The study of anti-Semitism and group prejudice in this country has been fundamentally affected by the monumental volume The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950, which in the few years since its publication has become a kind of “classic” in American social science. Nathan Glazer discusses here the recently published book Studies in the Scape and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality,” edited by Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda (Glencoe, Illinois; The Free Press), a volume of essays which further explores and evaluates the implications of the larger volume.

_____________

The authoritarian personality, published in 1950 as part of the Studies in Prejudice series sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, stands as one of the most ambitious efforts of modern American social science. In the 990 pages, 500,000 words, and 100 tables of The Authoritarian Personality, four senior authors (T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford) and three collaborators analyzed the results of a large-scale research project on anti-Semitism and group prejudice (“ethnocentrism”) conducted at the University of California in Berkeley. The project had studied more than 2,000 individuals, mostly college students but also sizeable numbers of middle-class adults, prisoners, patients undergoing psychiatric treatment, labor-union members, and some other working-class people. The social scientists tried to demonstrate from this material that anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism were more than “opinions”: they were rather facets of a definite personality type. The roots of this “authoritarian personality” were to be explained by the concepts of psychoanalysis; but its existence, the authors believed, could be demonstrated simply by the use of questionnaires.

_____________

The authoritarian personality was described by the authors as rigidly adhering to conventional, middle-class values; uncritically submissive to official moral authorities; tending to reject and condemn those who violated conventional values; opposed to the subjective, the imaginative, the introspective; disposed to think in rigid categories and to emphasize mystical determinants of the individual’s fate; preoccupied with problems of status and strength and weakness; disposed to believe that wild, dangerous, and secret things go on in the world; preoccupied with sexual transgressions.

All these traits (and many others) could be deduced, according to the logic of psychoanalytic thinking, from a family situation in which the parents were anxious about their own status, did not give enough unqualified love to their children, and were strict but inconsistent in their discipline, thus taking on, in the eyes of their children, the character of “forces” which could not be opposed and had to be constantly propitiated. The children’s repressed hostility and aggression toward the parents—and, later, the hostility and aggression that might be appropriately vented on bosses, the state, and other parent-like figures—are released on “out-groups” and various powerless objects (Jews, Negroes, the poor, etc.). Anyone acquainted with psychoanalytic thinking will be able to imagine the vast range of personality traits such a personal history can open to view.

The researchers devised four true-false questionnaires: (1) the “F-scale,” designed to test for authoritarian traits (“F” stands for fascism, since the authoritarian traits are presumed to be “pre-fascist”); (2) the “A-S scale,” testing for anti-Semitism; (3) the “E-scale,” testing for ethnocentrism (including anti-Semitism); and (4) the “PEC-scale,” testing for political and economic conservatism. Anti-Semitic, ethnocentric, conservative, and authoritarian opinions are scored “high”; their opposites, “low.” (The terms “high” and “low” in the meaning of “authoritarian” and “non-authoritarian” have already entered the vocabulary of contemporary American social psychology; we will continue to use them with no further identification). In general, it was found that high scorers on any one of the tests tended to score high on the others, thus establishing, apparently, a clear correlation between anti-Semitic or ethnocentric opinions and a general leaning towards conservatism and authoritarianism (pre-fascism).

Persons scoring in the highest and lowest quarters on the test for ethnocentrism were selected for intensive study by means of interviews and psychological “projective” tests, to further check the relation between ethnocentrism and authoritarianism. The interviews emphasized: the childhood history of the subject; his relations to parents, brothers, and sisters; his present relations with other people; his views of himself, his future, his work. More than ninety specific topics were covered in the interviews, and for each it was hypothesized in advance what might be expected to be the “high” variant (in attitudes towards parents, self, work, etc.), what the “low.” Persons unacquainted with the scores of the subjects on the various tests then read the interviews, deciding whether the person was high or low for each topic. Again, the results showed that the more anti-Semitic and ethnocentric group was generally high, the non-anti-Semitic and non-ethnocentric group low, in relation to authoritarianism.

_____________

II

In The few years since its publication, The Authoritarian Personality has inspired scores of doctoral theses and hundreds of less elaborate studies which have used its concepts and its tests, and attempted to elaborate or test the thesis presented. 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.

