The authoritarian personality

[imomus]

In 1950 Theodor Adorno published what was, for him, an unusually empirical book, a psychometric study of fascism called The Authoritarian Personality. The project began as research into how anti-semitism happens, but became something much wider: a study of the personality traits associated with authoritarianism. The book was a big influence on me when I was a student; this was everything I didn't want to be. So what did Adorno and his fellow researchers discover?



Here's the list of personal characteristics they found to correlate positively with authoritarianism:

1. Conventionalism: rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values.
2. Authoritarian submission: submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the ingroup.
3. Authoritarian aggression: tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.
4. Anti-intraception: opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tenderminded.
5. Superstition and stereotypy: the belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories.
6. 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.
7. Destructiveness and cynicism: generalized hostility, vilification of the human.
8. Projectivity: the disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.
9. Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual "goings-on".



Now, maybe you could have been forgiven, fifteen years after the publication of The Authoritarian Personality, for thinking that these traits were a thing of the past. But sixty years on many of these attitudes are still very prevalent on the internet, on TV, in politics, in the tabloid press. The authoritarians crept back.

Here's what humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow thought correlated with the authoritarian character:

1. Hierarchical consciousness; the tendency to perceive other people as competitors who occupy either a higher or a lower position than the authoritarian personality in question. The external attributes of power, rather than internal qualities of the individual, are important.
2. The tendency to generalize the characteristics of dominance and discomfort.
3. Striving for external attributes of prestige, such as power, money, status, etc.
4. Presence of animosity, hate and prejudices in the person’s character.
5. Identification of goodness with weakness and an attempt to use it for one’s own benefit.
6. Sadomasochistic tendencies.
7. Incessant discontent and an inability to achieve gratification in life.
8. Intra-psychic conflict.
9. Feelings of guilt which produce animosity.
(Source)



If, for the 20 year-old me, the Authoritarian Personality was who not to be, the Creative Personality was the thing to aim for. Creativity researchers MacKinnon and Barron listed these as personality traits associated with this personality:

1. Autonomy.
2. A high degree of feminine orientation in males.
3. Intuition.
4. An orientation to perception rather than judgment.
5. Flexibility.
6. Self-acceptance.
7. Psychological richness and complexity.

Barron painted a slightly darker picture: the creative person felt " the paradoxical presence of high degrees of ego strength along with psychopathic qualities". For Maslow and Rogers it was all about openness to experience, a locus of evaluation within the person, and the ability to toy with elements and concepts.



Psychologist J.P. Guilford came up with this checklist of traits associated with the creative personality, things more focused on actual creative activity than wider personality orientations. Creative people have:

1. The ability to see or sensitivity to problems: Can state difficulties or deficiencies in common products or in social institutions, make judgement that desired goals in a described situation have not been achieved.
2. Fluency of thinking: Able to think well and effortlessly.
3. Word fluency: Can easily state words containing a given letter or combination of letters.
4. Associational fluency: Can easily state synonyms for a given word.
5. Expressional fluency: Can easily write well-formed sentences with a specified content.
6. Ideational fluency: Can easily produce ideas to fulfill certain requirements, for example to name objects that are hard, white and edible, or to write an appropriate title for a given story.
7. Flexibility of thinking: Can easily abandon old ways of thinking and adopt new ones.
8. Spontaneous flexibility: Can produce a great variety of ideas. For example in suggesting uses for a brick, subject can jump among categories, from building material to weight to missile to source of red powder.
9. Adaptive flexibility: Can generalize requirements of a problem to find a solution. For example, in a problem of forming squares using a minimum number of lines, can abandon the usual idea that all squares have to be the same size.
10. Originality: Comes up with ideas that are statistically unusual.
11. Remote associations: Forms associations between elements that are remote from each other in time, or remote from each other logically.
12. Responses are judged to be clever.
13. Redefinition: Gives up old interpretations of familiar objects and uses them in new ways.
14. Elaboration: Can fill in details given a general scheme. Given a general task, fill in the detailed steps. Given two simple lines, draw a more complex object.
15. Tolerance of ambiguity: Willingness to accept some uncertainty in conclusions, not using rigid categories.
16. Interest in convergent thinking: Thinking towards one right answer, as in solving a mathematical problem stated in a textbook.
17. Interest in divergent thinking: Open-ended thinking, where there is not a single right answer.
(Source)

It seems to me that these are still traits that correspond with accomplishment in the arts, in design, in making and re-making stuff. They're also pretty good things to aim for in your life.

