Authoritarian personality
권위주의적 성격
The authoritarian personality (or authoritarian character) is a social-psychological concept for a character structure that submits to the strong, is aggressive towards the weak and towards 'alien' groups, and clings rigidly to convention. Erich Fromm formulated it on the basis of his theory of 'social character' in the Institute for Social Research's Studies on Authority and the Family (1936). In The Authoritarian Personality (1950), Theodor W. Adorno and a Berkeley team tried to measure the disposition towards fascism, together with antisemitism and ethnocentrism, with the F-scale. The work drew methodological criticism of its sampling and item design and was revised and carried on, notably in Bob Altemeyer's right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) scale.
In depth
What question did it come from?
On Marxist expectations, economic crisis and mass unemployment should have led workers to revolution. In 1930s Germany many workers embraced fascism instead. The Frankfurt School asked why people turn to authoritarian politics against their class interests, and brought in Freud's psychoanalysis to answer: not only economic structure but family, character and the unconscious had to be analysed.
Wilhelm Reich asked the question first. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) he argued for a fundamental link between authoritarian repression of drives and fascist ideology: the patriarchal family, the germ cell of the state, produces characters who submit to a repressive order despite want and humiliation. Reich later regarded Fromm's concept of the 'authoritarian character' as a watered-down plagiarism of his own theory.
How did Fromm formulate it?
Erich Fromm took charge of social psychology at the Institute for Social Research in 1930. His 'social character' refers, unlike an individual's own character, to the traits shared by people who live the same way of life and share basic experiences in a society. Social character is formed above all in the family, which Fromm called 'the psychological agency of society': the external force at work in society confronts the child in the parents and, in the patriarchal small family, especially in the father.
From 1929 Fromm and his colleague Hilde Weiss surveyed skilled workers, white-collar employees and lower civil servants. Of 3,000 questionnaires with 271 items, 1,150 came back; with the institute's emigration many were lost, and by 1934 only 584 remained. The aim was to gain insight into the psychological structure of workers and employees, and a first analysis appeared in the institute's Studies on Authority and the Family (1936). In the theoretical part of that volume Fromm named the drives underlying the authoritarian character as the pleasure of obedience and sympathy with the powerful, together with aggression against the defenceless.
Fromm developed the idea in Escape from Freedom (1941). Borrowing from psychopathology, he also called the authoritarian character 'sadomasochistic', meaning not sexual practices but an attitude to authority: such a person admires authority and wants to submit to it, while wanting at the same time to be an authority and make others submit. Identifying with the powerful spares them from facing their own powerlessness. Fromm found the deeper cause less in drives than in modern people's inability to bear the freedom they had gained, so that they flee into conformity and authority.
What did The Authoritarian Personality (1950) do?
In exile the institute planned the Studies in Prejudice series with funding from the American Jewish Committee, edited by Horkheimer. Its first volume, The Authoritarian Personality, appeared in 1950. It was written by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley: the psychoanalytically trained psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, the social psychologist Nevitt Sanford, and Adorno.
The research had two parts: a questionnaire survey, and then clinical interviews and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) for a smaller number chosen by their scores. The TAT is a projective test in which people make up stories about ambiguous pictures, revealing hidden attitudes. Questionnaire items were answered from −3 to +3 with no midpoint. Four scales were used: antisemitism (A-S), ethnocentrism (E), political and economic conservatism (PEC), and potential for fascism (F).
Adorno headed the alphabetical list of authors, but he joined late and was credited in five of the twenty-three chapters. In a 1947 letter to Horkheimer he said his main contribution was the F-scale, 'the core of the whole thing'. The title first planned was The Fascist Character and the Measurement of Fascist Trends; the Berkeley researchers wanted something more innocuous, and the final title was a compromise.
The American version toned down the institute's Marxist roots: the German-era axis of 'authoritarian versus revolutionary personality' became 'authoritarian versus democratic personality'. Because Fromm had left the institute in 1939 after a falling-out with Adorno, he is mentioned in only two footnotes. The book was never fully translated into German; a selection of the chapters Adorno wrote or co-wrote appeared in 1973.
What did the F-scale measure?