One must ascribe the impact of The Authoritarian Personality first of all, I think, to the fact that it said something of some importance about an important subject. This simple fact serves to differentiate it from much of the highly regarded recent work in the social sciences, which has said nothing, or, to be just, has said nothing of significance about our society (or other existing societies) or Americans (or other existing variants of the human species). As a matter of fact, the most admired work in the social sciences today is, it appears, not supposed to say anything about anything, being occupied not with substance, but with method, devoted to discussion of how something should be said—if it were to be said. So the most respected figures in the field of sociology today, and to a lesser extent in social psychology, themselves actually say nothing—at times they suggest a hypothesis for someone else to test; at times it is believed they themselves are engaged in the testing of some significant hypothesis by the refined methods appropriate to their status; but usually nothing published can be pointed to.

It is thus understandable why the only two postwar works in the social and psychological sciences which, it is generally agreed, have said something of some scope and significance (right or wrong), were written, respectively, by a group headed by German émigré philosophers (The Authoritarian Personality) and by a former lawyer (The Lonely Crowd`). Now the saying of something is, if nothing else, a great help for the younger men in the field: it gives them something to test, and it suggests a new way of looking at a group of subjects; and this was a great virtue of The Authoritarian Personality.

One must not ignore a second major virtue from the point of view of the young aspirant for a Ph.D. degree: The Authoritarian Personality was filled with ready-made tests that had already been taken through many of the technical procedures of validation which every test must pass. A test to a social psychologist is like nectar to a bee. Regardless of what it studies and how it studies it, someone some place is going to use it and see whether the results on it correlate with results on some other tests. And indeed, we now know how “highs” and “lows” perform on half a hundred other tests, some of them part of the regular equipment of the social psychologist, some of them ad hoc creations designed to test some special characteristic. (The absence of tests may explain why the “inner-directed, other-directed” dichotomy of The Lonely Crowd has been more spoken of than used in the social sciences: until the more ingenious workers in the field create appropriate tests—and some are at work on the problem now—the others will be at a loss.)

_____________

Finally we must point to a third reason for the impact of The Authoritarian Personality—the overwhelmingly liberal complexion of contemporary social scientists. Of course they want to fight prejudice, and they are delighted to make use of a theory which paints the anti-Semite in the most unpleasant terms. But more than this, The Authoritarian Personality connected prejudice with something even more hateful: the “reactionary,” pious in his attachment to conventional values, anti-intellectual, suspicious of “ologies” and “isms,” antagonistic to the foreigner, the immigrant, the labor movement, mouthing loyalty to the Constitution while daily demanding the abrogation of the Bill of Rights. It is clear that this type of person is “authoritarian,” as described in the book; to be able to add to the bill of indictment against him that he is also, in some very fundamental way, anti-Semitic and “pro-fascist” is a pleasure even to a scientist, especially since the authors of The Authoritarian Personality seem quite oblivious to authoritarianism on the political left, and so set a precedent for studying authoritarianism without need for unpleasant self-examination.

This is quite a mixed bag of incentives, and not all of them apply to everyone. As we shall see, many who took over where the authors of The Authoritarian Personality left off were interested in overcoming the faults of their theory; others, interested chiefly in confirming the theory, may have served to perpetuate those faults.

_____________

III

We Now have before us an excellent volume summing up the first four years of the work in criticism and elaboration of the concepts of The Authoritarian Personality (Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality,” edited by Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda; Glencoe, Illinois, The Free Press, 279 pp., $4.50). It may be safely said that no important work in American social science has been so well served by its critics. The criticism is sharp and on the whole just, and is unrestrained by those considerations for the personal feelings of colleagues and of the sponsoring institution that so often blunt criticism—not that the authors are inconsiderate, but, as we have said, the major responsibility for the book is borne by a group of émigré scholars, and both the over-all editor (Max Horkheimer) and one of the authors (T. W. Adorno) have since returned to Germany; and the sponsoring institution has encouraged criticism by making it amply clear that it was interested in the studies not as received knowledge or doctrine, but as a pioneer and catalytic contribution to a continuing search for truth on a central problem of modern society.¹ In a sense, the character and the scope of the criticism are the highest tribute to the value of the study: it is in a class by itself in the field, if the extensiveness, keenness, and quality of the analytic and critical research it has stimulated is any measure.