Comments

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

I give you (the reader, not just Momus) a challenge.

When is the authoritarian personality a good thing to aim for? Under what circumstances is it most beneficial to have an authoritarian personality?

[mrobot.livejournal.com]

it seems to me it's good for maintaining a safe secure group from outside and inside threats, as well as organizing the masses for some communal purpose (determined by the 'authority').

that said, i think these are feel-good caricatures.

[(Anonymous)]

I remember reading a while ago about a psychologist who studied the link between creativity and Buddhist beliefs.

He postulated that Buddhism was a religion that encouraged and cultivated creativity especially as compared to other religions/cultures.

I've since lost track and don't know who this was, but if anyone knows, please do tell me!

[(Anonymous)]

Jung talked about Buddhism a little; there is a good collection of his essays on religion in the book "Psychology and the East".

[(Anonymous)]

There's a reason you were and still are worried about becoming that authoritarian person. As I count it, you're already 2/3rds of the way there.

1. Conventionalism: rigid adherence to conventional anti-conventional values. For example, favoring conventions of the exotic over one's own culture.
2. Authoritarian submission: submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the outgroup. Anything Japanese must be superior.
3. Authoritarian passive-aggression: pointing out and mocking people for following conventional values.
4. Anti-intraception: doesn't apply
5. Superstition and stereotypy: Not sure about the first, but you're always talking about 'us-vs-them', take today's post for example.
6. Power and "toughness“: Preoccupation with dominating the conversation. Must have the last word in the comments section and prove just how wrong the other person is. Identification with counter-cultural power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego (yours is the biggest ego I know); exaggerated assertion of intelligence and talent.
7. Destructiveness and cynicism: not really
8. Projectivity: can't address this one.
9. Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual "goings-on". Writing a whole post to celebrate the cumshot? Check.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

As I count it

...being the operative phrase here. By slipping in "anti-conventional" in place of "conventional" in 1, "outgroup" instead of "ingroup" in 2, changing "follow conventional values" in 3 to "violate conventional values", and so on, you completely reverse the definition of Adorno's scale.

But I don't want to let myself off the hook. Of course there are parts in me which could, if I let them, slide in a more authoritarian direction. That's why it's important to recognise what these traits might be, and define them as undesirable. This is precisely why Adorno published his book: to try to nip future fascism of the kind we'd just seen defeated in 1945 from creeping back.

Other researchers thought there wasn't enough emphasis in Adorno's study on left-wing authoritarianism:

"Altemeyer has created a scale to measure left-wing authoritarianism. According to him, in politically consolidated countries right-wing oriented people support the establishment, whereas left-wing oriented people are in opposition to it. In line with this statement, he then defined left-wing authoritarianism in the following fashion:
1. A high degree of submission to authorities which attempt to subvert the authorities currently ruling in the given society.
2. Generalized aggression towards the established elites or those who support them.
3. A high degree of dedication to the norms accepted by the revolutionary authorities.
The results of Altemeyer’s research have shown that the left-wing authoritarians are also dogmatic and ethnocentric (Balík, Kubát 2004). Chiefly, it has shown that left-wing authoritarianism correlates with its right-wing counterpart. The distribution of results has allowed the earmarking of four groups of individuals:
1. individuals who are neither left- nor right-wing authoritarians;
2. individuals who are strong left-wing authoritarians and weak right-wing authoritarians;
3. individuals who are strong right-wing authoritarians and weak left-wing authoritarians;
4. individuals who are strong left- and right-wing authoritarians (Balík, Kubát 2004).
In addition to the above-mentioned characteristics, it is possible to observe in some cases of right- and left-wing authoritarian personalities, a categorical intolerance towards (almost) any sort of otherness and an admiration of uniformity and conformity, uncompromising advocation of the “right” opinions, aggressive behaviour towards political opponents, efforts to legitimize and legalize anti-social activities (often in the name of higher ideals), blanket radicalism, etc. In some cases, it is possible to mention abnormal conservatism, ambitiousness (supported by family upbringing), unlimited loyalty and servility, paranoid ideas, inability to feel sympathy, but also riveting speech, usage of slogans, half-truths, lies and fames, backstage politics, etc. Some of those characteristics form part of Adorno’s nine items or are simply expressions thereof."

