B. Construction of the Fascism (F) Scale
1. The Underlying Theory
The 38 items of the original F scale are shown in Table 1 (VII), numbered in the order of their appearance on Form 78. If the reader considers that most of what has gone before in this volume was either known or thought about before construction of the F scale began, it will be apparent that in devising the scale we did not proceed in a strictly empirical fashion. We did not consider starting with hundreds of items chosen more or less at random and then seeing by trial and error which ones might be associated with A-S and E. For every item there was a hypothesis, sometimes several hypotheses, stating what might be the nature of its connection with prejudice.
Table 1 (VII)
The F Scale: Form 78
2. Although many people may scoff, it may yet be shown that astrology can explain a lot of things.
3. America is getting so far from the true American way of life that force may be necessary to restore it.
6. It is only natural and right that women be restricted in certain ways in which men have more freedom.
9. Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a more red- blooded, active way of life.
10. It is more than a remarkable coincidence that Japan had an earthquake on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1944.
12. The modern church, with its many rules and hypocrisies, does not appeal to the deeply religious person; it appeals mainly to the childish, the insecure, and the uncritical.
14. After we finish off the Germans and Japs, we ought to concentrate on other enemies of the human race such as rats, snakes, and germs.
17. Familiarity breeds contempt.
19. One should avoid doing things in public which appear wrong to others, even though one knows that these things are really all right.
20. One of the main values of progressive education is that it gives the child great freedom in expressing those natural impulses and desires so often frowned upon by conventional middle-class society.
23. He is, indeed, contemptible who does not feel an undying love, gratitude, and respect for his parents.
24. Today everything is unstable; we should be prepared for a period of constant change, conflict, and upheaval.
28. Novels or stories that tell about what people think and feel are more interesting than those which contain mainly action, romance, and adventure.
30. Reports of atrocities in Europe have been greatly exaggerated for propaganda purposes.
31. Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished.
32. It is essential for learning or effective work that our teachers or bosses outline in detail what is to be done and exactly how to go about it.
35. There are some activities so flagrantly un-American that, when responsible officials won't take the proper steps, the wide-awake citizen should take the law into his own hands.
38. There is too much emphasis in college on intellectual and theoretical topics, not enough emphasis on practical matters and on the homely virtues of living.
39. Every person should have a deep faith in some supernatural force higher than himself to which he gives total allegiance and whose decisions he does not question.
42. No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only one reason.
43. Sciences like chemistry, physics, and medicine have carried men very far, but there are many important things that can never possibly be understood by the human mind.
46. The sexual orgies of the old Greeks and Romans are nursery school stuff compared to some of the goings-on in this country today, even in circles where people might least expect it.
47. No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished.
50. Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.
53. There are some things too intimate or personal to talk about even with one's closest friends.
55. Although leisure is a fine thing, it is good hard work that makes life interesting and worthwhile.
56. After the war, we may expect a crime wave; the control of gangsters and ruffians will become a major social problem.
58. What a man does is not so important so long as he does it well.
59. Human nature being what it is, there will always be war and conflict.
60. Which of the following are the most important for a person to have or to be? Mark X the three most important.
artistic and sensuous
popular, good personality
drive, determination, will power
broad, humanitarian social outlook
neatness and good manners
sensitivity and understanding
efficiency, practicality, thrift
intellectual and serious
emotional expressiveness, warmth, intimacy
kindness and charity
65. It is entirely possible that this series of wars and conflicts will be ended once and for all by a world-destroying earthquake, flood, or other catastrophe.
66. Books and movies ought not to deal so much with the sordid and seamy side of life; they ought to concentrate on themes that are entertaining or uplifting.
67. When you come right down to it, it's human nature never to do anything without an eye to one's own profit.
70. To a greater extent than most people realize, our lives are governed by plots hatched in secret by politicians.
73. Nowadays when so many different kinds of people move around so much and mix together so freely, a person has to be especially careful to protect himself against infection and disease.
