Authoritarian personality patterns are observable in children by age ten.

Evidence

“It was found that, at least after the age of ten, children’s personalities tend to fall into patterns similar to those observed in the adults described in The Authoritarian Personality. Thus ethnocentric youngsters tend to display authoritarian aggression, rigidity, cruelty, superstition, externalization, and projectivity, denial of weakness, power orientation, and tend toward dichotomous conceptions of sex roles, of kinds of people, and of values” (Frenkel-Brunswik, 1954). In the homes of the ethnocentric children discipline was strict, rigid, and punitive. Unprejudiced children were more apt to see both positive and negative features in their parents; they were more able to accept feelings of love and hate for the same persons. Prejudiced children seemed compelled to see their parents as wholly good though there were indications that they also saw them, covertly, as wholly bad. Prejudiced children conceived it to be the chief business of both parents and teachers to discipline their charges and keep them in line. While Frenkel-Brunswik published several partial reports of this work (1949, 1953, 1954), she never made a complete report and that is unfortunate in view of its considerable importance. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 650

Categorization

• CANDY: The detail that prejudiced children see parents as wholly good while covertly viewing them as wholly bad is a striking, tweetable psychological curiosity.
• XREF: connects to: Children’s questioning of unjustified authority is inherently punk — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 350; Rigid distant fathers and self-sacrificing mothers raise children prone to authoritarian personality — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 443