F stands for fascism. Instead of asking about explicit political beliefs, the F-scale used items that looked unpolitical to measure a character susceptible to fascist propaganda, an indirect test that concealed its purpose. The team held that nine traits cluster together as a result of childhood experiences.
| Trait | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Conventionalism | Rigid adherence to conventional middle-class values |
| Authoritarian submission | Uncritical submission to the authorities of one's own group |
| Authoritarian aggression | Seeking out and punishing those who violate conventional values |
| Anti-intraception | Rejecting the subjective, the imaginative and self-reflection |
| Superstition and stereotypy | Belief in fate; thinking in rigid categories |
| Power and 'toughness' | Preoccupation with dominance and submission; display of strength |
| Destructiveness and cynicism | Hostility towards human nature in general |
| Projectivity | Seeing the world as dangerous; projecting one's unconscious impulses outward |
| Sex | Exaggerated concern with other people's sexual 'goings-on' |
The team described anti-intraception as the 'rejection of all inwardness, of the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded'. The study followed a psychoanalytic model of development. Excessively harsh and punitive parenting leaves the child angry at the parents; for fear of punishment the child does not confront them but identifies with and idolises authority figures instead, and the repressed aggression is redirected into scapegoating minority groups.
What was criticised in its method?
The book shaped social psychology in the 1950s and drew correspondingly intense criticism.
| Issue | Criticism |
|---|---|
| Sampling | Participants were recruited through organisations. Richard Christie reported that members of organisations differ systematically from non-members, so the sample did not represent white, non-Jewish, middle-class Americans |
| Acquiescence response set | All items on the F and antisemitism scales were worded so that agreeing meant the authoritarian answer, so a tendency to say 'yes' regardless of content could inflate scores. Bass found a correlation of .20 between the F-scale and a reversed version, where −1.00 would be expected if wording played no role |
| Interviews and coding | Interviewers had seen participants' questionnaire answers in advance, and coding categories were interpreted through psychoanalytic theory |
| Education and status | Ethnocentrism correlated negatively with IQ and years of education; Christie found education to be the mediating factor. Critics argued that education and socio-economic status could explain the findings better than repression |
| Left-wing authoritarianism | Edward Shils (1954) objected that the study looked only at the right and missed authoritarianism on the left. In Coulter's study (1953) communists also scored high on the F-scale, whereas the mean of the English communist students tested by Rokeach (1960) was the lowest of all known groups |
| Theory and behaviour | Hyman and Sheatsley (1954) concluded that 'the authors' theory has not been proved by the data they cite'. J. J. Ray (1980) faulted the study for not showing that authoritarian beliefs go with authoritarian behaviour |
| Political bias | The conservative critic Christopher Lasch charged that the book cast right-wing politics as pathology and left-wing politics as mental health |
There are defences too. Roger Brown (2004) granted that sampling and response sets were the most serious defects, yet thought there remained 'a substantial residual probability' that the core conclusion was right: antisemitism, ethnocentrism and authoritarianism generally go together. Christie and Cook (1958), reviewing 230 related studies, found the E and F scales significantly correlated across a wide range of samples. The weakest link is usually said to be the psychoanalytic account of how authoritarianism arises in childhood.
What did Altemeyer change?
The Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer (1940–2024) introduced the concept and scale of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) in 1981. He thought Adorno had been on to something, but that the theory had lost credibility through its tie to Freudian psychoanalysis, and he kept only the three of the nine traits that hang together most strongly.
| Aspect | F-scale (1950) | RWA scale (1981) |
|---|---|---|
| Core components | Nine traits | Authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, conventionalism |
| Theoretical basis | Psychoanalytic theory of character development | Social learning; the psychoanalytic aetiology dropped |
| Item design | Every item 'agree = authoritarian' | Equal numbers of pro- and con-worded items to reduce acquiescence |
| What it measures | Potential for fascism | 'Authoritarian followers' of authorities they see as legitimate |
Altemeyer called authoritarian leaders 'social dominators'. He also disputed the book's conclusion that right-wing authoritarian governments necessarily produce hostility to ethnic and religious minorities, pointing out that Fascist Italy was not antisemitic until pressure from Hitler. He later devised a left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) scale as well.
How does it connect with the school's other work?
The Authoritarian Personality studied the kinds of people drawn to authoritarianism. Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman's Prophets of Deceit (1949), in the same series, analysed the messages of American agitators themselves. In post-war Germany the institute's 'Group Experiment' used group discussions to study West Germans' attitudes to antisemitism, nationalism and democracy. Adorno returned to the theme in his 1967 lecture 'Aspects of the New Right-Wing Radicalism'. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that the recent rise of authoritarian populism has revived interest in the school's work on authoritarianism.
How is it told apart from 'authoritarian' in everyday use?
This entry concerns a social-psychological concept of individual character structure. Sentences about the authoritarian nature of a regime, an institution or an organisation do not refer to it.