Altemeyer's traits of left-wing authoritarianism are closer to yours, and run the same risk of instant paradox: "submission to authorities which attempt to subvert the authorities" and so on. It's also worth noting that most of Altemeyer's research was into Right-Wing Authoritarianism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism); he thinks there's pretty much zero Left-Wing Authoritarianism in the US and Canada, though I suppose you could see the spectre of it in the PC movement. The final paradox is that when left-wing movements become left-authoritarian, they become, by definition, right-wing movements in disguise.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Altemeyer (who has a very accessible style) distinguishes between right-wing authoritarian followers and conservatives, and between right-wing and left-wing authoritarians:

"In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives, so you can call them “right-wingers” both in my new-fangled psychological sense and in the usual political sense as well. But someone who lived in a country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist Party would also be one of my psychological right-wing authoritarians even though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political views. Instead he’s someone who readily submits to the
established authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly conventional. It’s an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics. Right-
wing authoritarianism is a personality trait, like being characteristically bashful or happy or grumpy or dopey."

(Source) (http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/chapter1.pdf)

[simasima.livejournal.com]

Thinking of artists I admire, the truly creative personality seems to jumble all four lists together. A little from this, a little from that.

[(Anonymous)]

Yet another false binary from Mr Momus! There are a hell of a lot creative people who have authoritarian tendencies. Just about any film director for a start.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You're making a very elementary error here, one that gets made time and again. Just because we propose two axes -- in this case authoritarianism and creativity -- it doesn't mean that we're saying someone must be unambiguously one or the other. All sorts of complex combinations are possible, and your example (which accepts the basic definitions of creativity and authoritarianism) shows that.

This term "false binary" is a silly one. Any two factors can be put together to make a model which maps a continuum: from low to high on the x-axis, whatever that is, from low to high on the y-axis, whatever that is, and a plotted position out there on chart. Yes, I'm saying that I think it's good to ride low on the authoritarianism scale and high on the creativity scale, in this particular grouping of traits. No, I'm not saying that it's a simple either / or.

[(Anonymous)]

Any two factors can be put together to make a model which maps a continuum...


seems to me that creativity and authoritarianism could each have a large number of axes (adorno is effectively giving 9 axes to authoritarianism, right?) so attempting to place them in a single plane (forgive me if my maths isn't up to this) seems a bit futile.

even what Adorno was up to seems a bit odd . You divide subjects into a continuum, throw away the people furthest from the extremes, and end up with 2 groups. Then (only then, after you've already divided them) you ascribe certain characters to them (this seems a little circular and maybe none too empirical?). then you try and come up with a scale to measure those characters, but based only on a small subset from the extremes. i just don't see the point. what did he do with the "F scale" once he'd got it?

(this reaction based on the wikipedia entry-i haven't read it. maybe its a whole lot more worthwhile than it looks)

i scored 38 on that other test- which is fine, i'm a little less liberal than you (momus). i guess i already knew that, though.


cheers
matt

[(Anonymous)]

Your pushing his buttons there matey - you know how competitive he is and how he will try to score a point up on you. His main weapons are logic and rhetoric, but that's not the point so much as the fact that he will never loose an argument here, he loves a good rhetorical scrap and he always wins. It is, after all, his sandpit that we're all playing in!