74. What this country needs is fewer laws and agencies, and more courageous, tireless, devoted leaders whom the people can put their faith in.
75. Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere imprisonment; such criminals ought to be publicly whipped.
77. No sane, normal, decent person could ever think of hurting a close friend or relative.
The major source of these hypotheses was the research already performed in the present study. Available for the purpose was the following material: results, such as those given in preceding chapters, from the A-S, E, and PEC scales; numerous correlates of E derived from questionnaire studies, that is, from responses to factual and short essay questions pertaining to such topics as religion, war, ideal society, and so forth; early results from projective questions; finally, and by far the most important, material from the interviews and the Thematic Apperception Tests. Another important source of items was research in fields allied to the present one in which the authors had previously had a part. Principal among these were several studies performed at the University of California on personality in relation to war morale and ideology,2 and researches of the Institute of Social Research such as content analyses of speeches of anti-Semitic agitators and a study on anti-Semitic workers.3 Finally, there was the general literature on anti-Semitism and fascism, embracing both empirical and theoretical studies.
It will have been recognized that the interpretation of the material of the present study was guided by a theoretical orientation that was present at the start. The same orientation played the most crucial role in the preparation of the F scale. Once a hypothesis had been formulated concerning the way in which some deep-lying trend in the personality might express itself in some opinion or attitude that was dynamically, though not logically, related to prejudice against outgroups, a preliminary sketch for an item was usually not far to seek: a phrase from the daily newspaper, an utterance by an interviewee, a fragment of ordinary conversation was usually ready at hand. (As will be seen, however, the actual formulation of an item was a technical proceeding to which considerable care had to be devoted.)
As to what kinds of central personality trends we might expect to be the most significant, the major guide, as has been said, was the research which had gone before; they were the trends which, as hypothetical constructs, seemed best to explain the consistency of response on the foregoing scales, and which emerged from the analysis of clinical material as the likely sources of the coherence found in individual cases. Most of these trends have been mentioned before, usually when it was necessary to do so in order to give meaning to obtained results. For example, when it was discovered that the anti-Semitic individual objects to Jews on the ground that they violate conventional moral values, one interpretation was that this individual had a particularly strong and rigid adherence to conventional values, and that this general disposition in his personality provided some of the motivational basis for anti-Semitism, and at the same time expressed itself in other ways, e.g., in a general tendency to look down on and to punish those who were believed to be violating conventional values. This interpretation was supported by results from the E and PEC scales, where it was shown that items expressive of conventionalism were associated with more manifest forms of prejudice. Accordingly, therefore, adherence to conventional values came to be thought of as a variable in the person – something which could be approached by means of scale items of the F type and shown to be related functionally to various manifestations of prejudice. Similarly, a consideration of E-scale results strongly suggested that underlying several of the prejudiced responses was a general disposition to glorify, to be subservient to and remain uncritical toward authoritative figures of the ingroup and to take an attitude of punishing outgroup figures in the name of some moral authority. Hence, authoritarianism assumed the proportions of a variable worthy to be investigated in its own right.
In the same way, a number of such variables were derived and defined, and they, taken together, made up the basic content of the F scale. Each was regarded as a more or less central trend in the person which, in accordance with some dynamic process, expressed itself on the surface in ethnocentrism as well as in diverse psychologically related opinions and attitudes. These variables are listed below, together with a brief definition of each.
a. Conventionalism. Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values.
b. Authoritarian submission. Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the ingroup.
c. Authoritarian aggression. Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.
d. Anti-intraception. Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded.
e. Superstition and stereotypy. The belief in mystical determinants of the individual's fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories.
f. Power and »toughness.« Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness.
g. Destructiveness and cynicism. Generalized hostility, vilification of the human.
h. Projectivity. The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.
