Authoritarian attitudes and personality maladjustment.

S[NCE the publication of The Authoritarian Personality (2), the relationship of ethnic prejudice and authoritarian attitudes to personality and psychopathology has been the subject of anumber of studies. Several scales have been used as measures of authoritarian attitudes, and the personality factors underlying authoritarianism have been investigated with an even greater variety of techniques. The most frequently used attitude measures in studies of this type have been the Anti-Semitism (A-S), Ethnocentrism (E), and Fascism (F) scales developed in The Authoritarian Personality. The personality side has been assessed by means of clinical interviews (2), psychoanalysis (1), the Thematic Apperception Test (2), the Rorschach (IS, 19), the Rosenzweig P-F test, the Allport-Vernon Scale of Values, and other tests (10). The MMPI has been used most often in studying the authoritarian syndrome (2, 3, 8, 10, 11, 12, 17). A survey of these studies, the majority of which have been reviewed by Christie (5), leaves no doubt that personality factors account for a substantial portion of the variance in ethnic prejudice and authoritarian attitudes in general. The question that still remains open, however, concerns the characteristics and the extent of these personality factors. Two rather different approaches to this question may be discerned. In one approach the emphasis is on describing the psycho dynamics (if the investigator is psychoanalytically inclined) or the trait structure (if the investigator is factor-analytically inclined) of the authoritarian personality, but without reference to psychological maladjustment per se. The dynamic approach is exemplified, for example, by the work of Frenkel-Brunswik (see 5, pp. 226—275). The trait structure approach is represented in the work of Eysenck (7), who conceives of the authoritarian personality as representing one extreme of the dimension of "tough-mindedness-tendermindedness," which in turn he conceives as a projection onto the social attitude field of a set of constitution-