[(Anonymous)]

There are some good examples of the authoritarian character in Big Brother at the minute; in particular, Rodrigo, a Brazilian who is in love with all things English. Whenever the rules are broken, or the house 'disrespected', he reacts with absolute disapproval and condemnation, clearly with the implicit belief that God (the ultimate authority) is on his side.

Incidentally, Erich Fromm talked about the authoritarian character in his book 'The Fear of Freedom', published in 1942. The book was written partly as a reaction to the World War - Fromm wanted to examine why it was that leaders like Hitler were able to gain power, what it was within the psychology of the individual that they appealed to.

The creative character is talked about by most psychologists that I've read; for instance, Ellen Langer refers to a state of 'mindfulness' (the ability to form new categories being prime amongst the mindful characteristics), Eric Berne refers to 'awareness' and 'spontaneity', Jung refers to it through individuation, Fromm describes 'spontaneous action', Winnicott talks of 'creative living'. R.D. Laing also refers to it, as does James Hillman ('the psychic hermaphrodite'). Theorist Terry Eagleton also mentions something along these lines in 'After Theory'.

All seem to be gesturing towards a state of psychological maturity, of which the creative existence is a paradigm. This isn't to say that every artist is necessarily living 'creatively'; it seems that 'art' can just as often become a fetish and provide a resting point in the way that any other mindless lifestyle choice can.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

See, this is where it gets really interesting for me, when we start identifying authoritarianism in Big Brother contestants. It's all very well to pin it on Calvinist headmistresses like the ones in my Jean Brodie illustrations. But it's all around us, wearing jeans.

venus inverse

[(Anonymous)]

some of the most creative people i know are sadomasochists....

Re: venus inverse

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, there are leaps of logic here. The Creative IS an Authoritarian - he or she plays God very directly inside their own arena. They have a tolerance of ambiguity at a certain point and then they must define, they edit as much as they introduce. Without the Authoritarian side a certain kind of quasi-austistic drift ("suddenly a unicorn appeared!") takes over from any kind of engaging imagination.

[(Anonymous)]

Your personal traits and values are more "evolved". But you don't really work for a living. And you don't have any interest in doing so. Perhaps because having those exact values prevents one from fitting into the general mechanism of social produce. 99% of the jobs out there are boring. You need to be able to do a job for 45 years without minding the repetition or thinking too hard about the "why"s and the "how"s. You can attack this type of personality, but it also describes the people who keep the infrastructre running so that you can surf the net all day and play around in costume at art galleries.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think you hit an interesting critique there, one that Adorno didn't dare confront, or rather fudged by describing the authoritarian in terms of bourgeois morality. What if the authoritarian -- with his machismo, his insecurity, his bellicose patriotism, his resistance to change, to innovation -- is simply the proletarian? Wouldn't this explain the failure of the kind of progressive grassroots revolution Adorno and I hoped for, and its substitution by unwished-for revolution like "the Thatcher revolution"?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But you don't really work for a living.

I do work for a living, by the way, mate! I don't have any state or family subsidy, and savings. I live by money I earn by writing and performing. It's work. It has a market value.

[(Anonymous)]

I think you're taking a lot of things for granted here. What if, with the means of production we know have, we no longer needed to 'work' quite so much? I don't know the ins and outs, but Bertrand Russell talked about the four hour working day, as did some other theorist whose name escapes me.

What is the infrastructure, and why do we want to keep it going? This needs to be defined first, and if you're to make statements like the one above, then you should probably be able to elucidate on this question. By infrastructure are you talking about doctors, and engineers? And taxi drivers? And call centre workers?

Perhaps your average taxi driver would find it extremely boring to read a text by Adorno, or Fromm, and then write an exposition of what he read.

