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.

"[1] 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.

[2][need quotation to verify][3] Though criticized at the time for bias and methodology,[4][5] 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.

"[6] 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.

[7][8] 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.

[9] 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.

This labor study, which was never published, has been identified by some scholars as the "conduit" between Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment[10] and The Authoritarian Personality.

[11][9]: 714 The research was conducted during and after World War II and the Holocaust—the attempted genocide of European Jews by Adolf Hitler's National Socialist regime when significant concerns about the origins of fascism and authoritarianism had been raised.

[12] 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. were thus motivated by a desire[citation needed] to identify and measure factors that were believed to contribute to antisemitic and fascist traits.

The Authoritarian Personality was based in part on earlier Frankfurt School analyses undertaken in Germany, but with a few key changes.

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.

[2]: 192 [18] This hypothesis was consistent with prevailing psychological theories of the time, and Frenkel-Brunswik reported some preliminary support, but empirical data have generally not confirmed this prediction.

Based on the scores on the questionnaires, a smaller number of participants was elected for clinical interviews and administration of the Thematic Apperception Test.

[a] "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" [20]: 48 [Critique point]: The individuals were sampled from formal organizations.

[20]: 48 The items were phrased in a superficially moderate language, which nonetheless conveyed the saliency of Jews to the respondent and a negative sentiment towards them [20]: 49 Split-half reliability for the scale was .91 (high).

The items were written in accordance to fascist propaganda materials as well as priory held TAT protocol data and interviews with ethnocentric participants.

[21] In a large number of psychometric instruments, they showed that the tendency to respond affirmatively (Yeasayers) or negatively (Naysayers) is a relevant psychological factor despite the content of specific questionnaires.

Such groups included: German cosmetic factory workers (Cohn and Carsch, 1954); English fascists and communists, compared to 'politically neutral' soldiers (Coulter, 1953).

[22][need quotation to verify] 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.

In 1993, over a decade later, the latter point was also criticized by Billings et al.[29][better source needed] The book concludes that right-wing, authoritarian governments produce hostility towards racial, religious, or ethnic minorities.

Conservative social critic Christopher Lasch[32] argued that by equating mental health with left-wing politics and associating right-wing politics with an invented "authoritarian" pathology, the book'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".

The Authoritarian Personality remains widely cited in the social sciences and continues to inspire research interest today.

[In spite of that] there is a substantial residual probability that the chief conclusion of the questionnaire work is correct: attitudes of Anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism, and authoritarianism do generally go together.

The E and F scales are found to be significantly correlated in a wide array of samples and predictions of relationships with attitudinal measures are almost invariably confirmed" [20]: 76 Informational notes Citations 1969 edition available to borrow on Open Library