Authoritarian Personality Research Articles

Interview with Martin Jay

Interview with Martin Jay

El fin de algunas ilusiones. Subjetividad y democracia en tiempos de regresión autoritaria / The end of some illusions. Democracy and subjectivity in times of authoritarian regression

Este trabajo propone un análisis de la actual crisis de las democracias y el giro autoritario a partir de una reflexión sobre las formas de subjetivación. En un primero momento describe lo que consideramos cierto ideal de transparencia, tanto en el modo institucionalista de pensar la democracia como en la utopía neoliberal, y su descuido de la dimensión de las subjetividades política. En un segundo momento se detiene en los estudios sobre la personalidad autoritaria de la primera generación de la Escuela de Frankfurt, para mostrar que los fenómenos de autoritarismo social son “síntomas” que no pueden ser reducidos a su ubicación económica ni explicados solamente por un análisis de las relaciones de fuerzas políticas, sino que deben ser también indagados en la intersección entre ideología y subjetividad. Finalmente, ofrece algunas reflexiones sobre los procesos contemporáneos de subjetivación mediante los cuales se produce la aceptación y la justificación de las condiciones sociales y su rol en las formas sociales de autoritarismo.

Adorno's negative psychology

AbstractFollowing the Second World War, Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950/2019) became the most influential engagement between Frankfurt School critical theorists and the field of psychology. The recent publication of Adorno's retracted “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality” (2019) provides a timely impetus to reexamine and challenge certain long‐held ideas about Adorno's contribution to psychology—for instance that The Authoritarian Personality reduces complex social phenomena to individual motivation and personality. Adorno's Remarks provide an alternative approach to the usual reading of The Authoritarian Personality, where the psychology of authoritarianism points to a contradiction at the very core of the concept of psychology, aligning the study with Adorno's more critical and dialectical works. In this article, I challenge how Adorno and The Authoritarian Personality are commonly taken up in critical psychology and introduce “negative psychology” as Adorno's central contribution to the field modeled in his reading of psychoanalysis and his theory of negative dialectics. Reframed in this way, Adorno can continue to serve as a crucial site of critical engagement for psychologists.

Rebels without a cause? ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

An important empirical basis for the interpretations of Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford in The Authoritarian Personality (TAP) were questionnaires and in-depth interviews conducted by William R. Morrow with prisoners at California’s San Quentin prison. A reconstruction of the historical approach exposes serious methodological shortcomings, some of which Morrow openly addressed in memoranda, revealing that the supposedly particularly authoritarian attitude of the prisoners was due, among other things, to their submission to the psychiatric authority in the authoritarian situation of the prison and due to the conditions of a hierarchical prisoner society. In TAP, the empirically inadequate survey was interpreted primarily in the context of psychoanalytic literature on crime at that time, in particular Robert Lindner’s Rebel Without A Cause, whose theory of pseudo rebellion permeated TAP. Focusing on the shortcomings of TAP, this article argues, enables its inspiring insights to be appreciated.

The Positive and Negative Affect of Authoritarian Personality among Female University Students

The purpose of the study is to determine whether positive and negative affect are related to a type of authoritarian personality. Participants (N = 150) were female university students in Baghdad. The authors applied IN-PANAS scale to measure the positive and negative affect, and F scale to measure the authoritarian personality. Results: first, the sample had a positive affect on the authoritarian personality, but not a negative affect, second, there is a significant weak correlation between PA, NA, and authoritarian personality. Conclusion: The cognition affects on authoritarian personality more than the emotions do. In light of the new scientific challenges; this type of personality requires more research to reach a clear explanation for this personality in the future.

A Democratic Emergency After a Health Emergency? Exposure to COVID-19, Perceived Economic Threat and Support for Anti-Democratic Political Systems.

