ABSTRACT
Since its earliest days, the study of the authoritarian personality has been intimately involved with our struggle to understand prejudice (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). The famous team of researchers who collected around Nevitt Sanford at Berkeley during World War II set out, in the first instance, to understand the anti-Semitism then rushing to its catastrophic climax in Europe. The “Berkeley researchers” found that anti-Semites were profoundly ethnocentric as well, disliking a wide range of outgroups while overglorifying their own ingroups. Interviews of persons who scored highly on an Ethnocentrism scale revealed, the Berkeley team thought, an underlying personality structure that they labeled prefascist. Whereupon they developed another attitude scale to ensnare the potentially fascist personality. Remarkably, scores on that test, the Fascism scale, and ethnocentrism correlated about .75 over a wide range of samples.
