Authoritarian personality research declined due to methodological and psychometric flaws

Evidence

As already noted, in the years after the publication of The Nature of Prejudice, the popularity of the psychodynamic approach to stereotyping and prejudice declined. Previously, it had enjoyed at least some prominence among social psychologists. One example is research on the authoritarian personality (Adorno et al., 1950), in which prejudice was theorized to be characteristic of a particular kind of person (authoritarians) whose weak egos were in constant need of protection. Unfortunately, this research was criticized for methodological and psychometric flaws, including susceptibility to response sets and experimenter expectancies, and a reliance on a small unrepresentative sample for norming (see Duckitt, ch. 24 this volume). — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2374

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the Frankfurt School material on The Authoritarian Personality and its critics.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2374