Authoritarian personality

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The theory of the authoritarian personality describes a typical pattern of attitudes and personality traits that are supposed to form a potential for anti-democratic and fascist attitudes and behavior. While the facets of authoritarian behavior or authoritarianism are described in a similar way by many authors, the theoretical explanations of how these authoritarian traits arise through specific psychological processing patterns of important emotional experiences during childhood and adolescence ( puberty and adolescence ) differ.

Concept history

Today's understanding of the authoritarian personality was mainly shaped by the study The Authoritarian Personality published in 1950 by Theodor W. Adorno , Else Frenkel-Brunswik , Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford . The study was part of a large research project at the University of California, Berkeley , on the psychological basis of prejudices , especially those of an anti-Semitic nature.

This was preceded by Wilhelm Reich's psychoanalytical and socially critical examination of fascism and National Socialism . He asserted a fundamental connection between authoritarian drive suppression and fascist ideology. The authoritarian family is the nucleus of the authoritarian state. In his theoretical and empirical work , Erich Fromm developed the basic features of the authoritarian character more extensively and precisely than Reich , especially in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom . Many of these components can be recognized in the approach of the American project. In addition, as early as 1929/1930, Fromm had carried out a large-scale social science survey on the authoritarian character and other forms of social character in the Berlin Workers and Employees Survey using the questionnaire method, which was seldom used at the time.

As early as 1936, Fromm had written two fundamental contributions to theoretical and empirical social psychology for the collective work of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research Studies on Authority and Family . Max Horkheimer wrote a general cultural and family-sociological contribution on the topic of authority. Perhaps he emphasized a little more than Fromm, and like Reich, external social repression. In contrast, the conception of an “authoritarian syndrome” in the chapter Elements of Anti-Semitism in the frequently cited dialectic of the Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (1944/1969) did not play a central role. Nevertheless, Adorno emphasized the connection between his part of the investigation and the dialectic of the Enlightenment.

The history of the term has since been shaped by the competition between different explanatory approaches:

  • From a psychoanalytical point of view, the authoritarian character develops when aggressive, instinctual and other needs of the child are overly suppressed by parental demands for obedience and ultimately directed at other people, socially weaker people or minorities;
  • From a sociological point of view, the pressure to adapt to repressive social conditions and hierarchical structures is primarily held responsible;
  • From a social-psychological point of view, the thought patterns adopted by the family and other social reference groups are emphasized, i.e. attitudes and prejudices due to the lack of or incorrect knowledge about other groups of people;
  • In terms of developmental psychology, conflicts of authority in a failed detachment from the parents result in insufficient identification and independence, so that an authoritarian-structured dependency persists;
  • From the perspective of differential psychology, the interaction of a willingness to behave (disposition) and a "suitable" trigger situation is important in order to make it clear that authoritarian behavior does not show itself uniformly, but depends on the individual disposition and the respective situation.

Research project on the authoritarian personality

In 1943, the social psychologist R. Nevitt Sanford began a research project on anti-Semitism ( Berkeley Public Opinion Study , University of California ) in Berkeley with the psychiatrist and psychologist Daniel J. Levinson . In the studies on prejudice that began with the emigrated Frankfurt Institute for Social Research , Sanford became research director in 1944 together with the philosopher and social theorist Theodor W. Adorno . The psychoanalytically trained psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik was a key contributor and co-author. Studies in Prejudice emerged as the American Jewish Committee's academic contribution to the US war effort. In the background was the question of the anti-Semitism latent in the USA, as manifested, for example, in the prejudice that Jews avoided military service, but were the greatest beneficiaries of the war.

The book on the Authoritarian Personality was delayed until 1950, although most of the manuscripts were ready by mid-1947. There are different representations and references about the reasons: disputes due to financial difficulties, discussions about the identification of author shares, about book titles and foreword. Because there was temporarily no more funding, Adorno stopped work on his chapters and only completed them in 1949 before the emigrated institute returned to Frankfurt. The book, which was written not least with a view to National Socialism, was never fully translated into German.

Research conception and theory

The authors wondered why certain individuals accept anti-Semitic and ethnocentric ideas and others do not. The ethnocentric and other prejudices are not simply wrong and conformist opinions that are easy to correct, but these have deeper and less accessible motives. Those who are treated in an authoritarian manner as a toddler by their parents later develop an authoritarian character themselves, which can hardly be influenced and which is characterized by hostility towards others or inferiors.

