hostility towards racial, religious or ethnic minorities. Psychologist Altemeyer argued against that conclusion, saying that Fascist Italy was not characterized by antisemitism, and that Jews occupied high positions in Mussolini’s government until pressure from Hitler disenfranchised these Jews.
Though TAP was intended to identify antisemitism by its posited association with right wing politics and authoritarianism, Rubenstein’s research in Israel revealed that that Orthodox Jews scored higher on the these traits than Reform Jews, and that both groups scored higher than secular Jews.
Some observers have criticized what they saw as a strongly politicized agenda to TAP. Social critic Christopher Lasch
Christopher Lasch
Christopher Lasch was a well-known American historian, moralist, and social critic....
argued that by equating mental health with left-wing politics and associating right-wing politics with an invented “authoritarian” pathology, TAP’s goal was to eliminate antisemitism by “subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy—by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum.” Similarly, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis....
wrote, “It is precisely the kind of group loyalty, respect for tradition, and consciousness of differences central to Jewish identity, however, that Horkheimer and Adorno described as mental illness in Gentiles. These writers adopted what eventually became a favorite Soviet tactic against dissidents: anyone whose political views differed from theirs was insane. […] Christian self-denial, and especially sexual repression, caused hatred of the Jews [according to Adorno et al.].”
TAP remains widely-cited in the social sciences and continues to inspire research interest today.
See also
- Ambiguity toleranceAmbiguity toleranceAmbiguity tolerance is the ability to perceive ambiguity in information and behavior in a neutral and open way.Ambiguity tolerance is an important issue in personality development and education...
- Authoritarian personalityAuthoritarian personality-Historical Origins:Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson and Sanford compiled a large body of research and theory , which attempted to characterize a personality type that described the “potentially fascistic individual”...
- Right-wing authoritarianism
Further reading
- Theodor W. AdornoTheodor W. AdornoTheodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society....
, Else Frenkel-BrunswikElse Frenkel-BrunswikElse Frenkel-Brunswik was a Polish-Austrian Jewish psychologist.- External links :* http://www.kfunigraz.ac.at/sozwww/agsoe/bestand/25_agsoe/25bio.htm...
, Daniel LevinsonDaniel LevinsonDaniel J. Levinson , a psychologist, was one of the founders of the field of Positive Adult Development.-Early life and education:...
and Nevitt SanfordNevitt SanfordNevitt Sanford was professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. He studied ethnocentrism and antisemitism, and was one of the authors of The Authoritarian Personality. His co-authors in this work were Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik and Daniel Levinson...
. The Authoritarian Personality, Studies in Prejudice Series, Volume 1. New YorkNew York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
: Harper & Row, 1950. W. W. Norton & Company paperback reprint edition (1993) ISBN 0-393-31112-0.