NAEB Newsletter (Apr 1952)

- 17 * - The investigation was not directed towards avowed fascists but rather to the general population. Its purpose was to discover the traits in the "potentially fascistic individual 11 which render him particularly susceptible to anti-democratic propaganda For this reason the study was concerned not with overt behaviour but first of all with the attitudes, opinions, and values. Psychologically, opinions, attitudes, and values are "on the surface"; yet the emotional charge in questions concerning minor¬ ity groups is so great that “the degree of openness with which a person speaks will depend upon the situation in which he finds himself.'* One might therefore distin¬ guish between the open, and the partly submerged attitudes. Both of these can be measured by the use of the appropriate techniques without too much difficulty. Still a third level, however, consists of the deeper layer which is even more out of sight. "The individual may have 'secret* thoughts which he will under no circumstances reveal to anyone else if he can help it; he may have thoughts which he cannot admit to himself, and he may have thoughts which he does not express because they are so vague and ill-formed that he cannot put them into words." It is at this level that the authors concentrate their search for the factors making for the potentially fascist personality. As they put it, "What people say, and to a lesser degree, what they really think depends very largely upon the climate of opinion in which they are living; but when that climate changes, some individuals adapt themselves much more quickly than others. If there should be a marked increase in antidemocratic propaganda, we should expect some people to accept and repeat it at once, others when it seemed that 'everybody believed it** and still others not at all." They were also concerned with the relation between this "ideology-in-readiness and - the person's capacity for expressing it in words and action.. Viewing the personality as "a more or less enduring organization of forces within the individual," they perceive these forces as "readinesses for response." They see these forcbs as "primarily needs (drives, wishes, emotional impulses)'Which vary from one individual to another in their quality, their intensity, their mode of gratifica¬ tion, and the objects of their attachment, and which interact with other needs in harmonious or conflicting patterns." This basically Freudian theory is however placed in a. social context. While the authors view the personality forces as deter¬ mining ideological preferences, they recognize that the personality forces are them¬ selves the product of environment. Denying the existence of "innate" or "racial" personality forces, they see the individual's personality as conditioned by his social, religious, and economic environment, and give great weight to the nature of the child training in the family life setting. The Authoritarian Personality is a monumental work, conducted by a team of competent psychologists over a period of years, and as a joint project of the Berkeley Public Opinion Study and the Institute for Social Research, at the University of California. It reports over a span of almost 1,000 pages on the use of every pertinent tool of analysis in the investigation of the problem. Chapters are devoted to the develop¬ ment of questionnaires for measuring the kind and amount of anti-semitism, political- economic ideology, ethno-centrism (hostility to outgroups). An extremely interesting chapter (VII) explains why and how a test was constructed to measure "implicit anti¬ democratic trends" — called the F (for Fascist) test. What makes this test partic¬ ularly useful is the fact that its items are all neutral; that is, not directly re¬ lated to prejudice. Persons taking it therefore reveal their underlying attitudes without realizing the fact. Scores on it correlate *75> with the test for ethno- centrism and .57 with the test on political-economic ideology. Your reviewer is currently using the F scale test experimently with subjects at the University of Illinois. You too might consider piling around with it in your work.