No More Learning

Another item in the scale was the following: "Every person should have a deep faith in some supernatural force higher than himself to which he gives total allegiance and whose decisions he does not question. " The hypoth- esis was that agreement with this statement, which expresses very firm belief in the supernatural and an attitude of submission toward it, would be asso- ciated with prejudice. The mean score for the 295 subjects taking Form 78 was 3? 97 and the D. P-As, 1. 26. When the item, slightly revised, was used in Form 6o of the questionnaire (N = 226) the mean score was 3. 6o and the D. P. E, r. 38. These D. P. 's are large enough to indicate that the relation of this item to ethnocentrism approaches statistical significance. The item was significantly correlated with the remainder of the scale in which it appeared, and this total scale was highly correlated with ethnocentrism.
The third item was as follows: "Sciences like chemistry, physics, and medicine have carried man very far but there are many important things that can never possibly be understood by the human mind. " It was considered that subjects in agreeing with this item conceived of a mysterious spiritual
? ETHNOCENTRISM AND RELIGIOUS A TTITUDES
realm of things with respect to which investigation was taboo and toward which their attitude was one of reverence. This outlook was expected to correlate with ethnocentrism. The mean in the case of Form 78 was 4? 35 and the D. P. As, ? 97? In the case of Form 6o, where the item appeared in a slightly revised version, the mean was 4. 98 and the D. P. E, 1. 32. Here, once again, is evidence of a relationship between a particular religious idea and ethnocentrism. This item, like the "supernatural force" item discussed above, was significantly correlated with the remainder of the scale for measuring implicit antidemocratic trends and it was employed throughout the course of the study.
These results suggest that had it been possible to express a variety of religious beliefs, ideas, and sentiments in the form of scale items, more im- pressive quantitative results bearing on the relations of religious ideology to ethnocentrism would have been obtained. This is a matter which might well be the topic of future research.
C. DISCUSSION
Belonging to or identifying oneself with a religious body in America today certainly does not mean that one thereby takes over the traditional Christian values of tolerance, brotherhood, and equality. On the contrary, it appears that these values are more firmly held by people who do not affiliate with any religious group. It may be that religious affiliation or church attendance is of little importance one way or the other in determining social attitudes, that the great majority of middle-class Americans identify themselves with some religious denomination as a matter of course, without thinking much about it. This would be in keeping with the facts that the mean scores and the variability for the large religious denominations are very similar to those found in our sample as a whole. It may be argued, however, that this conventional approach to religion expresses enough identification with the status quo, submission to external authority, and readiness to emphasize moralistically the differences between those who "belong" and those who do not, to differentiate, in terms of E score, members of the large denominations from the nonreligious and from the members of those minor groups which actually stand for trends of an opposite character. At the same time, mem- bers of the major denominations seem to differ widely among themselves with respect to trends of this kind, and where there are signs that the ac- ceptance of religion has been determined primarily by conventional or ex- ternal considerations, E score tends to go up. Thus it is that agreement between the parents in the matter of religious affiliation, a circumstance that might lessen the chances of an awakening on the part of the subject to the issues involved, and sameness of the subject's religion and that of the mother, something that might be indicative of submissiveness toward au-
? 220 THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
thority, tend to be associated with ethnocentrism. But among the members of the major denominations there are many subjects whose religion would appear to be "genuine," in the sense that it was arrived at more or less independently of external pressure and takes the form of internalized values. These subjects, it seems, tend to score low, often very low, on ethnocentrism. Subjects with this same outlook probably predominate in the low-scoring Protestant denominations and often, ? no doubt, they profess to no religious affiliation at all.
It seems that we can approach an understanding of the relations between religion and ethnocentrism by paying attention to what the acceptance or the rejection of religion means to the individual. When the problem is ap- proached from this point of view the psychological factors which appear as most important are much the same as those which came to the fore in the preceding chapters: conformity, conventionalism, authoritarian submission, determination by external pressures, thinking in ingroup-outgroup terms, and the like vs. nonconformity, independence, internalization of values, and so forth. The fragmentary data on religious ideology afforded by the scale items lend themselves to the same mode of interpretation. An attitude of com- plete submissiveness toward "supernatural forces" and a readiness to accept the essential incomprehensibility of "many important things" strongly sug- gest the persistence in the individual of infantile attitudes toward the parents, that is to say, of authoritarian submission in a very pure form. Psychological variables of the kind discussed here are investigated directly in the next chapter.
D. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Subjects who profess to some religious affiliation express more prejudice than those who do not; but mean A-SorE scores for all the large denomina- tions are close to the theoretical neutral point. The vast majority of our subjects do identify themselves with some religious group, and the variability with respect to ethnocentrism among these subjects is almost as great as it is in our sample as a whole. The factor of religious denomination does not prove to be very significant. Among the largest denominations no differ- ences of any significance appear; but Unitarians, who seem to be distin- guished by their liberalism, and a group of minor Protestant groups, in the case of which there might be some spirit of nonconformity or some lack of identification with the status quo, score lower than the others. Frequency of church attendance is also not particularly revealing; however, the finding that those who never attend obtain lower E scores than those who do attend is added evidence that people who reject organized religion are less prej- udiced than those who accept it.
When the religious affiliation of the subject is considered in relation to that
? ETHNOCENTRISM AND RELIGIOUS A TTITUDES
22I
of his parents, it appears that ethnocentrism tends to be more pronounced in subjects whose parents presented a unified religious front than in cases where the religious influence from the parents was inconsistent, partial, or nonexistent. Furthermore, there is an indication that agreement between the subject and his or her mother in the matter of religion tends to be asso- ciated with ethnocentrism, disagreement with its opposite. These results sug- gest that acceptance of religion mainly as an expression of submission to a clear pattern of parental authority is a condition favorable to ethnocentrism.
A quantitative approach to religious ideology was made by including in one form of the questionnaire an open-ended question concerning the im- portance, in the subject's mind, of religion and the church. When a cate- gorization of the answers to this question was made and mean A-S scores cal- culated, it turned out that the subjects who considered both religion and the church important were very considerably more anti-Semitic than were sub- jects who considered neither important or emphasized the ethical aspects of religion or differentiated between the church and "real" religion and, while rejecting the former, stressed the more personal and the more rational aspects of the latter.
Two scale-items pertaining to religious ideology appeared to be slightly correlated with prejudice. The more agreement with statements to the effect that people should have "complete faith in some supernatural force" and that "there are some things that can never be understood by the human mind," the higher did the A-S score tend to be.
In general, it appeared that gross, objective factors-denomination and frequency of church attendance-were less significant for prejudice than were certain psychological trends reflected in the way the subject accepted or rejected religion and in the content of his religious ideology. These trends -conventionalism, authoritarian submission, and so forth-were generally the same as those which came to the fore in preceding chapters, and we turn now to our attempt to investigate them directly.
? CHAPTER VII
THE MEASUREMENT OF IMPLICIT ANTIDEMOCRATIC TRENDS
R. Nevitt Sanford, T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and Daniel f. Levinson
A. INTRODUCTION
At a certain stage of the study, after considerable work with the A-S and E scales had been done, there gradually evolved a plan for constructing a scale that would measure prejudice without appearing to have this aim and without mentioning the name of any minority group. It appeared that such an instrument, if it correlated highly enough with the A-S and E scales, might prove to be a very useful substitute for them. It might be used to survey opinion in groups where "racial questions" were too "ticklish" a matter to permit the introduction of an A-S or E scale, e. g. , a group which included many members of one or another ethnic minority. It might be used for measuring prejudice among minority group members themselves. Most important, by circumventing some of the defenses which people employ when asked to express themselves with respect to "race issues," it might provide a more valid measure of prejudice.
The PEC scale might have commended itself as an index of prejudice, but its correlations with the A-S and E scales did not approach being high enough. Moreover, the items of this scale were too explicitly ideological, that is, they might be too readily associated with prejudice in some logical or automatic way. What was needed was a collection of items each of which was correlated with A-S and E but which did not come from an area ordinarily covered in discussions of political, economic, and social matters. The natural place to turn was to the clinical material already collected, where, particularly in the subjects' discussions of such topics as the self, family, sex, interpersonal relations, moral and personal values; there had appeared numerous trends which, it appeared, might be connected with prejudice.
