Home Personal Psychology Personality THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY I: PRELIMINARY PERSPECTIVES AND STUDIES

THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY I: PRELIMINARY PERSPECTIVES AND STUDIES

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The question of major interest was: do individuals display a readiness to accept anti-Semitic ideology as a whole? Apparently they do, for substantially high correlation was found between the subscales (ranging from .74 to .85). Particularly interesting was the quite high correlation between the antithetical subparts that dealt respectively with Jewish “seclusiveness” and the need to segregate and restrict the Jew. Additionally, a reliability of .92 was found between the particular items on the total scale and between .7 and .89 on the subscales. As a result of these Adorno et al (195C, p. 75) concluded that anti-Semitism is a cohesive attitude the parts of which are in close relation. Furthermore, the

“. . . imagery of Jews as personally offensive and as socially threatening, attitudes of restriction; exclusion and the like, the view that Jews are too assimilative and yet too clanni.sh – these seem to be various factors of a broad ideological. pattern. An individual’s stand with regard to one of these issues tends to be very similar in direction and degree to his stand with regard to the others.”

Finally, anti-Semitism is observed to be an ideology, a way of thinking about certain “unclear ideas” that, once established, attract numerous specific opinions to form a system.

Having established an apparently a¢c:11rate scale which measures antisemitic: attitude, Adorno and associates attempted an interpretation of the content of the attitudes of highly anti-Semitic individuals by examining the content of the statements they endorsed. The California group found that the intolerant individual tended to agree with those statements which were stereotyped, which rigidly adhered to middle-class values, which tended to regard one’s own group as morally pure in contrast to the immoral out-group, which opposed and exaggerated sensuality, which emphasized dominance and power, e.g. fear of Jewish power and desire for Gentile power, which expressed a fear o:fmoral contamination and of being overwhelmed and victimized, which expressed the desire to erect social barriers in order to separate one group :from an­ other, and which maintained the morality and the dominance o:f one’s own group.

The successful investigators were now ready to determine whether these findings were confined to views about a particular minority group, the Jews, or whether they were applicable to all out-groups and part of a more inclusive, universal attitude o:f rejection of the external group. To answer this question, Adorno and associates constructed another scale w:hioh dealt with “ethnocentrism,” i.e. hostility toward numerous other minorities. They administered this newly devised scale to the subjects used in the original study and compared the results.

The Ethnocentric scale consisted of several sub—scales: (1) the Negro (N) scale, (2) the minority (M) scale which dealt with minorities other than Jews and Negroes, and (3) a “pseudo patriotism” scale which contained items dealing with international relations and which described the United States as an in-group in relation to other nations described as the out-groups. This scale proved to be highly reliable ( .91 on the total scale, from .80 to .-91 on the subscales); additionally, the intercorrelation between the subscales ranged from .74 to .84. Most importantly the correlation between the Ethnocentric Scale and the Anti-Semitism Scale a significant .80; in addition, the subparts of the two scales correlated substantially w:lth each other. In fact, these correlations were only slightly less than the intercorrelations among the parts of the same scale.

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