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Authoritarian personalities fuel fascism
The 1950 Explanation
The book was The Authoritarian Personality, written to answer what kind of person gets swept up in Nazism and its aftermath. The term describes someone who feels most secure when submitting to an authoritarian leader. It does not describe someone who wants to become one.
Individuals Add Up
Put a bunch of those people together in a Nazi party, and the fascism takes off and draws in more like-minded people. The explanation rests on individuals with problems, and the problems add up.
Tajfel and Turner's View
Psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner, working in the 1970s, located the cause somewhere else: the group itself. Under their social identity theory, the fact that people are together generates the in group and out group behavior. Being in a group also brings benefits, including a sense of belonging that some argue evolved to keep humans in groups, a sense of purpose, and a sense of self-worth.
How did Adorno's team measure authoritarianism?
The Berkeley researchers built a questionnaire called the F-scale, with the F standing for fascism. Respondents rated their agreement with statements on topics such as obedience to authority and conventional morality, and the scores were compared with measures of prejudice. The authors drew on Freudian ideas and linked the personality to rigid, punitive childhoods.
What flaws did critics find in the F-scale?
Nearly every item was worded so that agreeing signaled authoritarianism, so people who tend to agree with any statement scored high regardless of their beliefs. Critics also argued that the scale captured only authoritarianism of the political right. Psychologist Bob Altemeyer built a revised right-wing authoritarianism scale in the 1980s to address problems like these.
Why did Tajfel doubt the personality explanation?
Tajfel, who lost much of his family in the Holocaust, argued that the sheer scale of participation was hard to explain by pointing to a few disturbed individuals. He thought ordinary social categories could produce discrimination. His minimal group experiments tested that idea by sorting ordinary teenagers from Bristol schools into groups at random.
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