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How World War II scientists invented a data-driven approach to fighting fascism
The F-scale personality test measured authoritarianism in US citizens.
If you’ve ever taken a personality test, it was probably in a lifestyle magazine (“What kind of adventurer are you? Take this quiz to find out!”) or maybe at the behest of a friend who’s a Meyers-Briggs believer. But these fluffy diversions have a serious, often dark history. In fact, one of the earliest personality tests was developed during World War II to determine who might become an authoritarian and join the Nazi movement.
In 1943, three psychology professors at the University of California at Berkeley were struggling to understand the most horrific European genocide in a generation. As the war raged overseas, Daniel Levinson, Nevitt Sanford, and Else Frenkel-Brunswik decided to use the greatest power at their disposal—scientific rationality—to stop fascism from ever rising again. They did it by inventing a personality test eventually named the F-scale, which they believed could identify potential authoritarians. This wasn’t some plot to weed out bad guys. The researchers wanted to understand why some people are seduced by political figures like Adolf Hitler, and they had a very idealistic plan to improve education so that young people would become more skeptical of Hitler’s us-or-them politics.
As they cooked up a research plan, the Berkeley group borrowed ideas from a somewhat checkered tradition in psychology that held that personalities could be broken down into discrete character traits. In the late nineteenth century, pseudoscientists like Francis Galton, best known for popularizing the idea of eugenics, believed that human “character” could be measured the same way “the temper of a dog can be tested.” This idea gained traction, and the first personality tests were developed by the US Army during World War I so millions of soldiers could be tested for vulnerability to “shell shock,” an early term for post-traumatic stress.
To create a personality test that actually revealed latent authoritarianism, the researchers had to give up on the idea that there’s a strong link between anti-Semitism and authoritarianism. That perspective was too limiting. Though their experiences with the Holocaust suggested a causal connection between hatred of Jews and the rise of fascism, it turned out that people with authoritarian tendencies were more accurately described as ethnocentric. Authoritarians believed their own group was superior and expressed racism against a wide range of other people. Frenkel-Brunswik conducted many of the interviews, and she writes in The Authoritarian Personality that the group adjusted its work accordingly, testing people for prejudice against blacks, Filipinos, and immigrants. It found that the common thread among all the high-scoring authoritarians was a generalized disgust with people who seemed different and therefore “uncanny.” When an authoritarian scored low on anti-Semitism, he or she was sure to score high on hatred of another outsider group.
As a result of these findings, the F-scale in its final form was intended to measure ethnocentrism, superstition, aggression, cynicism, conservatism, and an inordinate interest in the private sex lives of others as the building blocks for a personality drawn to authoritarian leaders. Now the group began to gather data on a much wider scale. They tested students at the University of Oregon and George Washington University, as well as union members, war vets, the inmates of San Quentin Prison, and patients at a psychiatric clinic.
At this link, we’ve recreated a version of the original F-scale test that the researchers administered, all questions included. Originally, people had the option to respond to each question using a sliding scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree,” but I’ve simplified this to “agree” and “disagree.” As you’ll see as you read through the questions, it’s somewhat dated—remember, this was created in the late 1940s. To figure out your score, just add up how many times you checked “agree.” The higher your score, the closer you are to being authoritarian. You can see why this might make the test easy to game, since the non-authoritarian answer is always “disagree.” But the test’s structure also created an additional problem. As University of Minnesota political psychologist Christopher Federico pointed out to Ars, there’s a widely recognized psychological phenomenon called acquiescence bias, where some people have a predilection for agreeing with anything people say to them. So a high-scoring person might have authoritarian tendencies, but they might just suffer profoundly from acquiescence bias, too.
Though they hardly created the perfect test structure, the researchers were able to gather a fair amount of good data that’s still considered relevant by scholars who study authoritarianism today. Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris told Ars that it “set the paradigm in the field of social psychology.”
The Authoritarian Personality
After exhaustive analysis, the group published its findings in 1950 in , a book that would change the way we understand the lure of fascist dictators and right-wing authoritarianism. A thick volume of case studies, psychological research, and complicated social theory, it represented the first sustained attempt to use rigorous social scientific research to explain, as the authors put it, “the willingness of masses of people to tolerate the mass extermination of their fellow citizens.” Martin Jay, an intellectual historian at UC Berkeley who has written about Adorno’s work, told Ars that the book was the first of a five-part series called Studies in Prejudice. “It was the most empirical” of the bunch, according to Jay. Other volumes in the series, such as Leo Lowenthal’s Prophets of Deceit, dealt more with cultural analysis, exploring topics such as how propaganda can inspire widespread hate for a specific ethnic group. “In 1945, [the authors] were worried that the US was under threat from agitators, or right-wing fascists,” Jay explained. “They wanted an empirical way to deal with tendencies that might lead the US in a similar direction to Germany.”
Those worries seemed justified by the time the book came out in 1950. It was the height of Cold War paranoia, and that year Berkeley professors were asked to sign loyalty oaths to prove they were not associated with the Communist Party. Levinson fled to a position at Harvard, and Sanford was fired after refusing to sign the oath. Frenkel-Brunswik, who was Jewish, had already escaped Poland and Austria as Nazism spread across Europe. It’s likely she signed the loyalty oath out of fear that she might be kicked out of the US. A few years later, struggling with personal and professional setbacks, she committed suicide. Adorno, who had also fled German fascism, saw what happened to his fellow researchers as part of an overall pattern of political disaster. He wrote a series of dark, wrathful works of cultural criticism where he predicted that the US would fall prey to right-wing propaganda and reject democracy.