ObjectivesThe urgency of the COVID‐19 pandemic has led governments to impose restrictions on individual freedom and required citizens to comply with these restrictions. In addition, lockdowns related to COVID‐19 have led to a significant economic crisis. We aimed to study how the pandemic and related economic threats have impacted support for anti‐democratic political systems.MethodWe analyzed data from a quota panel of the Italian adult population (N = 1,195), surveyed once before and once during the pandemic.ResultsA hierarchical regression model showed that exposure to COVID‐19 and perceived economic insecurity were associated with support for anti‐democratic political systems, independent of participants’ predispositions toward a strong leader.ConclusionAn authoritarian personality is not a necessary precondition for individual anti‐democracy: when facing severe personal threats, anyone could restore a subjective sense of control over the social world by becoming anti‐democratic, independent of their initial predisposition to support anti‐democratic political systems.

Coveting Uniformity in a Diverse World: The Authoritarian Roots of Welfare Chauvinism in Postmigration Crisis Germany

ObjectiveTo explore the links between authoritarian personality traits and welfare chauvinism by controlling for a host of alternative explanations while also investigating whether these links are additive or interacting with other triggering variables.MethodUsing the online survey platform Qualtrics, a stratified sample of 1,010 respondents in Germany was recruited in January 2019. Authoritarian personality is operationalized by applying the fourfold child‐rearing scale pioneered by Feldman and Stenner.ResultsFindings indicate that authoritarianism has an independent, additive effect on welfare chauvinism, but cultural and economic threats do not systematically mediate the effect of authoritarianism on welfare chauvinism.ConclusionSubmissive authoritarianism is significantly linked to a desire to disentitle immigrants from using welfare benefits.

Der autoritäre Charakter – politisch wirksam wie lange nicht mehr

Summary When markedly developed, a personality based on prejudice is authoritarian by character. This concept was put forward within the Critical Theory as an attempt to explain the psychodynamics of the potentially anti-democratic, fascist individual with the goal of understanding the »break with civilization « caused by the »Third Reich«. The final chapter of the legendary »Studies on Authoritarian Personality« has only just been published in German. This is an appropriate occasion to revisit this theory in order to develop interactive responses to authoritarian pressure or to investigate one’s own authoritarian tendencies.

Heidegger: the case of philosophy

The name of M. Heidegger is associated with a serious scandal in modern philosophy. This person, who is recognized as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, turned out to be a staunch opponent of world Jewry and a supporter of the National Socialist Revolution. Are these odious beliefs: a trait of his personalities, his ideological conformism? Or are they organically woven into his philosophy? Heidegger's philosophy is deeply rooted in the very center of European philosophy. And it attracts all of its history, classical ideas and concepts in the course of its thought. Heidegger introduces Nazism into philosophy”, but is not this dangerous possibility hidden in the bowels of philosophy itself? What is M. Heidegger as the case of philosophy itself? In this article, the author describes the contexts in which the case - the case, the fall, even the collapse - of Heidegger becomes philosophically significant. Appealing to the concept of the late Heidegger das Ereignis (event), it is actualized that philosophical thought, understood as the experience of being, belongs to the contemporary and here relates to all such a whim of the experience of the modern. It is a paradoxical combination of boundary involvement in what is happening and boundary abstraction. Thus, the purity of the article is devoted to the analysis of the events of the early twentieth century, mainly in the intellectual context. The author then turns to Heidegger's philosophy, analyzing the following key points: the phenomenological turn of philosophy and its ontological deepening by Heidegger, the destruction of Kantian criticism and Cartesian double-substance; elimination of abstract reflection. Finally, the author argues in detail why, in his view, the philosophically necessary course of Heidegger's thoughts and the paths echoed by his own course of this authoritarian personality coincide.

