Twentieth Century Psychology Overview: Authoritarian Personality (Part 1, 2, 3)

Author: Theodore W. Adorno et al. (USA)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-12-01
Features: In May 1944, the American Jewish Committee (the American Jewish Committee) invited American scholars with diverse academic backgrounds to hold a two-day conference on religion and ethnic prejudice. During the conference, the participants formulated a research plan to address a major issue at the time: prejudice. They established two research standards. One had a narrower scope and primarily focused on problems encountered in social education, such as people's reactions to several major events in society at the time, as well as the evaluation of methods and techniques used by mass media in reporting intergroup relationships. The other was basic research aimed at enriching the knowledge base in this field. The two research standards mentioned above consisted of numerous sub-topics, the results of which were five representative works that explained the causal relationships of prejudice from various perspectives:
The first work was "The Dynamics of Prejudice" by Bettelheim and Janowitz, which primarily explored the relationship between the personality traits of veterans and their prejudice.
The second work was "Antisemitism and Emotional Disorder" co-authored by Ackerman and Jahoda, based on case studies from different industries, analyzing the unconscious and rational factors influencing the authoritarian personality of individuals.
The third work was "Rehearsal for Destruction" by Massing, which primarily analyzed the relationship between social contexts and prejudice, as individuals' social contexts directly constrained their responses or psychological tendencies.
The fourth work was "Prophets of Deceit" co-authored by Lowenthal and Guterman, which primarily studied how agitators turned existing prejudices and tendencies into a doctrine and ultimately led to overt actions, including the role of agitators, their propaganda techniques, and the regulatory mechanisms that transformed nascent feelings into distinctive beliefs and actions.
The fifth work is the one translated into Chinese as "The Authoritarian Personality," co-authored by Theodor Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik and others.