i. Sex. Exaggerated concern with sexual »goings-on.«
These variables were thought of as going together to form a single syndrome, a more or less enduring structure in the person that renders him receptive to antidemocratic propaganda. One might say, therefore, that the F scale attempts to measure the potentially antidemocratic personality. This does not imply that all the features of this personality pattern are touched upon in the scale, but only that the scale embraces a fair sample of the ways in which this pattern characteristically expresses itself. Indeed, as the study went on, numerous additional features of the pattern, as well as variations within the over-all pattern, suggested themselves – and it was regretted that a second F scale could not have been constructed in order to carry these explorations further. It is to be emphasized that one can speak of personality here only to the extent that the coherence of the scale items can be better explained on the ground of an inner structure than on the ground of external association.
The variables of the scale may be discussed in more detail, with emphasis on their organization and the nature of their relations to ethnocentrism. As each variable is introduced, the scale items deemed to be expressive of it are presented. It will be noted, as the variables are taken up in turn, that the same item sometimes appears under more than one heading. This follows from our approach to scale construction. In order efficiently to cover a wide area it was necessary to formulate items that were maximally rich, that is, pertinent to as much as possible of the underlying theory – hence a single item was sometimes used to represent two, and sometimes more, different ideas. It will be noted also that different variables are represented by different numbers of items. This is for the reason that the scale was designed with first attention to the whole pattern into which the variables fitted, some with more important roles than others.
a. Conventionalism
12. The modern church, with its many rules and hypocrisies, does not appeal to the deeply religious person; it appeals mainly to the childish, the insecure, and the uncritical.
19. One should avoid doing things in public which appear wrong to others, even though one knows that these things are really all right.
38. There is too much emphasis in colleges on intellectual and theoretical topics, not enough emphasis on practical matters and on the homely virtues of living.
55. Although leisure is a fine thing, it is good hard work that makes life interesting and worthwhile.
58. What a man does is not so important so long as he does it well.
60. Which of the following are the most important for a person to have or to be? Mark X the three most important.
artistic and sensuous
popular, good personality
drive, determination, will power
broad, humanitarian social outlook
neatness and good manners
sensitivity and understanding
efficiency, practicality, thrift
intellectual and serious
emotional expressiveness, warmth, intimacy
kindness and charity
It is a well-known hypothesis that susceptibility to fascism is most characteristically a middle-class phenomenon, that it is »in the culture« and, hence, that those who conform the most to this culture will be the most prejudiced. Items referring to the holding of conventional values were included in order to gather data bearing on this hypothesis. Many of the early findings of the present study, however, gave evidence that the matter was not quite so simple. The correlation between conventional values and prejudice seemed to be positive but not very high; whereas unconventional people tended to be free of prejudice, it was clear that some conventional people were prejudiced while others were not. It seemed that, among the conventional group, what might make the difference was the deeper source of the conventionality, or rather the type of broader personality structure within which it had a functional role. If the adherence to conventional values was an expression of a fully established individual conscience, then we should expect no necessary connection between these values and antidemocratic potential. The same standards which render the individual easily offended by what he conceives to be the morally loose behavior of unassimilated minority group members or of »lower-class« people, would – if they are well internalized – cause him to resist the violence and delinquency which characterize the advanced stages of fascism. If, on the other hand, adherence to conventional values is determined by contemporary external social pressure, if it is based upon the individual's adherence to the standards of the collective powers with which he, for the time being, is identified, then we should expect a close association with antidemocratic receptivity. It is this latter state of affairs that we wish to call conventionalism – and to distinguish from mere acceptance of conventional values. The conventionalistic individual could in good conscience follow the dictates of the external agency wherever they might lead him and, moreover, he would be capable of totally exchanging one set of standards for another quite different one – as in a conversion from official Communism to Catholicism.