This research project was primarily concerned with psychological variables and at the core with psychoanalytic explanatory hypotheses with the practical, albeit utopian-seeming intention of being able to contribute to the democratic process. First, the main features of the authoritarian personality should be recorded: rigid adherence to conventions , power focus and humility , destructiveness and cynicism . Beyond the mere description of the prejudices, developmental psychology should investigate the fundamental motives, emotional experiences and character traits from which such thought patterns arise. A distinction was made between the opinions expressed and the underlying dynamically connected (and unconscious) structures of the individual. The authors tried to combine methods of social psychology and the psychoanalytically oriented dynamic character theory, interpretative and statistical procedures.

According to the theory of the authoritarian personality, people who cling to fascist ideologies are characterized by an improper, prejudicial view of social and political conditions, including anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism . From a psychoanalytical point of view, a - largely unconscious - hostility is directed towards other people. This projection relates primarily to ethnic , political or religious minorities , especially since fewer social sanctions are to be feared or such prejudices already exist. Since the fascist groups received support mainly from the right-wing or conservative camp, parts of the conservative attitude were also seen as an expression of this personality structure. Standardized questionnaires were used as research methods: the AS scale (for “anti-Semitism”), the E scale (for “ethnocentrism”) and the PEC scale (for “political-economic conservatism”). The underlying authoritarian personality structure should be measured using the new California F scale (for “implicit anti-democratic tendencies and fascism potential”). It is made up of the following subscales:

  • Conventionalism - clinging to what is traditional
  • Authoritarian Submission - submission to authority
  • Authoritarian aggression - tendency to punish violations of traditional values
  • Anti-Intraception - rejection of the subjective, imaginative and aesthetic
  • Superstition and Stereotype - superstition, cliché, categorization and fate determinism
  • Power and Toughness - identification with those in power, overemphasis on the socially advocated characteristics of the self
  • Destructiveness and Cynicism - general hostility, reduction of other people
  • Projectivity - predisposition to believe in the existence of evil in the world and to project unconscious emotional impulses outwards
  • Sex - Exaggerated concerns about sexual happenings

The authors gave a detailed account of how they developed the questionnaire scales and evaluated the survey. More than 2000 people were questioned, 1518 of them with the scales in their final version. About 40 groups of different origins were included, primarily from California and mainly from the middle class , including a relatively large number of students. For the very detailed interviews, 40 women and 40 men were finally selected because of extremely high or extremely low values ​​in the questionnaire scales AS, E and PEC, i.e. people with very pronounced prejudices and those with only minor prejudices, with a similar distribution in terms of age and gender and religious affiliation was sought. The interview included the subjects of politics, economy, religion, minorities, some with indirect questions, as well as the thematic apperception test TAT by Henry Murray , which was supposed to explore latent or unconscious motives, conflicts and attitudes.

The expected connection between the results of the F-scale and the degree of anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism and political-economic conservatism was largely confirmed. This was also evident in the interviews. In other respects the publication seems incomplete. The extent to which the interview, questionnaire and TAT agree or contradict one another has hardly been examined. There was hardly any discussion of whether the interview and the TAT are suitable for shedding light on the underlying motives and dynamics of the early childhood family imprint. The dependencies on socio-demographic characteristics and samples were seen, but insufficiently considered. There is a lack of precise information on the relative frequency of the syndromes in the groups examined and in-depth analyzes of the relationship with sociodemographic variables. Nevertheless, the book contains a variety of methodological innovations, scientifically stimulating empirical findings and theoretical perspectives.

Modernity of the research project

The book became famous not only because this social science investigation was about fascism and authoritarianism . The research approach was modern in several ways :

  • The authors combined the empirical social psychology of attitude research with differential psychology and empirical personality research, borrowed their central explanatory hypotheses from psychoanalytic theory and also included sociological concepts.
  • The research was based on an interactionist-dynamic concept. The authoritarian syndrome is not seen as a rigid quality nor as an exclusively situation-dependent behavior. This is a modern, middle way between property theory and situationism, between differential psychology and sociology.
  • The distinction between attitude (thought pattern) and the underlying character structure requires a combination of several methods: the innovative F-scale, the in-depth interview and the TAT to uncover hidden desires, fears and defense mechanisms .
  • The empirical approach was very broad and encompassed large groups of people, using both statistical and interpretive methods.
  • This psychological research had a social science framework; It was basic research on the explanation of fascism with a politically committed view of social conditions and its practical significance for democratic education .

The research work is often seen as a great pioneering achievement in social research . From a psychological point of view, the concept of the authoritarian personality is probably the single most important contribution to the understanding of the development towards totalitarianism .