At this point the second-and major-purpose of the new scale began to 222
? MEASUREMENT OF ANTIDEMOCRA TIC TRENDS
2 23
take shape. Might not such a scale yield a valid estimate of antidemocratic tendencies at the personality level? It was clear, at the time the new scale was being planned, that anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism were not merely matters of surface opinion, but general tendencies with sources, in part at least, deep within the structure of the person. Would it not be possible to construct a scale that would approach more directly these deeper, often un- conscious forces? If so, and if the scale could be validated by means of later clinical studies, would we not have a better estimate of antidemocratic po- tential than could be obtained from the scales that were more openly ideo- logical? The prospect was intriguing. And experience with clinical tech- niques and with the other scales gave considerable promise of success. In attempting to account for the generality of A-S and of E, to explain what it was that made the diverse items of these scales go together, we had been led to the formulation of enduring psychological dispositions in the person -stereotypy, conventionalism, concern with power, and so forth. Study of the ideological discussions of individuals, e. g. , Mack and Larry, had had the same outcome: there appeared to be dispositions in each individual that were reflected in his discussion of each ideological area as well as in his dis- cussion of matters not ordinarily regarded as ideological. And when clinical- genetic material was examined, it appeared that these dispositions could fre- quently be referred to deep-lying personality needs. The task then was to formulate scale items which, though they were statements of opinions and attitudes and had the same form as those appearing in ordinary opinion- attitude questionnaires, would actually serve as "giveaways" of underlying antidemocratic trends in the personality. This would make it possible to carry over into group studies the insights and hypotheses derived from clinical investigation; it would test whether we could study on a mass scale features ordinarily regarded as individualistic and qualitative.
This second purpose-the quantification of antidemocratic trends at the level of personality-did not supersede the first, that of measuring anti- Semitism and ethnocentrism without mentioning minority groups or cur- rent politico-economic issues. Rather, it seemed that the two might be realized together. The notion was that A-S and E would correlate with the new scale because the A-S and E responses were strongly influenced by the underlying trends which the new scale sought to get at by a different approach. Indeed, if such a correlation could be obtained it could be taken as evidence that anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism were not isolated or specific or entirely superficial attitudes but expressions of persistent tendencies in the person. This would depend, however, upon how successful was the attempt to exclude from the new scale items which might have been so frequently or so automatically associated with anti-Semitism or ethnocentrism that they might be regarded as aspects of the same political "line. " In any case, how- ever, it seemed that the discovery of opinions and attitudes, in various areas
? 224 THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
other than the usual politico-socioeconomic one, that were associated with anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism, would give a more comprehensive grasp of the prejudiced outlook on the world. The new instrument was termed the F scale, to signify its concern with implicit prefascist tendencies.
On theoretical grounds it was expected that the correlations ofF with A-S and E would not approach unity. It was hoped that the F scale would catch some of the antidemocratic potential that might not be expressed when sub- jects responded to items which dealt directly with hostility toward minority groups. True, the items of the present A-S and E scales were, for the most part, so formulated as to allow the subject to express prejudice while main- taining the feeling that he was being democratic. Yet it was recognized that a subject might score relatively low on A-S or E and still, in the interview, where a confidential relationship was established and the interviewer was very permissive, reveal that he was prejudiced. More than this, it had to be admitted that a subject might refuse altogether to express hostility against minority groups and yet reveal features, e. g. , a tendency to think of such groups in a stereotyped way or a tendency moralistically to reject social groups other than ethnic ones, which had to be taken as susceptibility to anti- democratic propaganda. If the F scale were to be regarded as a measure of antidemocratic potential-something which might or might not be ex- pressed in open hostility against outgroups-then it could not be perfectly correlated with A-S or E. Rather, the demand to be made of it was that it single out individuals who in intensive clinical study revealed themselves to be receptive to antidemocratic propaganda. Although it was not possible within the scope of the study to use the F scale alone as the basis for selecting interviewees, it was possible to relate F scale score to various other indices of antidemocratic personality trends as brought to light by other techniques. Such trends, it seemed, could exist in the absence of high A-S or E scores.
However, the distinction between potential and manifest should not be overdrawn. Given emotionally determined antidemocratic trends in the person, we should expect that in general they would be evoked by the A-S and E items, which were designed for just this purpose, as well as by the F scale and other indirect methods. The person who was high on F but not on A-S or E would be the exception, whose inhibitions upon the expression of prejudice against minorities would require special explanation.
