Authoritarian personality

Authoritarian Personality

The behaviour of the authoritarian people who are intolerant in situations that the can not control may be exacerbated –and constitute a risk for societies – when theyare in positions of power.
For that reason the authoritarian personality has been studied by both the political thinking as by social psychology .

As mentioned before, more than half a century,Theodor Adorno propelled this term in his book “The authoritarian personality”, in which he investigated about this syndrome.
The main aim of this book was "to study the subject as potentiallyfascist personality which structure makes him vulnerable to anti-democratic propaganda" (Adorno et et al, 1950, p.27)
Adorno et al. based their authoritarian theory in the psychoanalytic theory, propelledby Sigmund Freud, explaining that the early childhood experiences are very important in the personality development.
They defined authoritarianism as a general tendency to place themselves insituations of dominance or submission against the other as a result of a basic insecurity of SELF.
The authoritarism is one solution that people use to combat insecurity. They used it to escape. Whatauthoritarian people do is, to join something or someone external that has authority and thus give up their individuality.
Authoritarianism is reflected in these people in two different ways.
Thefirst one is due to feelings of inferiority, powerlessness and low self-esteem, so that individuals tend to submission and dependence on someone superior than themselves. The other one is due the samereason but they tend to submit to others.
Another solution to escape insecurity is due too to the same thing, and is called automatic compliance. The individual abandons him SELF to be part of themass.
The book's authors developed a hypothesis, which stated that the susceptibility of individuals to belong to this type of ideology (authoritarianism) depended on the psychological characteristics...