Proportions of the four main authors

Sanford played a major role in the theoretical conception and method development of the scales. The development of the fascism scale (California-F-Scale) , which he primarily describes, forms a central part of the book. This F-scale should be used in group studies to assess the individual's susceptibility to fascism based on the character structure. Levinson was primarily responsible for the scales on ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism and political-economic ideology. Frenkel-Brunswik also played a part in this scale development, but was primarily responsible for the construction and depth psychological analysis of the interviews. The interview served to gain insight into the underlying psychological conditions and also to check the validity of the questionnaire scales. In addition to Frenkel-Brunswik, Adorno had a share in the evaluation of the interviews and, like this one, wrote about recognizable political-psychological types, but more sociologically oriented. He started from the grouping of people with particularly high or low values ​​in the F-scale and interpreted the interview material according to topics such as “the functional character of anti-Semitism”, “the imaginary enemy” or “anti-Semitism for what?”.

Reception and criticism

In the United States, The Authoritarian Personality found great interest and recognition of intentions. The professional criticism was directed partly against the psychoanalytic attempts at explanation, partly against the lack of representativeness of the survey. It was often criticized that a sufficient distinction was not made between the authoritarian personality and ordinary conservatism . In addition, authoritarianism exists not only in the right but also in the left extreme of political attitudes - as Hans Jürgen Eysenck and Milton Rokeach have pointed out. Edward Shils argued that the study was based on an outdated right-left political division.

The critical debate about the components (subscales) of the F-scale continues to this day. These appear psychologically heterogeneous and are individually different, so they do not appear as a unit. The term syndrome expresses that it is a pattern of related characteristics that are typical, even if U. individual aspects are missing. Socio-economic status, level of education, social class and other characteristics could perhaps more easily explain some of the relationships observed. Despite methodological inadequacies, the theory of the authoritarian personality has had a major impact on subsequent research.

In Germany, under the conditions of the post-war years, it was to be foreseen that empirical social research on potentially fascist thought patterns would trigger offense and resistance in many people. The tendency of German historians, sociologists and psychologists to grapple scientifically with the German past, at least in the first few years, has been presented on various occasions. The reviews of the book were ambiguous, sometimes polemical.

Authoritarian studies after 1950

At the Institute for Social Research (IfS) between 1951 and 1971 (Adorno was managing director from 1953 to 1969), two major investigations into authoritarianism and anti-Semitism were undertaken: the so-called group experiment (Pollock 1955) and the development and application of the Frankfurt authoritarianism scale ( A-scale) in a large and several smaller opinion polls (von Freyhold 1971). In addition, there were smaller opinion polls, u. a. the survey of 232 people in Frankfurt about current anti-Semitic incidents (Schönbach 1961).

Attitude research based on group discussions should enable access to the “non-public opinion” of the German average population and indirectly also capture anti-Semitic tendencies. In the theoretical chapter written by Adorno, however, the concept of “authoritarian personality” does not appear at all. This study was methodologically much narrower than the American model. What was new, however, was the semi-standardized group discussion, which was methodologically based on similar procedures in Anglo-American market and advertising research at the time. But why should political attitudes, which are now considered socially undesirable, be captured more validly in the uncontrolled dynamics of the group situation than in individual interviews or questionnaires? Accordingly, 61 percent of the participants had to be excluded as "total silences". The large-scale project with 121 groups, 1635 people and over 6000 pages of protocol notes therefore gives the impression of a methodologically limited and unsuccessful variant of the American study.

In the opinion research project by Freyhold (1971), a representative cross-section of the population of 1989 people was surveyed in the context of the so-called Eichmann survey. There was no innovative theoretical perspective, and the Frankfurt Authoritarianism Scale was a revision of the earlier questionnaire scales. How urgent it would be for the validation of the questionnaire and for a deeper understanding of authoritarianism to investigate the NSDAP members and their followers as well as the perpetrators was not taken into account.

Rolf Wiggershaus asked whether “the resurrected IfS was not unsuitable from the start” for “the current and concrete analysis of the objective factors” (Wiggershaus 1997, p. 500). Six stated that after his return to Germany, the IfS “never regained the importance for research on authoritarianism that it had in the USA” (Six 1997, p. 226). The picture obtained from these details shows that social science research on authoritarianism began slowly in Germany and that, at least during the first two decades of the post-war period, there was no thorough, methodologically innovative and practice-relevant research. The main social psychological research projects continued to be undertaken in the USA. a. the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment or Erich Fromm's great 1974 work on the anatomy of destructiveness .