The scale items listed under Conventionalism afford the subject an opportunity to reveal whether or not his adherence to conventional values is of the rigid, absolutist character just described. For example, this would seem to be indicated by a mark of +3 on the item, »Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.« However, a sound decision on this matter would depend on the individual's responses to items in the other categories. For example, extreme conventionalism going with a strong inclination to punish those who violate conventional values is a different thing from conventional values associated with a philosophy of live and let live. In other words, the meaning of a high score on this variable, as on any of the others, is to be known from the broader context within which it occurs.
b. Authoritarian Submission
20. One of the main values of progressive education is that it gives the child great freedom in expressing those natural impulses and desires so often frowned upon by conventional middle-class society.
23. He is indeed contemptible who does not feel an undying love, gratitude, and respect for his parents.
32. It is essential for learning or effective work that our teachers or bosses outline in detail what is to be done and exactly how to go about it.
39. Every person should have a deep faith in some supernatural force higher than himself to which he gives total allegiance and whose decisions he does not question.
43. Sciences like chemistry, physics, and medicine have carried men very far, but there are many important things that can never possibly be understood by the human mind.
50. Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.
74. What this country needs is fewer laws and agencies, and more courageous, tireless, devoted leaders whom the people can put their faith in.
77. No sane, normal, decent person could ever think of hurting a close friend or relative.
Submission to authority, desire for a strong leader, subservience of the individual to the state, and so forth, have so frequently and, as it seems to us, correctly, been set forth as important aspects of the Nazi creed that a search for correlates of prejudice had naturally to take these attitudes into account.4 These attitudes have indeed been so regularly mentioned in association with anti-Semitism that it was particularly difficult to formulate items that would express the underlying trend and still be sufficiently free of logical or direct relations to prejudice – and we cannot claim to have been entirely successful. Direct references to dictatorship and political figures were avoided for the most part, and the main emphasis was on obedience, respect, rebellion, and relations to authority in general. Authoritarian submission was conceived of as a very general attitude that would be evoked in relation to a variety of authority figures – parents, older people, leaders, supernatural power, and so forth.
The attempt was made to formulate the items in such a way that agreement with them would indicate not merely a realistic, balanced respect for valid authority but an exaggerated, all-out, emotional need to submit. This would be indicated, it seemed, by agreement that obedience and respect for authority were the most important virtues that children should learn, that a person should obey without question the decisions of a supernatural power, and so forth. It was considered that here, as in the case of conventionalism, the subservience to external agencies was probably due to some failure in the development of an inner authority, i.e., conscience. Another hypothesis was that authoritarian submission was commonly a way of handling ambivalent feelings toward authority figures: underlying hostile and rebellious impulses, held in check by fear, lead the subject to overdo in the direction of respect, obedience, gratitude, and the like.
It seems clear that authoritarian submission by itself contributes largely to the antidemocratic potential by rendering the individual particularly receptive to manipulation by the strongest external powers. The immediate connection of this attitude with ethnocentrism has been suggested in earlier chapters: hostility against ingroup authorities, originally the parents, has had to be repressed; the »bad« aspects of these figures – that they are unfair, self-seeking, dominating – are then seen as existing in outgroups, who are charged with dictatorship, plutocracy, desire to control, and so forth. And this displacement of negative imagery is not the only way in which the repressed hostility is handled; it seems often to find expression in authoritarian aggression.
c. Authoritarian Aggression
6. It is only natural and right that women be restricted in certain ways in which men have more freedom.
23. He is indeed contemptible who does not feel an undying love, gratitude, and respect for his parents.
31. Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished.
47. No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished.
75. Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere imprisonment; such criminals ought to be publicly whipped.
