ABSTRACT
The investigators obtained most of their subjects by approaching organizations and asking to survey opinions in the entire membership. The authoritarian type in his perception and thought appeared to be rigid and intolerant of ambiguity. The Authoritarian Personality had the greatest possible relevance to the social issues of its day. Several categories adapt traits of ordinary authoritarians to the special case of psychiatric patients. Authoritarianism may be the world-view of the uneducated in western industrial societies. In the 1930's, more than a decade before the publication of The Authoritarian Personality, R. Stagner developed a scale for the assessment of fascistic attitudes. Throughout The Authoritarian Personality there are intimations that one dimension may not be adequate to the description of modern ideologies. Perhaps the authoritarian is a person who is best characterized by the kind of information that will induce him to change his attitudes. The non-authoritarian will also change his attitudes but the requisite information is different.