B. CONSTRUCTION OF THE FASCISM (F) SCALE 1. THE UNDERLYING THEORY
The 38 items of the original F scale are shown in Table I (VII), num- bered in the order of their appearance on Form 78. If the reader considers that most of what has gone before in this volume was either known or
? MEASUREMENT OF ANTIDEMOCRA TIC TRENDS 225
thought about before construction of the F scale began, it will be apparent that in devising the scale we did not proceed in a strictly empirical fashion. We did not consider starting with hundreds of items chosen more or less at random and then seeing by trial and error which ones might be associated with A-S and E. For every item there was a hypothesis, sometimes several hypotheses, stating what might be the nature of its connection with prejudice.
The major source of these hypotheses was the research already performed in the present study. Available for the purpose was the following material: results, such as those given in preceding chapters, from the A-S, E, and PEC scales; numerous correlates of E derived from questionnaire studies, that is, from responses to factual and short essay questions pertaining to such topics as religion, war, ideal society, and so forth; early results from projective questions; finally, and by far the most important, material from the inter- views and the Thematic Apperception Tests. Another important source of items was research in fields allied to the present one in which the authors had previously had a part. Principal among these were several studies performed at the University of California on personality in relation to war morale and ideology (19, 20, 102, 107, 108, 109), and researches of the Institute of Social Research such as content analyses of speeches of anti-Semitic agi- tators and a study on anti-Semitic workers (2, 3, 56, 57, 57A, 57B). Finally, there was the general literature on anti-Semitism and fascism, embracing both empirical and theoretical studies.
It will have been recognized that the interpretation of the material of the present study was guided by a theoretical orientation that was present at the start. The same orientation played the most crucial role in the prepara- tion of the F scale. Once a hypothesis had been formulated concerning the way in which some deep-lying trend in the personality might express itself in some opinion or attitude that was dynamically, though not logically, re- lated to prejudice against outgroups, a preliminary sketch for an item was usually not far to seek: a phrase from the daily newspaper, an utterance by an interviewee, a fragment of ordinary conversation was usually ready at hand.
(As will be seen, however, the actual formulation of an item was a technical proceeding to which considerable care had to be devoted. )
As to what kinds of central personality trends we might expect to be the most significant, the major guide, as has been said, was the research which had gone before; they were the trends which, as hypothetical constructs, seemed best to explain the consistency of response on the foregoing scales, and which emerged from the analysis of clinical material as the likely sources of the coherence found in individual cases. Most of these trends have been mentioned before, usually when it was necessary to do so in order to give meaning to obtained results. For example, when it was discovered that the anti-Semitic individual objects to Jews on the ground that they violate con- ventional moral val~es, one interpretation was that this individual had a
? 226 THE AUTHORIT ARIAN PERSONALITY
TABLE x (VII) THE F SCALE: FoRM 78
z. Although many people may scoff, it may yet be shown that astrology can explain a lot of things.
3? America is getting so far from the true American way of life that force may be necessary to restore it.
6. It is only natural and right that women be restricted in certain ways in which men have more freedom.
9? Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a more red-blooded, active way of life.
xo. It is more than a remarkable coincidence that Japan had an earthquake on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1944.
12. The modern church, with its many rules and hypocrisies, does not appeal to the deeply religious person; it appeals mainly to the childish, the insecure, and the uncritical.
14. After we finish off the Germans and Japs, we ought to concentrate on other enemies of the human race such as rats, snakes, and germs.
17. Familiarity breeds contempt.
19. One should avoid doing things in public which appear wrong to others, even
though one knows that these things are really all right.
20. One of the main values of progressive education is that it gives the child
great freedom in expressing those natural impulses and desires so often
frowned upon by conventional middle-class society.
23. He is, indeed, contemptible who does not feel an undying love, gratitude, and
respect for his parents.
24. Today everything is unstable; we should be prepared for a period of constant
change, conflict, and upheaval.
28. Novels or stories that tell about what people think and feel are more interest-
ing than those which contain mainly action, romance, and adventure.
30. Reports of atrocities in Europe have been greatly exaggerated for propa-
ganda purposes.
3I. Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be
severely punished.
32? It is essential for learning or effective work that our teachers or bosses outline
in detail what is to be done and exactly how to go about it.
35? There are some activities so flagrantly un-American that, when responsible officials won't take the proper steps, the wide-awake citizen should take the
law into his own hands.
38. There is too much emphasis in college on intellectual and theoretical topics,
not enough emphasis on practical matters and on the homely virtues of living. 39? Every person should have a deep faith in some supernatural force higher than himself to which he gives total allegiance and whose decisions he does
not question.