The individual who has been forced to give up basic pleasures and to live under a system of rigid restraints, and who there-fore feels put upon, is likely not only to seek an object upon which he can »take it out« but also to be particularly annoyed at the idea that another person is »getting away with something.« Thus, it may be said that the present variable represents the sadistic component of authoritarianism just as the immediately foregoing one represents its masochistic component. It is to be expected, therefore, that the conventionalist who cannot bring himself to utter any real criticism of accepted authority will have a desire to condemn, reject, and punish those who violate these values. As the emotional life which this person regards as proper and a part of himself is likely to be very limited, so the impulses, especially sexual and aggressive ones, which remain unconscious and ego-alien are likely to be strong and turbulent. Since in this circumstance a wide variety of stimuli can tempt the individual and so arouse his anxiety (fear of punishment), the list of traits, behavior patterns, individuals, and groups that he must condemn grows very long indeed. It has been suggested before that this mechanism might lie behind the ethnocentric rejection of such groups as zootsuiters, foreigners, other nations; it is here hypothesized that this feature of ethnocentrism is but a part of a more general tendency to punish violators of conventional values: homosexuals, sex offenders, people with bad manners, etc. Once the individual has convinced himself that there are people who ought to be punished, he is provided with a channel through which his deepest aggressive impulses may be expressed, even while he thinks of himself as thoroughly moral. If his external authorities, or the crowd, lend their approval to this form of aggression, then it may take the most violent forms, and it may persist after the conventional values, in the name of which it was undertaken, have been lost from sight.
One might say that in authoritarian aggression, hostility that was originally aroused by and directed toward ingroup authorities is displaced onto outgroups. This mechanism is superficially similar to but essentially different from a process that has often been referred to as »scapegoating.« According to the latter conception, the individual's aggression is aroused by frustration, usually of his economic needs; and then, being unable due to intellectual confusion to tell the real causes of his difficulty, he lashes out about him, as it were, venting his fury upon whatever object is available and not too likely to strike back. While it is granted that this process has a role in hostility against minority groups, it must be emphasized that according to the present theory of displacement, the authoritarian must, out of an inner necessity, turn his aggression against outgroups. He must do so because he is psychologically unable to attack ingroup authorities, rather than because of intellectual confusion regarding the source of his frustration. If this theory is correct, then authoritarian aggression and authoritarian submission should turn out to be highly correlated. Furthermore, this theory helps to explain why the aggression is so regularly justified in moralistic terms, why it can become so violent and lose all connection with the stimulus which originally set it off.
Readiness to condemn other people on moral grounds may have still another source: it is not only that the authoritarian must condemn the moral laxness that he sees in others, but he is actually driven to see immoral attributes in them whether this has a basis in fact or not. This is a further device for countering his own inhibited tendencies; he says to himself, as it were: »I am not bad and deserving of punishment, he is.« In other words the individual's own unacceptable impulses are projected onto other individuals and groups who are then rejected. Projectivity as a variable is dealt with more fully below.
Conventionalism, authoritarian submission, and authoritarian aggression all have to do with the moral aspect of life – with standards of conduct, with the authorities who enforce these standards, with offenders against them who deserve to be punished. We should expect that, in general, subjects who score high on one of these variables will score high on the others also, inasmuch as all three can be understood as expressions of a particular kind of structure within the personality. The most essential feature of this structure is a lack of integration between the moral agencies by which the subject lives and the rest of his personality. One might say that the conscience or superego is incompletely integrated with the self or ego, the ego here being conceived of as embracing the various self-controlling and self-expressing functions of the individual. It is the ego that governs the relations between self and outer world, and between self and deeper layers of the personality; the ego undertakes to regulate impulses in a way that will permit gratification without inviting too much punishment by the superego, and it seeks in general to carry out the activities of the individual in accordance with the demands of reality. It is a function of the ego to make peace with conscience, to create a larger synthesis within which conscience, emotional impulses, and self operate in relative harmony. When this synthesis is not achieved, the superego has somewhat the role of a foreign body within the personality, and it exhibits those rigid, automatic, and unstable aspects discussed above.