Despite the fact that it is made up of five different studies by different writers, this volume is so fully representative of what can be said in criticism and in support of the original volume, and of the subsequent work devoted to its thesis, that the best thing we can do is to describe the contents of these essays in order.

_____________

The first essay—“Authoritarianism: ‘Right’ and ‘Left,’” by Edward A. Shils—takes up the important question of the political orientation of The Authoritarian Personality, and the way this affected the actual empirical work. Mr. Shils points out that the “Right-Left” spectrum that summed up the range of political thought in the 19th century has been obscured by the rise of Bolshevism, which is not “Left,” out of the Left, and the rise of fascism, which is not “Right,” out of the Right. Those under the influence of Marxist thinking in all its forms have tried to preserve the 19th-century view by arguing that Bolshevism is (or was)really the heir of socialism and other democratic working-class movements, extreme, to be sure, and modified by the peculiar conditions of Russia, while fascism was really only the servant of “big business.” The fact that the two have, in point of realities and contemporary experience, steadily approximated each other, and that their relations to the historic programs of Left and Right have by now become purely historical, if that, has made little impression on those political analysts influenced by Marx.

Mr. Shils asserts that The Authoritarian Personality is an instance of this “steadfast adherence to the Right-Left polarity” in the face of all evidence. This polarity he finds present not only “in the general interpretive chapters . . . but in the severely empirical chapters. . . . The entire team of investigators proceeds as if there were a unilinear scale of political and social attitudes at the extreme right of which stands the Fascist . . . and at the other end what the authors call the complete democrat, who actually holds the views of the non-Stalinist Leninist.” This is a rather strong and uncompromising statement, but Mr. Shils, in expanding it, properly modifies it; the complete democrat of The Authoritarian Personality, it turns out, if we examine the views he is expected to support, is the kind of person who believes “the Wallaceite clichés to which [in the late 40’s] Communists and fellow-travelers gave their assent, as well as persons of more humane sentiment. . . .”

Thus some of the statements offered for “true” or “false” answers on the PEC-scale, which serves to divide conservatives from liberals, read as follows:

It is the responsibility of the entire society, through its government, to guarantee everyone adequate housing, income, and leisure.

The only way to provide adequate medical care is through some program of socialized medicine.

It is essential after the war to maintain or increase the income taxes on corporations and private individuals.

Labor unions should become stronger by being politically active and by publishing labor newspapers to be read by the general public.

If America had more men like Henry Wallace in office we would get along much better.

(It is only fair to point out that on the final form of this scale, which is the one used in the study, the Wallace item is dropped, and the labor union item much milder.)

Mr. Shils asserts: “The failure to discriminate the substantially different types of outlook which could be called liberal, liberal collectivist, radical, Marxist, etc. . . . flows from the authors’ failure to perceive the distinctions between totalitarian Leninism . . . humanitarianism, and New Deal interventionism.” Mr. Shils then goes on to point out that there are really great similarities between the authoritarian ideology tested by the F-scale, and the authoritarianism of Communism. Thus in both we find a great stress on the importance of secret plotting in the way the world runs, though one group believes the plotters are the Elders of Zion and the other believes they are the bankers of Wall Street. (And, as recent events have shown, the mythology of the “Left” can be almost as anti-Semitic as that of the “Right.”) Both take a mystical and irrational view of the world, though in one case it may be expressed in a belief in astrology and the power of blood, and in the other in an absolute adherence to the world of Marx and Lenin, called “science.” Both emphasize the importance of discipline, strong and fearless leaders, untiring work against the vermin (“fascist vermin” is one of the pet Communist phrases) who are undermining society, and so on.

_____________

However, Mr. Shils does not quite satisfy us when he tries to show just how the failure to see these points of identity between “Left” and “Right” affects the actual scientific undertaking. He would have been helped, I think, had he studied an earlier and to my mind superior analysis of the political outlook of The Authoritarian Personality—“Prejudice in the Catastrophic Perspective,” by Paul Kecskemeti (COMMENTARY, March 1951). Thus Mr. Shils’s main argument is that a number of leftist authoritarians can actually be detected in the ‘low” group selected, on the basis of their performance on the questionnaires, for further detailed study; yet the authors of The Authoritarian Personality hardly noticed their existence. But he does not seem to realize that the individuals selected for intensive study were picked not on the basis of their performance on the F-scale, measuring authoritarian tendencies, but only on the basis of their performance on the E-scale, which measures anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism alone, not authoritarianism.

