ABSTRACT
People probably differ in their willingness to buy into simple-minded, bizarre, or cock-eyed ideologies; thus, one might search for an ideology-prone personality type. Insofar as obedience, conformity, and other situational pressures can propel a person toward the commission of mass atrocities, one might focus on the influence-prone, conformist, or obedient personality. The Social Democratic workers showed themselves to possess personalities and beliefs consistent with support for fascism. Psychoanalytic theory provides the glue that holds together the diverse elements of the complex authoritarian personality syndrome. During the 1950s, research on the authoritarian personality dominated the field of social psychology, and hundreds of studies based on the F-scale appeared in scientific journals. The original model of the authoritarian personality had an impressive conceptual and intellectual coherence; the parts fit together logically and the model captured many aspects of personality that, intuitively, seemed to incline a person to support destructive dictators.