42. No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only
one reason.
43? Sciences like chemistry, physics, and medicine have carried men very far,
but there are many important things that can never possibly be understood
by the human mind.
46. The sexual orgies of the old Greeks and Romans are nursery school stuff
compared to some of the goings-on in this country today, even in circles where people might least expect it. ?
? 47?
50.
53?
55.
;6.
5s. 59? 6o.
No insult to our honor 'should ever go unpunished.
Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.
There are some things too intimate or personal to talk about even with one's closest friends.
Although leisure is a fine thing, it is good hard work that makes life interest- ing and worthwhile.
After the war, we may expect a crime wave; the control of gangsters and ruffians will become a major social problem.
What a man does is not so important so long as he does it well.
Human nature being what it is, there will always be war and conflict. Which of the following are the most important for a person to have or to be? Mark X the three most important.
artistic and sensuous
popular, good personality
drive, determination, will power
broad, humanitarian social outlook neatness and good manners
sensitivity and understanding
efficiency, practicality, thrift
intellectual and serious
emotional expressiveness, warmth, intimacy kindness and charity
It is entirely possible that this series of wars and conflicts will be ended once and for all by a world-destroying earthquake, flood, or other catastrophe. Books and movies ought not to deal so much with the sordid and seamy side of life; they ought to concentrate on themes that are entertaining or uplifting.
65.
66.
MEASUREMENT OF ANTIDEMOCRA TIC TRENDS 227
67. When you come right down to it, it's human nature never to do anything
without an eye to one's own profit.
70. To a greater extent than most people realize, our lives are governed by plots
hatched in secret by politicians.
73? Nowadays when so many different kinds of people move around so much
and mix together so freely, a person has to be especially careful to protect
himself against infection and disease.
74? What this country needs is fewer laws and agencies, and more courageous,
tireless, devoted leaders whom the people can put their faith in.
75? Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere
imprisonment; such criminals ought to be publicly whipped.
77? Nosane,normal,decentpersoncouldeverthinkofhurtingaclosefr~endor
relative.
particularly strong and rigid adherence to conventional values, and that this general disposition in his personality provided some of the motivational basis for anti-Semitism, and at the same time expressed itself in other ways, e. g. , in a general tendency to look down on and to punish those who were believed to be violating conventional values. This interpretation was sup- ported by results from the E and PEC scales, where it was shown that items expressive of conventionalism were associated with more manifest forms of prejudice. Accordingly, therefore, adher(! flce to conventional values
? 228 THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
came to be thought of as a variable in the person-something which could be approached by means of scale items of the F type and shown to be related functionally to various manifestations of prejudice. Similarly, a con- sideration of E-scale results strongly suggested that underlying several of the prejudiced responses was a general disposition to glorify, to be sub- servient to and remain uncritical toward authoritative figures of the ingroup and to take an attitude of punishing outgroup figures in the name of some moral authority. Hence, authoritarianism assumed the proportions of a variable worthy to be investigated in its own right.
In the same way, a number of such variables were derived and defined, and they, taken together, made up the basic content of the F scale. Each was regarded as a more or less central trend in the person which, in accord- ance with some dynamic process, expressed itself on the surface in ethno- centrism as well as in diverse psychologically related opinions and attitudes. These variables are listed below, together with a brief definition of each.
a. Conventionalism. Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values.
b. Authoritarian submission. Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized
moral authorities of the ingroup.
c. Authoritarian aggression. Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to con-
demn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.
d. Anti-intraception. Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-
minded.
e. Superstition and stereotypy. The belief in mystical determinants of the
individual's fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories.
f. Power and "toughness. " Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated
assertion of strength and toughness. '
g. Destructiveness and cynicism. Generalized hostility, vilification of the
human.
h. Projectivity. The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go
on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional
impulses.
1. Sex. Exaggerated concern with sexual "goings-on. "
These variables were thought of as going together to form a single syn- drome, a more or less enduring structure in the person that renders him re- ceptive to antidemocratic propaganda. One might say, therefore, that the F scale attempts to measure the potentially antidemocratic personality. This does not imply that all the features of this personality pattern are touched upon in the scale, but only that the scale embraces a fair sample of the ways in which this pattern characteristically expresses itself. Indeed, as the study went on, numerous additional features of the pattern, as well as varia- tions within the over-all pattern, suggested themselves-and it was regretted that a second F scale could not have been constructed in order to carry these explorations further. It is to ~e emphasized that one can speak of personality
? MEASUREMENT OF ANTIDEMOCRA TIC TRENDS 229
here only to the extent that the coherence of the scale items can be better explained on the ground of an inner structure than on the ground of external association.