Where it was, shall we be: lessons from the authoritarian personality for Trump’s America

This article revisits The authoritarian personality (Adorno et al, 1950) in the context of the weakness of the contemporary American left. After a review of the uniquely American locus of the work, the author argues that The authoritarian personality still has much to offer those interested in sociopolitical critique and resistance along psychodynamic lines. Specifically, where Adorno and his fellow researchers focused on the high scorers along the famous F-scale and their overt authoritarian potential, the author analyses what the study reveals about the low scorers. The author contests that these low-scoring individuals, although often vehemently oriented against prejudice, were revealed to be wildly inconsistent in their ability to resist dangerous and potentially authoritarian currents in the public sphere, which she then connects to the inconsistency of the contemporary left’s ability to effectively confront and critique the toxic Trump movement and regime. The author concludes by reframing these low scorers in the context of D.W. Winnicott’s theory of the True and False Self, with the aim of supporting more effective work towards the vivification of the left.

What's Behind Rising Authoritarianism: Answers from Political Psychology & the Third Reich

Liberty is never more precarious than in uncertain times. From the Great Depression to the Great Recession, from the Peloponnesian War to the so-called War on Terror, harsh times attract harsh measures. Sufficiently frightened, humans become quite willing to trade liberty for security, citizenship for slavery. Although preferring security to liberty makes psychological sense, in our modern world it can backfire. The evolutionary rationale for fear-based traditionalism, the search for certainty in a world fundamentally defined by uncertainty, rebounds — mutates — injecting into the populous what political psychologists call the “authoritarian personality.” This paper examines the rise of the Third Reich to show how economic and political uncertainty can undermine liberal democracy.

CEO Political Ideology and Management Earnings Forecast

Republican CEOs are more likely to issue earnings forecasts and to issue forecasts that are more accurate and timely. Republican CEOs favor range and less optimistic forecasts, convey more negative news, and have more positive earnings surprises. We address endogeneity using propensity score matching and difference-in-difference estimates. Our results are robust to controlling for CEO characteristics, incentives, overconfidence, and managerial ability, and are stronger for firms with a high level of institutional ownership and litigation risk. The preference for threat and ambiguity avoidance of conservative CEOs seem to outweigh the tendency to seize on information associated with their authoritarian personalities.

Donald Trump and the Arab World: The Disrupter in Chief faces the Status Quo*

For the last fifty years, every US Presidency has come to be defined by momentous events in the Arab world. This pattern also applies to Donald Trump, whose approach to the region is shaped by the preference for reduced military exposure and a break with his predecessor’s policies as well as a general deference and even admiration for authoritarian personalities and systems. The result has been a policy mishmash which offers disruption where continuity is required and continuity where disruption is needed. Trump’s policies are thus likely to exacerbate the region’s security crises at the inter-state and intra-state levels.

Does Religiosity Matter? Explaining Right-Wing Extremist Attitudes and the Vote for the Alternative for Germany (AfD)

Especially in the East of Germany the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany has been very succesful in recent elections. The academic discourse concentrates on a lot of prominent theories to explain the vote for AfD as well as right-wing extremist attitudes. However, in this context religiosity is still a black box as the research reveals contradictory results due to the insufficient measurement of religiosity. Against this background the paper reflects on the theory of authoritarian personality (Adorno et. al 1950) and takes different forms of religiosity into account. Based on the analysis of a representative population survey (ALLBUS 2018), the paper discusse the role of different forms of religiosity such as commitment to church, attachment to god and belief in supernatural powers. The paper reveals that these factors play a role in a way that expecially belief in supernatural powers correlates with right-wing extremism and attachment to church is especially an immunizing factor in the East of Germany, where the doctrine of the churches as well as the democratic history is particularly helpful to prevent right-wing extremist views as well as the vote for the AfD.

The Authoritarian Personality and It's Enemies: Wilhelm Reich, Theodor W. Adorno, Alice Miller and Klaus Theweleit

