Is Supernaturalism a Part of Authoritarianism

Summary.-In their original report, The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno, FrenkelBrunswick, Levinson, and Sanford asserted that the authoritarian character accepts supernatural phenomena as valid. This assumption, however, has received little empirical evaluation. In the present study, 940 subjects of various ages responded to a questionnaire composed of the F-Scale mixed with items of a 1980 Supernaruralism Scale by Randall and Desrosiers. There was no correlation of authoritarianism scores with those of supernatural acceptance. However, compared to a smaller sample tested in 1977, there were significantly higher F-Scale scores for the more recent cohort. Increased authoritarianism may reflect a general societal conservative shift of the 1980s. In the book, The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno, Frenkel-Bmnswick, Levinson, and Sanford (1950) described several personality characteristics consistent with authoritarianism, including a tendency toward superstitiousness and belief in supernatural control. Despite the hundreds of research artides concerning authoritarianism, little attention has been paid to the authoritarian's propensity toward supernatural beliefs. One reason these supernatural aspects have received scant attention is that the authors of The Authoritarian Personality were vague and somewhat contradictory in the description of these beliefs, for example, the high "F-Scale" scorer is characterized by rigid thinking, stereotypy and by an acceptance of supernatural or mystical causality. One then reads on about an authoritarian person adopting a scientific attitude, albeit a "pseudo-scientific" one. But if the authoritarian were to reject science, such rejection would not square with the more general theoretical framework in which the authoritarian is said to identify strongly with powerful authority "ingroups," i.e., science and technology. One could reasonably expect an authoritarian person instead to reject supernatural phenomena in favor of scientific skepticism. In our previous work (Randall & Desrosiers, 1980) we collected pilot data (n = 3291, that showed an inverse correlation (r = -0.12) between these two personality factors. The aim of the present report was to test the alleged relationship of authoritarianism and supernaturalism through analysis of a new set of data collected in 1987. Method.-The Supernaturalism questionnaire (Randall & Desrosiers, 1980) was used to assess belief in paranormal events. In addition to the 329 subjects tested in 1977, data from a new cohort of 940 were collected anonymously from undergraduates, graduate students, and their acquaintances via students' research projects. This new cohort contained 294 men and 646 women who were classified into four meaningful age groups: College (18 to 22 yr.), Young Adult (23 to 29 yr.), Middle Adult (30 to 49 yt), and Mature Adult (50 yr. and over). Items from the Supernaturalism questionnaire were intermixed with items From the F-Scale (version 45), and subjects responded to both scales using a 6-point, forced-choice Likert scale, with 1 ="Disagree Strongly ." Results.-The over-all Pearson correlation of F-Scale scores and Supernaturalism scores for the 1987 cohort was -0.0003 (N = 940). Analysis of variance of F-Scale scores did indicate that