To say that this personality describes the people who keep the infrastructure running seems to imply that the authoritarian character is fundamental to the infrastructure. Have you thought this through? Do you really believe that?

More isms and the authoritarian personality

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

What about the degree of authoritarianism in some other isms, including some popular ones at the moment: feminism and organicism? Here are two opinion pieces about them that suggest, arguably, that authoritarian personalities are to be found everywhere in them. Would that make them right-wing in some sense?

Feminism:

"And this underlies an obvious killer fact for the politics of equality: equality of opportunity is not the same thing as equality of outcome.

It is a dangerous mistake doggedly to pursue equality of outcome and equal numbers of men and women in everything. The entire basis of the gender equality movement, equality by numbers, stems from an unquestioned and wrong assumption, taken as fact in defiance of the actual truth.

The tragedy of feminism is that it has been dogged, or perhaps I should say bitched, by a lot of fixed ideas and unquestioned beliefs. Only when it becomes intellectually rigorous will feminism have some claim to intellectual respectability and then perhaps some claim to justice."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/minette_marrin/article6788645.ece

Organic movement:

"[Ben Goldacre's] linking of the organic movement with homeopathy is telling. They are cults masquerading as science, rather like the creationists of America’s Bible Belt – but at least the latter have the self-awareness to acknowledge their opinions are based on faith. The organic movement, philosophically, is based on an inchoate faith in nature, seeing any human interference with nature as in some way bad and destructive of the 'roots' of creation.

As Luc Ferry, the French philosopher, wrote in The New Ecological Order: 'The hatred of the artifice connected with our civilisation... is also a hatred of humans as such. For man is the antinatural being par excellence... This is how he escapes natural cycles, how he attains the realm of culture, and the sphere of morality, which presupposes living in accordance with laws and not just with nature.'"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6788644.ece

What do you think, Momus (and others)? Have these two movements become poisoned by sclerotic authoritarian thinking? Or are the sort of people who write such columns just so many Hitlers kicking around adventurous, creative organicists, feminists, organic feminists, feminist organicists, and so on? Who wins out here in the right-wing-authoritarianism sweepstakes?

Re: More isms and the authoritarian personality

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

Hmm . . . can you be poisoned by sclerosis?

Re: More isms and the authoritarian personality

[mrobot.livejournal.com]

seems to me that the organic movement is more neo-luddism as a critique of capitalism than some form of misanthropism.

i think the luc ferry quote is rather off mark in relation to the organic movement, i dont see how becoming more in tune with nature is somehow anti-civilization and anti-human, it just happens to be anti-this-civilization. if the organic movement basically seeks to move agriculture back 100 years, i don't see how that's somehow incompatible with human civilization.

Astrology by another Name

[jdcasten.livejournal.com]

Just to comment on some of the comments… although not a “false binary,” I think that Momus would agree that isolating “Authoritarian” v. “Creative” personalities would be a “false dichotomy”—there are more than two axes to many issues.

For example… there are alternatives to socialism and capitalism, like the Parecon that Michael Albert promotes:

http://www.zcommunications.org/zparecon/parecon.htm

Albert, et. al. cite that class arises in socialism as well as capitalism, with what he calls a “coordinator class”—all the “powerful” (authoritarian?) and “creative” jobs go to a few, while the many still take orders and scrub public toilets, etc. I personally stop short of anarcho-syndicalism in my approach to political economies—but I definitely advocate employee empowered and owned firms with fairer labor distribution and democratically regulated markets.

Also, I wonder how scientifically exact these psychometric studies are (and how they evolved from Astrology)… and how much would be “trained” into a person, and how much a person can change the “nature” that they are given—how much of the Buddhist wisdom, to watch what goes in (your brain) and what goes out, can actually change you (or your kids)—to become less authoritarian and more creative?

Where are these images from, and what's the relevance?

[ajkandy.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

Just curious, they're obviously movie stills, but I'm unfamiliar with the film...and their relevance to the Authoritarian Personality.