Authoritarian personality traits trace to insecurity, anxiety, and threat

Evidence

Allport suggested that these intrapersonal dynamics of insecurity, anxiety, and threat would produce seven surface traits characteristic of the authoritarian personality: (1) Emotional ambivalence, particularly toward one’s parents, with uncritical positivity on the surface contrasting with repressed underlying resentment; (2) Moralism and rigid conventionality, with punitiveness toward anything deviant or unconventional; (3) Dichotomization, a tendency to categorize the world into rigid, simplistic dichotomies of good–bad, right–wrong, us–them; (4) Needs for definiteness, structure, order, and an intolerance of ambiguity; (5) Externalization, a preference to explain behavior in terms of concrete external forces rather than subjective, inner, psychological processes; (6) Institutionalization, a tendency to seek order and security in organized and institutionalized groups with clear roles, norms, and rules, such as the “nation”; (7) Authoritarianism, a need for strong authority and leaders that would impose order, discipline, and cohesion in society and the nation. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2430

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distills Allport’s seven-trait model of the authoritarian personality into a compact enumeration worth retaining.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality and later RWA/SDO research traditions. — connects to: Authoritarian personality theory holds that a psychological structure, not objective circumstances, determines fascist character — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1780