Now the authors of The Authoritarian Personality can answer: if, as a matter of fact, Communists come out low on the E-scale, they are properly a subject of study together with all others who come out low. Our aim in studying the low-prejudice and high-prejudice groups as a unit was to see what else in the way of attitudes and what in the way of personality was associated with prejudice. In other words—if there are persons low on prejudice who are authoritarians, our study will reveal them. As a matter of fact, they can continue, we do refer to “rigid lows,” a group low on the Fscale yet showing the same character of rigidity in the way they hold on to their liberal views that the highs show in holding on to their views. Further, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality may answer to Shils, you have shown a strong resemblance between the expressed views of the rightist authoritarian, and the underlying ideology of Leninism. Yet this ideology on the whole remains hidden; it is certainly not exposed to the ordinary fellow-traveler, and probably not very clear to the ordinary party member. How then is an ordinary questionnaire to find this ideology? It will find—as it does—those who believe in liberal clichés and are used by others who actually adhere to the leftist authoritarian ideology. But these latter, even if they fell into the group we studied, would disavow this ideology.

_____________

Technically, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality are covered. But there are two important answers to this argument, an argument which in essence justifies a failure to make important political distinctions by pleading the limitations of one kind of scientific procedure. These answers were presented by Mr. Kecskemeti. First, he pointed out that all the attitudes associated at a particular moment in time (in this case the period of the Western alliance with Russia, and its afterglow) with an attitude we favor—that is, tolerance—are in effect idealized by The Authoritarian Personality. If at a given moment the most tolerant people are the supporters of Wallace’s Progressive party, can we argue that we should be against those people who are against the members of the Progressive party? For one thing, the relation may be accidental and not inevitable and organic. (As a matter of fact, no study of the relation between attitudes and personality has yet, I believe, solved the problem of distinguishing ideology—the views someone picks up—from character—the orientations that are basic to a person.) Since

he wrote his article, events have supported Mr. Kecskemeti’s sharp criticism. For the extreme right in this country has in recent years been very careful to avoid all signs of anti-Semitism—which may indicate that anti-Semitism is less basic to an extreme rightist position than the authors of The Authoritarian Personality believed. And at the same time, as we all know, in the last few years the Communist parties throughout the world have at times adopted a position indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.

Mr. Kecskemeti’s second point was the necessity of considering the dynamics of history. If we get more militant liberals of the type admired by the authors of The Authoritarian Personality, it does not follow that prejudice will diminish but, more likely, that there will be a polarization of social tendencies into two extremes, creating a situation likely to produce more prejudice and making the position of the Jews more dangerous. Unquestionably, there were far more “militant liberals,” in the sense in which the term is used in The Authoritarian Personality, in Germany in 1933 than there have ever been in the United States.

To these criticisms, I am afraid the authors of The Authoritarian Personality can only plead guilty, falling back to a more limited and more defensible position. They have not fully shown the relation between authoritarianism and ethnocentrism; this turned out to be a more complicated one than they imagined. Rather, as Mr. Shils asserts and they might well admit, they have only studied one form of authoritarianism—which Mr. Shils properly describes as “nativism,” the outlook exemplified by the fly-by-night anti-Semitic sheet and by all those who are susceptible to its arguments.

_____________

Mr. Shils’s article offers one further important criticism of The Authoritarian Personality. He argues that it is not possible to estimate the probability of fascism in the United States, which is one interest of the authors, by studying the nature and distribution of the authoritarian personality, for there is, he convincingly shows, no necessary relation between personality and policy. Policy will be carried on by institutions (parties, governments) regardless of the individual personalities that make them up. More, the success or failure of a policy—like fascism—is dependent not on the number of those with personalities presumed to be related to it, but on social conditions, and on success in perpetuating a certain line through organization, which knows how to involve and tie together people of many kinds of characteristics and temperaments.

