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)." 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. 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."
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. 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. 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. Generally, Adorno et al. took an antipositivist position; 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. 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.
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