A Factor Analysis of the F-Scale

S INCE its publication in 1950, the work entitled The Authoritarian Personality' has come to be evaluated as a major contribution to social psychological knowledge. The study, one of the most ambitious and thorough attempts to document the relationship between personality and prejudice and political ideology, earned its distinction for several reasons. One of its major contributions was the attempt to provide means for studying personality and ideology en masse. Since the guiding and very much operating theory of the study was psychoanalytic, this purpose becomes doubly important in view of the relative lack of objective measures for psychoanalytic concepts. According to the researchers, one of their major findings is that "individuals who show extreme susceptibility to fascist propaganda... exhibit numerous characteristics that go together to form a 'syndrome,' although typical variations within this major pattern can be distinguished."2 The basic features of the syndrome were seen to be essentially those of "sado-masochistic" personality structure that is formed out of a particular resolution of the "oedipus complex."3 In order to get objective mass measurements of tendencies toward this core syndrome, a scale named the Fascism scale and denoted by the abbreviation "F-scale" was constructed. Its purpose was to provide an objective, easily applied means for approximating the far more timeconsuming clinical methods of singling out individuals receptive to anti-democratic propaganda.4 While other scales developed in the study have since been applied in other studies, none has received so much attention as the F-scale. This is understandable because the F-scale is the first available instrument for the mass-statistical study of this kind of personality. More importantly, the widespread adoption of the F-scale probably reflects the recognition that this instrument, because it is the measure for the key concept of the study, provides a link between the studies in which it is used and the major findings of The Authoritarian Personality. In addition, due to its centrality in accumulating research, the F-scale has become the focus of a considerable amount of careful scrutiny and evaluation.5 One of the crucial questions raised about the F-scale concerns the relationship between the instrument and the theory that guided its construction. The translation of a concept into an empirical measure is of vast significance for the theoretical import of the concept. Thus it may be asked: Do the empirical indicators of the authoritarian personality embodied in the F-scale behave in a manner consistent with the underlying theory of the scale? A definitive answer to this question is vital to the integration of the many studies using the F-scale, and it is consequential to the success of the original study in its purpose of objectifying authoritarianism and making it amenable to mass-statistical research. The research reported in this paper is intended to throw some light on the question. The method of factor analysis was employed to examine the relations between the items of the scale and their consistency with the theory of the authoritarian personality. The rationale, results, and implications of the factor analysis are reported below.