Indeed, Mr. Shils makes the interesting point that it is just because the leaders of American “nativism” are examples of the “authoritarian personality” that they are unable to be successful. Some of the characteristics of this personality, as we have seen, are great distrust of others, rigidity and mechanization of thought, weakness in understanding oneself and others, and various other traits deadly to one’s capacity as a political leader. Harold Lasswell, who has pioneered in the study of the relations between political leadership and personality, argues to the same effect in another essay in this volume. He believes it is not likely that leaders, whether democratic or totalitarian, will be themselves authoritarians: leaders need to be strong and impressive individuals. The authoritarian personality is more likely to be found among the followers of political movements and in bureaucratic positions; the political skills needed by democratic leaders and totalitarian leaders alike do not seem, in our experience, to be of the authoritarian variety.

One can only conclude that much more work is necessary on persons in their character as political men, both as leaders and followers, something which Professor Lasswell has been advocating for years.

_____________

The second essay in the book is a lengthy methodological critique by Herbert H. Hyman and Paul B. Sheatsley, who are known as acute practitioners and critics of the techniques of public opinion research. They proceed systematically and in detail through all the phases of the work described in The Authoritarian Personality, making many sharp criticisms.

In some cases I think they go too far, for example, in their feeling that the records of the interviews have been over-analyzed. Thus, T. W. Adorno, discussing an interview in which the subject had spoken of the Jews as “a ticklish problem,” had written: “The term ‘problem’ is taken over from the sphere of science and is used to give the impression of searching, responsible deliberation. By referring to a problem, one implicitly claims personal aloofness. . . . This, of course, is an excellent rationalization for prejudice.” Hyman and Sheatsley, taking issue with this, assert “. . . the very phrase, ‘the Jewish problem,’ or ‘Negro problem,’ is in such common usage that it has none of the properties imputed to it here.” Now they are right in saying that the use of the term “the Negro problem” could not be interpreted as Adorno does, because there is a “Negro problem”—there are debates in Congress, the Supreme Court, in the press, and so on. But Adorno is right in realizing that the Jews are not a problem in this sense, and have not been in Western democratic countries since the beginning of the 19th century. It is only those who want to make them a “problem” who are likely to use such a phrase. Here, as elsewhere in their lengthy critique, Hyman and Sheatsley, 1 think, show the influence of their involvement with public opinion research, which, because it must deal with scores of interviewers and coders and thousands of respondents, cannot afford such fine analysis, but must rather analyze the gross characteristics of large numbers of people.

On the other hand, it is precisely their knowledge of public opinion research which leads them to what I believe are two important and potentially fruitful criticisms of The Authoritarian Personality.

1. The group studied, as we have seen, consisted mostly of college students and middle-class adults. Now The Authoritarian Personality does not generalize to the whole American population on the basis of this particular group. What it does say, however, is that the relations that are found between sets of attitudes in this group will be found in people in general. Thus if it finds in its limited sample that ethnocentric individuals are authoritarian, it tends to assume it has found a general relationship between authoritarianism and ethnocentrism. However, the middle class is different from the working class: not only in the attitudes it holds, but in the way these attitudes are related to each other. Leo Srole, in a study of Springfield, Massachusetts, found, as a matter of fact, that the relation ‘between scores on the F-scale and prejudice was greater for the college-educated than for the high-school-educated, and was really quite small in those with only elementary school education. That is, in this latter group there were many authoritarians who were not ethnocentric, and vice versa. The relation found in The Authoritarian Personality, it seems, holds only for the better educated.
2. The Authoritarian Personality, finding a correlation between authoritarianism and group prejudice, assumes that the two are related. But it is always possible in this type of study that there is a third factor independently related to the first two in such a way that if it were held constant it would explain the differences. For example: one may find that Jews earn more than non-Jews, and explain the difference in psychological terms (as The Authoritarian Personality explains the difference between those prejudiced and those not prejudiced); but if one compares city Jews with city non-Jews, and rural Jews with rural non-Jews, this difference in income may disappear; the general superiority in income of Jews over non-Jews may simply reflect the fact that Jews have a higher proportion of city-dwellers.

