The Authoritarian Personality

The Authoritarian Personality is a book published by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik,Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford in 1950. Adorno et al. identified nine personality traits which tend to lead to fascism or right-wing attitudes later on. These traits include conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intellectualism, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex. Adorno believes that the nine traits are clustered together as the result of childhood experiences.

Following is a series of papers discussing The Authoritarian Personality (TAP).

Paper 1: Perceived Threat and Authoritarianism/ Feldman & Stenner / 1997
This study uses the 1992 National Election Data, constructing measures of authoritarianism and threat.
Always, there is the perception that threat would lead to authoritarianism. This research basically argues that the threat comes from the societal level, rather individual threat.
And the research shows, the more distant you thought you are from a certain political view or party would further gap you and that certain view and party, which shows a self-enforcing process.

Paper 2: Threat, Authoritarianism and Voting / Lavine et al/ 1999
This study is designed to tackled with the fallacy of traditional RWA study of using "hot" topics, which would trap the low RWA people.
Instead of surveying on questions like attitude towards guns, minority, etc., the study opposed to the subjects to AWARD and THREAT messages of voting. The result shows that low RWA people would be appeared by threat messages and finally go to vote, while the high RWA people the opposite.
However, the study is really raw in experiment design, no matter in the scale of treatment exposure or the quality of message taking.

Book Chapter: The Authoritarian Specter / Bob Altemeyer
This book proposed the idea of people tend to form RWA under the influence of environment, rather than the genetic reasons. Altemeyer developed a new scale, which is called "Experiencing Scale". His scale has 0.7 correlation with the old RWA scale.
Based on the research carried out in Canada, he found that: 1) Education and Age (of ppl who do not have children), these two factors can reduce the RWA; 2) However, having children would increase RWA; 3) Major social event would influence RWA, but depends on what kinds of event it is.
High RWA people are very leaned to believe, but also leaned to betray what they just believed. They would limit their experience to consolidate their RWA attitude, which is also self-enforcing.

Remark: Threat and RWA study is quite common in daily life, especially in election times. Politicians would use threat to manipulate the crowds to vote. However, always, such a political ad would appear to have misleading messages which would lead the audience to believe in messages they sent, which may not be true.