The authoritarian personality, 50 years later: What lessons are there for political psychology?

Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sandford's The Authoritarian Person ality is probably the most deeply flawed work of prominence on political ps ychology. The methodological, procedural, and substantive errors of this st udy are well known, but they are frequently simply attributed to poor metho dological judgements, issues of scaling (such as response set), or Freudian theories that legitimated circular interpretations. But a more fundamental bias arose from the attempt to empirically verify the existence of a "type " of person whom the researchers thought dangerous and with whom they did n ot empathize. This attempt involved two dangerous procedures: (1) the fusio n of nominalist research procedures (in which empirical results were used t o type respondents) with a realist interpretation of types (in which some p eople "just were" authoritarians. These subtler problems have haunted conte mporary work in political psychology that avoids the methodological problem s of Adorno et al.; Altemeyer's work on authoritarianism, which not only is free from the defects of the Adorno et al. study but also involves some me thodologically exemplary experiments, is similarly distorted by asymmetries . The Authoritarian Personality as a cautionary example of bias arising fro m the choice of methodological assumptions.