Hyman and Sheatsley argue in the same way, from a number of studies, that the prejudiced ate differentiated from the unprejudiced not only by coming out higher on the F-scale, but by having less education, and they therefore suggest that authoritarianism, as tested by the F-scale, is Something produced by lack of education: “As one examines the interview excerpts in the text, one is continually and vividly struck by the fact that some of the differences obtained, which are treated as determinants of ethnocentrism, seem actually mere reflections of formal education. For example, one of the factors found to differentiate the ethnocentric most significantly is a conventionality with respect to sex. . . . It is shown that high scorers emphasize conventional virtues in a mate, and the authors state: ‘In contrast . . . the low-scoring subject takes a much more individualized attitude, as shown in the following [quotation]: ‘She has to be intelligent, mature, emotionally stable, have adequate physiological characteristics. . . . She should have a maximum of femininity, since we’re all bisexual. You can think of it in terms of a polyfactorial setup. . . .’ It seems strange [continue Hyman and Sheatsley] for the authors to follow this quotation with the remark: ‘The preceding description . . . reveals a conception of real people.’ . . . It is later noted that high-scorers are more likely to explain phenomena in terms of heredity, physical or accidental factors, whereas low-scorers tend in general toward socio-psychological explanations. Again, one thinks immediately that this is a common correlate of formal education. . . .”

A number of items from the F-scale have been used in public opinion polls with national cross-sections. Hyman and Sheatsley quote some of the results, broken down by education:

There would seem to be no question, then, that there is a close relation between authoritarianism—or whatever it is that the F-scale measures—and education. (Further evidence along the same lines is reported in “Authoritarianism and Political Behavior” by Morris Janowitz and Dwayne Marvick in the September 1953 Public Opinion Quarterly.) But by the same token, there is no question that more than education is involved, for 14 to 36 per cent of the college-educated will agree with one or another of these five sentiments from the F-scale. In addition, this major criticism of Hyman and Sheatsley contradicts, to some extent, their earlier one. If the sample is defective in being composed predominantly of college students and middle-class persons, then the differences in authoritarianism found in the sample cannot be due to the traits the subjects have in common, such as a college education.

What seems to be involved, more than the mere formal number of years of education—which is certainly important in itself—is another factor that we might call “intellectuality” or “sophistication.” We all know that two college seniors with the same amount of education will differ enormously in the degree to which they reflect the ideas current among the intellectually sophisticated. But then what will determine who becomes sophisticated and who does not? Different backgrounds, to some extent, but I think we are ultimately driven back to psychological factors. Certainly the authors of The Authoritarian Personality were wrong in not testing more extensively for social correlates to authoritarianism and ethnocentrism. But now, after these more extensive tests have been made, authoritarianism still stands as a psychological reality, a constellation of traits that can be located with many different tests, not only with the F-scale used in The Authoritarian Personality.

_____________

This, at any rate, is the conclusion of the next paper in this volume, which consists of a review of the most important work that has been done on the authoritarian personality since the publication of the book. Richard Christie, the author of this chapter, shows first of all that the psychological type described by The Authoritarian Personality as authoritarian is really that, and is really closely linked to fascism. Thus, a study by H. V. Dicks of German prisoners of war, comparing Nazis with the apolitical and the anti-Nazis, shows that the same differences in personality turned up as in the study of California college students. Jerome Himelhoch, in a doctoral thesis, used the F-scale to distinguish authoritarians from non-authoritarians, then gave his subjects Rorschach tests. By comparing the Rorschach records of “highs” and “lows,” he was able to develop a scoring system which differentiated them, and which was successfully used on other samples to divide highs from lows. He then scored the Rorschach records of seven top Nazi leaders tried at Nuremberg (Goering, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Streicher, Ley, Frank, and Doenitz) and all scored high—just as his authoritarian students from New York University did.

In another study, Joan Eager and M. B. Smith tested a group of camp counselors with the F-scale. They then interviewed the children under them by means of a “guess who” test: which counselor treats you as if you were a baby?—and so on. Sure enough—those counselors who came out high on the F-scale were also revealed to be more authoritarian in the eyes of the children.

