The Authoritarian Personality

If the Agentic Personality and the Libertarian Personality cannot explain Milgram’s results, how about the Authoritarian Personality? A group of researchers in the early 1950s devised a famous questionnaire to measure the cluster of personality traits that they believed characterized supporters of fascist regimes - traits that include an emotional need to submit to authority, but also an exaggerated and punitive interest in other people’s sexuality, and a propensity to superstition and irrationalism.

Interestingly, Milgram’s compliant subjects had higher F-scores than his defiant subjects.^[448] Indeed, isn’t it mere common sense that authoritarians are more obedient to authority?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. For one thing, subsequent research has largely discredited the authoritarian personality studies. The F-scale turns out to be a good predictor of racism, but a bad predictor of everything else politically interesting about authoritarianism (such as left-right political orientation).^[449] For another, people who volunteer for social psychology experiments are generally low-F, which makes Milgram’s subjects at best atypical authoritarians.^[450] For a third, high-F individuals typically mistrust science, so it rather begs the question to assume that they regard the experimenter as an authority to be deferred to. Finally, remember that the F- scale measures other things besides emotional attachment to hierarchy. We might as well call high-F something other than the Authoritarian Personality: we might call it the Superstitious Personality, or even the Perverted Prude Personality. In that case, the explanation only raises new questions. Why should Perverted Prudes or believers in alien abduction be specially prone to obedience?