In the late 1950s, after Frenkel-Brunswik’s death, The Authoritarian Personality and its authors were reclaimed as important to the field of social psychology. Sanford was reinstated as a professor at UC Berkeley, only to resign after he received all of his back pay. His resignation was one of many ways he protested what he considered ongoing failures of the educational system; in 1968, he founded a very successful nonprofit, the Wright Institute, devoted to educational reform. His former student Levinson went a different direction, abandoning politics to pen a bestselling book called Seasons of a Man’s Life, about how men’s personalities change throughout their lives. In the 1970s, he became a pop psychology celebrity.
Despite all their other work, the four authors of The Authoritarian Personality are still remembered for a study that started with $500 in research money from the UC Berkeley psychology department in 1943. Federico, who researches authoritarianism in America today, told Ars via e-mail that many of their findings are still relevant:
Above all, [The Authoritarian Personality] was correct in its key argument: that there are personality differences among individuals in the degree to which they prefer clear lines of social authority, strict social norms, and social uniformity as opposed to diversity. It was also correct in arguing that individuals who score high on authoritarianism in this respect tend to be more intolerant of those who are different (e.g., racial, ethnic, or religious minorities) or those [who] appear to deviate from traditional social norms (e.g., LGBT folks). They are also more likely to gravitate toward political figures (e.g., Trump in the present context) who embody intolerance and willingness to attack minorities who are believed to pose some kind of social threat.
The book has remained relevant partly because authoritarianism hasn’t changed much in seven decades. It’s easy to find parallels between authoritarians identified in the 1940s by the Berkeley group and people today who support authoritarian leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn, president-elect of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte, and presidential hopeful Donald Trump in the US.
Contradictory beliefs
Perhaps the most fundamental scientific contribution that the Berkeley researchers made will sound obvious today, though it was a breakthrough at the time. This study was the first to demonstrate quantitatively that people often have two different levels of belief that are in conflict with each other. Jay said that the book’s “basic intuition” is that “people have surface beliefs but if you dig down they have psychological limitations that take them away from those beliefs. There are differences between conscious and unconscious motives—which explains why people would betray their ideals.”
This internal conflict became obvious in many of the interviews done for The Authoritarian Personality, where people would call themselves champions of democratic values but simultaneously express a wish for “strong” leaders who would do away with elections. Another common finding was that test subjects would call themselves free of prejudice, or “color blind,” and then use intensely negative stereotypes to describe Jews, blacks, Japanese people, and “zoot suiters.” Broadly, zoot suits were to the 1940s what hip hop styles are to the 2010s, symbols of pride and cultural power. Many people taking the F-scale tests would have remembered the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles, a week of racially motivated fights between white sailors and local Mexican-American zoot suiters.
Authoritarians taking the Berkeley group’s personality tests often thought they were more democratic than they actually were. As Jay suggested, this helps explain why their German counterparts would “betray their ideals” and engage in genocide or racist violence. Their surface beliefs contradicted their deeper prejudices, and when push came to shove, the deeper prejudices won out.
When the Berkeley group saw this pattern emerging in their tests, they began to wonder whether the clash of surface and deeper beliefs could be explained using psychoanalysis. They lived at a time when the work of Sigmund Freud was still taken very seriously as science, and so they tried to fit their findings into his paradigm of the unconscious mind affecting the conscious one. Freud believed that a lot of our unconscious desires come from repressing violent and sexual feelings during childhood. So the authors of The Authoritarian Personality looked for patterns in their authoritarian subjects’ childhoods, discovering that many of them had been raised in very strict households with corporal punishment.
In The Authoritarian Personality, the researchers speculated that having to obey rigid rules sparked rage in the young authoritarians—but they repressed it, remaining obedient. When all that rage built up so much that they couldn’t bear it, authoritarians let off steam by directing anger at outsiders like Jews or zoot suiters. As Federico put it, “The idea is that the repressed hostility involved in being highly submissive to authority needs to be aimed in some other direction, leading to a chronic tendency to be prejudiced, intolerant, and so on.” It was a convoluted way of explaining something that turned out to be quite simple. Today, psychologists take a more direct approach. “Basically, we learn our beliefs and values from parents,” Federico said. “If a person’s parents are authoritarian, they are likely to learn an authoritarian way of looking at and relating to the world.”
Political scientists generally reject the Berkeley group’s Freudian interpretation, too. Partly that’s because focusing on family dynamics doesn’t account for the sphere of influences outside the home. As Norris pointed out, a focus on family dynamics “neglects the broader socio-economic conditions and cultural values which may lead towards supporting more authoritarian attitudes, such as societal-level cultural prejudice against outsiders and beliefs in a strong leader. It also neglects the role of political elites and the way that leadership rhetoric and party organizations may shape and condone the expression of authoritarian attitudes.”
"Two things I request of You (Deprive me not before I die): Remove falsehood and lies far from me; Give me neither poverty nor riches— Feed me with the food allotted to me; Lest I be full and deny You, And say, “Who is the Lord?” Or lest I be poor and steal, And profane the name of my God."
[Prov. 30:7-9, Bible, NKJV]
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