The variables of the scale may be discussed in more detail, with emphasis on their organization and the nature of their relations to ethnocentrism. As each variable is introduced, the scale items deemed to be expressive of it are presented. It will be noted, as the variables are taken up in turn, that the same item sometimes appears under more than one heading. This follows from our approach to scale construction. In order efficiently to cover a wide area it was necessary to formulate items that were maximally rich, that is, pertinent to as much as possible of the underlying theory-hence a single item was sometimes used to represent two, and sometimes more, different ideas. It will be noted also that different variables are represented by different numbers of items. This is for the reason that the scale was designed with first attention to the whole pattern into which the variables fitted, sofne with more important roles than others.
a. Conventionalism
12. The modern church, with its many rules and hypocrisies, does
not appeal to the deeply religious person; it appeals mainly to the childish, the insecure, and the uncritical.
19. One should avoid doing things in public which appear wrong to others, even though one knows that these things are really all right.
38. There is too much emphasis in colleges on intellectual and theoreti- cal topics, not enough emphasis on practical matters and on the homely virtues of living.
55? Although leisure is a fine thing, it is good hard work that makes life interesting and worthwhile.
58. What a man does is not so important so long as he does it well.
6o. Which of the following are the most important for a person to have or to be? Mark X the three most important.
artistic and sensuous
popular, good personality
drive, determination, will power
broad, humanitarian social outlook neatness and good manners
sensitivity and understanding
efficiency, practicality, thrift
intellectual and serious
emotional expressiveness, warmth, intimacy kindness and charity
It is a well-known hypothesis that susceptibility to fascism is most charac- teristically a middle-class phenomenon, that it is "in the culture" and, hence, that those who conform the most to this culture will be the most prejudiced.
? 230 THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
Items referring to the holding of conventional values were included in order to gather data bearing on this hypothesis. Many of the early findings of the present study, however, gave evidence that the matter was not quite so simple. The correlation between conventional values and prejudice seemed to be positive but not very high; whereas unconventional people tended to be free of prejudice, it was clear that some conventional people were prejudiced while others were not. It seemed that, among the conventional group, what might make the difference was the deeper source of the conventionality, or rather the type of broader personality structure within which it had a func- tional role. If the adherence to conventional values was an expression of a fully established individual conscience, then we should expect no necessary connection between these values and antidemocratic potential. The same standards which render the individual easily offended by what he conceives to be the morally loose behavior of unassimilated minority group members or of "lower-class" people, would-if they are well internalized-cause him to resist the violence and delinquency which characterize the advanced stages of fascism. If, on the other hand, adherence to conventional values is de- termined by contemporary external social pressure, if it is based upon the individual's adherence to the standards of the collective powers with which he, for the time being, is identified, then we should expect a close association with antidemocratic receptivity. It is this latter state of affairs that we wish to call conventionalism-and to distinguish from mere acceptance of con- ventional values. The conventionalistic individual could in good conscience follow the dictates of the external agency wherever they might lead him and, moreover, he would be capable of totally exchanging one set of standards for another quite different one-as in a conversion from official Communism to
Catholicism.
The scale items listed under Convention(llism afford the subject an op-
portunity to reveal whether or not his adherence to conventional values is of the rigid, absolutist character just described. For example, this would seem to be indicated by a mark of +3 on the item, "Obedience and respect for au- thority are the most important virtues children should learn. " However, a sound decision on this matter would depend on the individual's responses to items in the other categories. For example, extreme conventionalism going with a strong inclination to punish those who violate conventional values is a different thing from conventional values associated with a philosophy of live and let live. In other words, the meaning of a high score on this variable, as on any of the others, is to be known from the broader context within which it occurs.
b. Authoritarian Submission
20. One of the main values of progressive education is that it gives the
child great freedom in expressing those natural impulses and desires so often frowned upon by conventional middle-class society.
? MEASUREMENT OF ANTIDEMOCRA TIC TRENDS 231
2 3? He is indeed contemptible who does not feel an undying love, grati- tude, and respect for his parents.