In the context of the German student movement of 1968, Adorno saw parallels between the protesting extra-parliamentary opposition and the very authoritarian structures it claimed to be fighting. He wrote to his friend Herbert Marcuse : “I take the danger of the student movement turning into fascism much more heavily than you. You would only have to look once into the manic, frozen eyes of those who, possibly referring to ourselves, turn their anger against us. "

Consequences for pedagogy

Horkheimer and Adorno emphasized in various places that their research on anti-Semitism and authoritarianism is related to democratic education . This orientation was very close in post-war Germany. Adorno saw two areas here: upbringing in childhood and general education . He dealt with this in the radio lecture on Education after Auschwitz, broadcast on April 18, 1966 :

“The demand that Auschwitz not be again is the very first thing in education. It precedes everyone else so much that I neither have to nor should justify it. I can't understand that to this day one has dealt so little with her. "

“Of course, I cannot presume to even sketch out the plan for such an education. But I would like to point out at least some nerve points. In many cases - for example in America - the authoritarian German spirit has been held responsible for National Socialism and also for Auschwitz. I think this explanation is too superficial, although with us, as in many other European countries, authoritarian behavior and blind authority outlast much more tenaciously than one would like to say under the conditions of formal democracy. "

“But I would like to emphasize emphatically that the return or non-return of fascism is not a psychological question, but a social one. I only talk so much about the psychological because the other, more essential moments are largely removed from the will of education, if not from the intervention of the individual at all. "

Adorno's own theses and suggestions for education after Auschwitz are therefore fundamental but general. The program of a new pedagogy, i.e. an anti-authoritarian education, was based on other authors: Wilhelm Reich , Ludwig Marcuse and Alexander Sutherland Neill . It is noteworthy that in previous years neither Alexander Mitscherlich nor the very widespread educational psychology of Reinhard Tausch and Anne-Marie Tausch used the term “authoritarian personality” or Erich Fromm at all. There was a great gap between the abstract social theory of the influential IfS, empirical social science, academic educational psychology and the reality of everyday school life in post-war Germany.

Recent research

Research diversity

The international research literature is unmanageable today. As early as 1993, Meloen had 2,341 publications. In Germany, the first comprehensive and method-critical discussion came from Klaus Roghmann - only in 1966. With the F-scale or similar scales, especially in the USA, numerous groups of people were examined, in Germany, for example, former members of the Waffen-SS and SS and members of the Wehrmacht , but only from 1962 to 1966 (see Steiner, Fahrenberg 2000) .

The psychological structure of political conservatism and authoritarianism is an enduring theme of attitudes researchers. The discussion also reflects the change from deep psychological, sociological to social-cognitive currents, but is stuck on old controversies. This is how Jost u. a. (2003) the ideological core of conservatism in a two-component model: resistance to change and justification of existing inequalities. Greenberg and Jonas, on the other hand, had previously claimed that the assumption of a rigid adherence to an extreme (right or left) ideology is completely sufficient ( see: political spectrum ). Other authors such as Lederer or Austria want to cover significantly more components with their authoritarianism questionnaires ( see: F-scale ). Even in the more recent, critical or positive contributions to the discussion, the abstract distinction between social attitudes and personality traits still seems to play a role (see Martin 2001, Roiser and Willig 2002, Oesterreich 2005, Rippl et al. 2000, Six 2006).

More behavioral research approaches

Detlef Oesterreich has oriented the conception of the authoritarian personality more interactively and closer to behavior. According to this, the authoritarian syndrome is the result of a socialization process that overwhelms the child when it has to seek the protection of an authority, but precisely because of this it cannot develop into an autonomous person . Children naturally identify with their parents and other powerful caregivers. Instead of becoming detached and developing into independently thinking, independent people, they remain in a fearful subordination, in an over-identification with reference persons or with ideological, political and religious reference groups. "In my previous investigations, I have tried to prove two things: 1. that political crisis situations provoke authoritarian reactions which, under certain conditions, can lead to an orientation towards politically extreme groups, and 2. that authoritarian personalities are the result of a socialization that leads to independence."

Following on from Austria's conception, the close entanglement between a personal tendency (latent disposition ) to authoritarian behavior and a social situation in everyday life suitable as a trigger condition should be examined more thoroughly. In addition, there is the special ideology , whereby authoritarian people can change their ideology, some even “tilt” between right-wing extremist and left-wing extremist. Neither the authoritarian personality traits of a person nor the social environment and its value orientation alone are decisive. Only the current social situation determines whether and how conformity and obedience are expressed, whether someone consciously dares to oppose the convictions and demands of the majority.

