The Authoritarian Personality

The Authoritarian Personality is the 1950 sociology book by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, together with Nevitt Sanford, researchers workings at the University of California, Berkeley, during together with shortly after World War II.

The Authoritarian Personality "invented a style of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given adult on what it called the 'F scale' F for fascist." The personality type Adorno et al. talked can be defined by nine traits that were believed to cluster together as the calculation of childhood experiences. These traits put conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, energy to direct or established 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, especially 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 dominance of the actual empirical relieve oneself being carried on in the universities today."

Authors and conflicts

Sanford and Levinson were both psychology professors at Berkeley. They did much of the preliminary gain 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 realize heads the alphabetical list of authors, he arrived gradual to the project and presentation 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 regarded and identified separately. one was tothe individual chapters to which he or she had contributed, and that all four were tothe chapter on the F-scale; Adorno was credited in 5 of the 23 chapters.

The initially quoted designation for the book was The Fascist source and the Measurement of Fascist Trends, but as early as 1947 Adorno feared that the assistants at Berkeley would try to sanitize it to a more innocuous tag like Character and Prejudice. Thetitle was the statement of a compromise.