32? It is essential for learning or effective work that our teachers or bosses outline in detail what is to be done and exactly how to go about it.
39?
43?
50.
Every person should have a deep faith in some supernatural force higher than himself to which he gives total allegiance and whose decisions he does not question.
Sciences like chemistry, physics, and medicine have carried men very far, but there are many important things that can never pos- sibly be understood by the human mind.
Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.
74? What this country needs is fewer laws and agencies, and more courageous, tireless, devoted leaders whom the people can put their faith in.
77? No sane, normal, decent person could ever think of hurting a close friend or relative.
Submission to authority, desire for a strong leader, subservience of the individual to the state, and so forth, have so frequently and, as it seems to us, correctly, been set forth as important aspects of the Nazi creed that a search for correlates of prejudice had naturally to take these attitudes into account. 1 These attitudes have indeed been so regularly mentioned in associa- tion with anti-Semitism that it was particularly difficult to formulate items that would express the underlying trend and still be sufficiently free of logical or direct relations to prejudice-and we cannot claim to have been entirely successful. Direct references to dictatorship and political figures were avoided for the most part, and the main emphasis was on obedience, respect, rebel- lion, and relations to authority in general. Authoritarian submission was conceived of as a very general attitude that would be evoked in relation to
a variety of authority figures-parents, older people, leaders, supernatural power, and so forth.
The attempt was made to formulate the items in such a way that agree- ment with them would indicate not merely a realistic, balanced respect for valid authority but an exaggerated, all-out, emotional need to submit. This would be indicated, it seemed, by agreement that obedience and respect for authority were the most important virtues that children should learn, that a person should obey without question the decisions of a supernatural power, and so forth. It was considered that here, as in the case of conventionalism, the subservience to external agencies was probably due to some failure in
1E. Fromm (42), E. H. Erikson (zs), A. M:JSlow (79), M. B. Chisholm (18), and W. Reich (96) are among the writers whose thinking about authoritarianism has influenced our own.
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THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
the development of an inner authority, i. e. , conscience. Another hypothesis was that authoritarian submission was commonly a way of handling ambival- ent feelings toward authority figures: underlying hostile and rebellious im- pulses, held in check by fear, lead the subject to overdo in the direction of respect, obedience, gratitude, and the like.
It seems clear that authoritarian submission by itself contributes largely to the antidemocratic potential by rendering the individual particularly re- ceptive to manipulation by the strongest external powers. The immediate connection of this attitude with ethnocentrism has been suggested in earlier chapters: hostility against ingroup authorities, originally the parents, has had to be repressed; the "bad" aspects of these figures-that they are unfair, self-seeking, dominating-are then seen as existing in outgroups, who are charged with dictatorship, plutocracy, desire to control, and so forth. And this displacement of negative imagery is not the only way in which the repressed hostility is handled; it seems often to find expression in authoritarian aggression.
c.
Authoritarian Aggression
6. It is only natural and right that women be restricted in certain ways in which men have more freedom.
23. He is indeed contemptible who does not feel an undying love, grati- tude, and respect for his parents.
3I. Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished.
47? No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished.
75? . Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere imprisonment; such criminals ought to be publicly whipped.
The individual who has been forced to give up basic pleasures and to live under a system of rigid restraints, and who therefore feels put upon, is likely not only to seek an object upon which he can "take it out" but also to be par- ticularly annoyed at the idea that another person is "getting away with some- thing. " Thus, it may be said that the present variable represents the sadistic component of authoritarianism just as the immediately foregoing one repre- sents its masochistic component. It is to be expected, therefore, that the conventionalist who cannot bring himself to utter any real criticism of accepted authority will have a desire to condemn, reject, and punish those who violate these values. As the emotional life which this person regards as proper and a part of himself is likely to be very limited, so the impulses, es- pecially sexual and aggressive ones, which remain unconscious and ego-alien are likely to be strong and turbulent. Since in this circumstance a wide va- riety of stimuli can tempt the indi. vidual and so arouse his anxiety (fear of punishment), the list of traits, behavior patterns, individuals, and groups
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that he must condemn grows very long indeed. It has been suggested before that this mechanism might lie behind the ethnocentric rejection of such groups as zootsuiters, foreigners, other nations; it is here hypothesized that this feature of ethnocentrism is but a part of a more general tendency to punish violators of conventional values: homosexuals, sex offenders, people with bad manners, etc. Once the individual has convinced himself that there are people who ought to be punished, he is provided with a channel through which his deepest aggressive impulses may be expressed, even while he thinks of himself as thoroughly moral. If his external authorities, or the crowd, lend their approval to this form of aggression, then it may take the most violent forms, and it may persist after the conventional values, in the name of which it was undertaken, have been lost from sight.