The essay presents a reconstruction and critical interpretation of four theories of authoritarian personality related to analysis of fascism. The first theory origins from a book The "Mass Psychology of Fascism" by Wilhelm Reich, published already before the Second World War, the second theory comes from a famous "The Authoritarian Personality" by Theodor W. Adorno. The third was presented by Alice Miller in "For Your Own Good", and the fourth – by Klaus Theweleit in groundbreaking "Male Fantasies". Only one of them, by Miller, refers directly to pedagogy. Nevertheless, the essay presents all four publications in relation to upbringing. The essay raises following questions: what is authoritarian personality? Which elements of education support its development and which prevent it? The theories are presented in relation to each other. Some of their conclusions are consistent, but other present conflicting positions. The dialectical method applied by the author enables to see, among others, how Adorno’s theories are put upside down by Miller, as well as Theweleit, who develops Reich’s ideas. The reconstruction of the dialogue between presented theories enables to put new questions related to the role of authoritarian personality in contemporary times.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Authoritarian Narrators:An Artist of the Floating World,The Remains of the Day,Never Let Me Go, and the Authoritarian Personality

AbstractThis essay examines how Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrators – namely, those of his novelsAn Artist of the Floating World,The Remains of the Day, andNever Let Me Go– are all variations of one central theme: the authoritarian personality. By drawing on the findings of the eponymous study by Theodor W. Adorno et al., it analyses the role of the narrators’ respective upbringings in the formation of their authoritarian predisposition as well as how their authoritarian tendencies later manifest themselves in their conduct. The way these tendencies – or the limitations imposed by them on the narrators’ imagination – also manifest themselves aesthetically in the narrative discourse further allows a comparison to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann inEichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Reaffirming Critical Composition Studies as an Antidote to Trumpian Authoritarianism

Public discussion of “the authoritarian personality” returned with the election of President Trump. This article traces the rise of that concept and broader study of mass society in American social science, with adaptations into composition studies from the 1960s to the 1990s—followed by their lamentable eclipse under a lethal combination of forces since then.

Personality, media choice and political ideology: explaining ideological pluralism in China

ABSTRACT To what extent do personality traits and media exposure explain political ideology? How important is authoritarian information control in structuring political attitudes relative to individual-level factors? This article evaluates the sources of political ideology using survey data from over 10,000 in internet users in China. Consistent with the literature, we find that both personality traits and media exposure are significantly associated with one’s expressed ideological orientation. However prior individual-level personality traits appear to have a larger impact than information exposure and may cause citizens to self-select media information. This means that media effects have a differential impact on individuals, with authoritarian personalities being more prone to reinforce their views with propaganda. This research highlights important ways that personality mediates information exposure, helps to explain the micro-foundations that shape authoritarian control at an individual level, explains the efficacy of propaganda techniques, as well as the mechanisms of political pluralism under authoritarianism.

The "Authoritarian Personality" Reconsidered: the Phantom of "Left Fascism".

This article explores the question of "Left fascism," which emerged in relation to discussions around the Student Movement in the German Federal Republic in the crucial decade between 1967-1977. The term was originally coined by Jürgen Habermas in a lecture entitled "The Phantom Revolution and its Children" in which he suggests that the extreme voluntarism of the studentscould not but be characterized as "Left fascist." Such a characterization becomes the basis for a vitally important exchange of letters between Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno from January to August of 1969 on the relation between theory and praxis. After first sketching Adorno's conception of the "authoritarian personality," with the help of Sándor Ferenczi's concept of the "identification with the aggressor," the article proceeds to examine the exchange of the letters between Adorno and Marcuse, illustrating Adorno's changed orientation: that "fascism" or "authoritarianism" maybe either left or right. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the authoritarian tendencies of the contemporary Left.

The mediating role of moral exclusion between authoritarianism and outgroup discrimination

It has been well-documented that right wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation as two facets of the authoritarian personality differentially account for a variety of negative intergroup behaviors. Integrating the Dual Process Model (Duckitt, 2001), with the literature on “Moral exclusion” (e.g., Opotow, 1990; Tileagă, 2007) we investigated whether or not moral exclusion would mediate such a relationship. Employing survey data (N = 1015), collected from a representative Hungarian sample, we found that moral exclusion mediated the effects of both RWA and SDO on the negative behavioral intentions against Roma as well as Jewish minorities in Hungary. Moreover, we argued that the concept of moral exclusion should be interpreted not as a generalized tendency, but as a mechanism which can be stemmed from distinct social cognitive motivations.