In another study, the F-scale was given to college students; then, as Christie writes, “each high scorer was paired with a low scorer and the two were required to spend twenty minutes together in which they were asked to discuss any aspect of radio, television, or the movies. . . . After this, the F-scale was given again but now each student was told to answer it in the way in which he thought the student he had just been talking with would. The second time they took the test the lows were able to almost approximate the scores of the highs; but the highs, in their second taking of the test, came out with scores scarcely lower than the first time.” This, it is believed, demonstrates the rigidity of the highs, their greater projectivity (they see other people as themselves), and their lack of insight. Other tests, some as ingenious (and difficult to describe) as this one, also give results that seem to bear out the conclusions of The Authoritarian Personality. The question also arises whether in comparing highs and lows we are only coming out with differences in intelligence. This problem had been taken up in The Authoritarian Personality and a low correlation had been found between I.Q.’s and low scores on the F-scale, too low to really explain the differences. Christie has gone into the matter, and has found that this relation is rather greater than The Authoritarian Personality indicates. Obviously we are dealing with very much the same things as the previous correlations between education and authoritarianism. The F-scale is surely tapping, in large measure, intelligence, education, and intellectual sophistication. Yet it must also be tapping something else, if in groups of homogeneous education and intelligence, more or less, it serves to differentiate persons from one another.

_____________

Just what this something tapped by the F-scale is will be coming out more clearly as a result of some ingenious investigations, some of which are reported—not very adequately, or in sufficient detail—in the last chapter of this book by Else Frenkel-Brunswik, one of the original authors of The Authoritarian Personality. We have seen what difficulties arise in trying to use opinions to differentiate persons of different personalities. If we find many opinions, some hardly related—like anti-Semitism and a belief in astrology—in the same person, we are tempted to deep psychological explanations. To a large extent, both opinions may be the product of a limited intelligence or education—but suppose both appear in per-sons of adequate intelligence and education?

The problem has become one of getting tests of personality that do not have any relation to tests of opinion. Now rigidity is considered a basic characteristic of the authoritarian personality—he is rigid in his thinking because of his authoritarian upbringing (discipline, lack of love, etc.), because of his fear of facing his true aggressive feelings toward parents and parent-like figures of authority, and so on. Certain tests of rigidity, independent of opinion, are now being used with interesting and provocative results. Thus M. Rokeach has devised a test of simple problem-solving, in which a “set” is established—the subject is shown how to solve a certain problem, a few more problems of the same type are then offered to him, and finally he is offered a problem which, though solvable by the technique he has been using, can be solved much more directly by another technique. Now this might seem to be a simple test of intelligence, but Rokeach asserts that scores of rigidity based on it are highly correlated with ethnocentrism, and are only slightly related to intelligence. In the same way, Dr. Frenkel-Brunswik herself has found in certain experiments in perception in children—unfortunately, these have not yet been reported in adequate detail—that the ethnocentric are “intolerant of ambiguity.” Various other experiments along the same line have been reported.

Out of these ingenious experiments in perception and modes of thinking we see emerging the same type, more or less, that was defined by the original F-scale. And even when tests quite divorced from opinion are used to detect this type, it is found to be prejudiced. These studies seem to me to be proving the central contention of The Authoritarian Personality: that there is a specific type, the authoritarian personality, characterized by rigidity and unable to think in subtle and complicated ways, and that this psychological type tends to be prejudiced. It is intriguing to discover, from Dr. Frenkel-Brunswik’s chapter, that the Nazi psychologist Jaensch, who was an ingenious laboratory worker, described the same type, by way of similar experiments in perception—and idealized it. This was to him the pure, peasant, racial type, as against more “cosmopolitan” psychological varieties.

We are still only at the beginning of these investigations. The Authoritarian Personality, as I have said, has been well served by its criticism and if one looks only at the criticism, almost nothing seems to stand up of the original study. Yet what does stand up is the most important: the steady current of research into the problem of authoritarianism and prejudice which is being carried on by many able and ingenious scholars, which research, as far as one can now see, promises to validate—though at the same time to modify greatly—the central thesis of The Authoritarian Personality: that such a personality structure exists, and persists. But more important, it offers a key that promises to extend our knowledge of race and group prejudice. This department will carry further reports on the research as it becomes public.

_____________

¹ This volume of criticism is the second in a series called “Continuities in Social Research,” started with the idea of encouraging really long and full analyses and critiques of major works in the social sciences. The first volume in the series was devoted to The American Soldier, a vast and on the whole empty work published in 1949. It is revealing of what sociologists like to call “power relations” when they are talking about other people that scarcely a word that could be considered criticism was breathed in this first volume of “critical” essays.