One might say that in authoritarian aggression, hostility that was orig- inally aroused by and directed toward ingroup authorities is displaced onto outgroups. This mechanism is superficially similar to but essentially dif- ferent from a process that has often been referred to as "scapegoating. " Ac- cording to the latter conception, the individual's aggression is aroused by frustration, usually of his economic needs; and then, being unable due to in- tellectual confusion to tell the real causes of his difficulty, he lashes out about him, as it were, venting his fury upon whatever object is available and not too likely to strike back. While it is granted that this process has a role in hostility against minority groups, it must be emphasized that according to the present theory of displacement, the authoritarian must, out of an inner necessity, turn his aggression against outgroups. He must do so because he is psychologically unable to attack ingroup authorities, rather than because of intellectual confusion regarding the source of his frustration. If this theory is correct, then authoritarian aggression and authoritarian submission should turn out to be highly correlated. Furthermore, this theory helps to explain why the aggression is so regularly justified in moralistic terms, why it can become so violent and lose all connection with the stimulus which originally set it off.
Readiness to condemn other people on moral grounds may have still an- other source: it is not only that the authoritarian must condemn the moral laxness that he sees in others, but he is actually driven to see immoral at- tributes in them whether this has a. basis in fact or not. This is a further device for countering his own inhibited tendencies; he says to himself, as it were: "I am not bad and deserving of punishment, he is. " In other words the indi- vidual's own unacceptable impulses are projected onto other individuals and groups who are then rejected. Projectivity as a variable is dealt with more fully below.
Conventionalism, authoritarian submission, and authoritarian aggression all have to do with the moral aspect of life-with standards of conduct, with the authorities who enforce these standards, with offenders against them
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who deserve to be punished. W e should expect that, in general, subjects who score high on one of these variables will score high on the others also, inas- much as all three can be understood as expressions of a particular kind of structure within the personality. The most essential feature of this structure is a lack of integration between the moral agencies by which the subject lives and the rest of his personality. One might say that the conscience or superego is incompletely integrated with the self or ego, the ego here being conceived of as embracing the various self-controlling and self-expressing functions of the individual. It is the ego that governs the relations between self and outer world, and between self and deeper layers of the personality; the ego under- takes to regulate impulses in a way that will permit gratification without inviting too much punishment by the superego, and it seeks in general to carry out the activities of the individual in accordance with the demands of reality. It is a function of the ego to make peace with conscience, to create a larger synthesis within which conscience, emotional impulses, and self operate in relative harmony. When this synthesis is not achieved, the super- ego has somewhat the role of a foreign body within the personality, and it exhibits those rigid, automatic, and unstable aspects discussed above.
There is some reason to believe that a failure in superego internalization is due to weakness in the ego, to its inability to perform the necessary syn- thesis, i. e. , to integrate the superego with itself. Whether or not this is so, ego weakness would seem to be a concomitant of conventionalism and au- thoritarianism. Weakness in the ego is expressed in the inability to build up a consistent and enduring set of moral values within the personality; and it is this state of affairs, apparently, that makes it necessary for the individual to seek some organizing and coordinating agency outside of himself. Where such outside agencies are depended upon for moral decisions one may say that the conscience is externalized.
Although conventionalism and authoritarianism might thus be regarded as signs of ego weakness, it seemed worthwhile to seek other, more direct, means for estimating this trend in personality, and to correlate this trend with the others. Ego weakness would, it seemed, be expressed fairly directly in such phenomena as opposition to introspection, in superstition and stere- otypy, and in overemphasis upon the ego and its supposed strength. The fol- lowing three variables deal with these phenomena.
d. Anti-intraception
z8. Novels or stories that tell about what people think and feel are more
interesting than those which contain mainly action, romance, and .
adventure.
38. There is too much emphasis in colleges on intellectual and theoreti- cal topics, not enough emphasis on practical matters and on the homely virtues of living.
. .