The American behavioral economist Karen Stenner argues that authoritarianism is not a personality trait, but should be viewed as a reaction to threats to the normative order when the “imagined 'we'” disintegrates, for example through fear of “ethnic disappearance” and immigration in Eastern Europe.

Necessary connection of perspectives

There are still objections to the concept of the authoritarian personality and criticism of the empirical studies, which are usually only based on questionnaires ( see: F-scale ) or reports and not on the observation of authoritarian behavior in everyday life. When speaking of a typical pattern of attitudes and intentions to act, this means that individual components may well be missing. Despite such reservations, it is a very important concept and the particularly pronounced forms of authoritarian personality can be recognized everywhere: unmistakable in families, in politics and business, in institutions and in everyday life. The authoritarian personality is conformist. Deviations from the "normal" are rejected. U. pursued. Individualism and liberal attitudes or cultural pluralism will not be tolerated.

In the majority of German textbooks on social psychology , research on authoritarianism is only dealt with briefly, mostly without referring to the outstanding studies in the important details, without going into current research or establishing a reference to everyday life. If publications on right-wing extremism do not even cite the terms authoritarianism, authoritarian personality or the F-scale, it can only be assumed that predominantly sociologically trained social researchers are still very reserved towards psychological explanatory hypotheses for the development of individual behavioral differences. The psychoanalytic attempts at explanation are mostly rejected and, in the sense of widespread cognitivism , the cognitive side of the extreme attitudes, i.e. the lack of knowledge, the prejudice or the distorted judgment, is seen - instead of asking about the deeper motivation , the regulation of emotions and the special family upbringing style . The exaggerated demarcation between the sociological (and socially critical) approach on the one hand and personality and developmental psychological research on the other hand is sterile in this area, because it is about mutually complementary perspectives of necessarily interactionist research . Priority remains the thorough investigation of the attitude expressed (self-assessment), the triggering situation and the actual behavior.

Today, important aspects of the authoritarian personality are often treated under the terms (right-wing) extremism , anti-Semitism or fundamentalism . Representative social science studies have repeatedly shown a large percentage of responses in the last few decades that can be interpreted as an indication of an authoritarian attitude ( e.g. SINUS study on right-wing extremism 1981; Lederer and Schmidt, 1995; Decker, Brähler 2000; Heitmeyer 2002– 2011).

literature

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  • Theodor W. Adorno: Education after Auschwitz . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1966.
  • Theodor W. Adorno: Studies on the authoritarian character (edited by Ludwig von Friedeburg). Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1973. ISBN 3-518-28782-6 (= German translation only of the contributions to Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford, 1950: The Authoritarian Personality ).
  • Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford: The Authoritarian Personality . Harper and Brothers, New York 1950. ( full text online )
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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Scientific experiences in America . In: Theodor W. Adorno: Gesammelte Schriften . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Vol. 10.2, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 702-738, here pp. 721 f.
  2. ↑ See the masthead of Studies in Prejudice “Sponsored By The American Jewish Committee”, available in full at: ajcarchives.org .
  3. ^ Rolf Wiggershaus: The Frankfurt School: history, theoretical development, political significance. C. Hanser, 1987. pp. 390 ff .; Hans-Joachim Dahms: Positivism dispute: the arguments of the Frankfurt School with logical positivism, American pragmatism and critical rationalism. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3518286587 , p. 254.
  4. ^ Source references see Fahrenberg and Steiner, 2004, Wiggershaus 1996 u. a.
  5. ^ Edward Shils: Authoritarianism 'Right' and 'Left'. In: Richard Christie, Marie Jahoda (Eds.): Studies in the Scope and Method of 'The Authoritarian Personality'. Glencoe, Ill. 1954.
  6. ↑ See Wolfgang Kraushaar (Ed.): Frankfurter Schule and student movement . Hamburg 1998, vol. 2, p. 652.
  7. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Education after Auschwitz . In: Theodor W. Adorno: Gesammelte Schriften . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Vol. 10.2, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 674–690, here p. 674.
  8. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Education after Auschwitz . In: Theodor W. Adorno: Gesammelte Schriften . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Vol. 10.2, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 674–690, here p. 677.
  9. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Education after Auschwitz . In: Theodor W. Adorno: Gesammelte Schriften . Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Vol. 10.2, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 674–690, here p. 678.
  10. ↑ Austria, 1996, p. 176.
  11. ^ Karen Stenner: The Authoritarian Dynamic , Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  12. ↑ Ivan Krastev: On the way to a majority dictatorship? In: Henrich Geiselberger (Ed.): The great regression. Frankfurt 2017, pp. 117-134, here: p. 127.