There is some reason to believe that a failure in superego internalization is due to weakness in the ego, to its inability to perform the necessary synthesis, i.e., to integrate the superego with itself. Whether or not this is so, ego weakness would seem to be a concomitant of conventionalism and authoritarianism. Weakness in the ego is expressed in the inability to build up a consistent and enduring set of moral values within the personality; and it is this state of affairs, apparently, that makes it necessary for the individual to seek some organizing and coordinating agency outside of himself. Where such outside agencies are depended upon for moral decisions one may say that the conscience is externalized.
Although conventionalism and authoritarianism might thus be regarded as signs of ego weakness, it seemed worthwhile to seek other, more direct, means for estimating this trend in personality, and to correlate this trend with the others. Ego weakness would, it seemed, be expressed fairly directly in such phenomena as opposition to introspection, in superstition and stereotypy, and in overemphasis upon the ego and its supposed strength. The following three variables deal with these phenomena.
d. Anti-intraception
28. Novels or stories that tell about what people think and feel are more interesting than those which contain mainly action, romance, and adventure.
38. There is too much emphasis in colleges on intellectual and theoretical topics, not enough emphasis on practical matters and on the homely virtues of living.
53. There are some things too intimate or personal to talk about even with one's closest friends.
55. Although leisure is a fine thing, it is good hard work that makes life interesting and worthwhile.
58. What a man does is not so important so long as he does it well.
66. Books and movies ought not to deal so much with the sordid and seamy side of life; they ought to concentrate on themes that are entertaining or uplifting.
Intraception is a term introduced by Murray5 to stand for »the dominance of feelings, fantasies, speculations, aspirations – an imaginative, subjective human outlook.« The opposite of intraception is extraception, »a term that describes the tendency to be determined by concrete, clearly observable, physical conditions (tangible, objective facts).« The relations of intraception/extraception to ego weakness and to prejudice are probably highly complex, and this is not the place to consider them in detail. It seems fairly clear, however, that anti-intraception, an attitude of impatience with and opposition to the subjective and tender-minded, might well be a mark of the weak ego. The extremely anti-intraceptive individual is afraid of thinking about human phenomena because he might, as it were, think the wrong thoughts; he is afraid of genuine feeling because his emotions might get out of control. Out of touch with large areas of his own inner life, he is afraid of what might be revealed if he, or others, should look closely at himself. He is therefore against »prying,« against concern with what people think and feel, against unnecessary »talk«; instead he would keep busy, devote himself to practical pursuits, and instead of examining an inner conflict, turn his thoughts to something cheerful. An important feature of the Nazi program, it will be recalled, was the defamation of everything that tended to make the individual aware of himself and his problems; not only was »Jewish« psychoanalysis quickly eliminated but every kind of psychology except aptitude testing came under attack. This general attitude easily leads to a devaluation of the human and an overevaluation of the physical object; when it is most extreme, human beings are looked upon as if they were physical objects to be coldly manipulated – even while physical objects, now vested with emotional appeal, are treated with loving care.
e. Superstition and Stereotypy
2. Although many people may scoff, it may yet be shown that astrology can explain a lot of things.
10. It is more than a remarkable coincidence that Japan had an earthquake on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1944.
39. Every person should have a deep faith in some supernatural force higher than himself to which he gives total allegiance and whose decisions he does not question.
43. Sciences like chemistry, physics, and medicine have carried men very far, but there are many important things that can never possibly be understood by the human mind.
65. It is entirely possible that this series of wars and conflicts will be ended once and for all by a world-destroying earthquake, flood, or other catastrophe.
Superstitiousness, the belief in mystical or fantastic external determinants of the individual's fate, and stereotypy,6 the disposition to think in rigid categories, have been mentioned so frequently in the foregoing chapters and are so obviously related to ethnocentrism that they need little discussion here. A question that must be raised concerns the relations of these trends to general intelligence – and the relations of intelligence to ethnocentrism. Probably superstition and stereotypy tend to go with low intelligence, but low intelligence appears to be correlated with ethnocentrism to only a slight degree (see Chapter VIII).[7] It appears likely that superstition and stereotypy embrace, over and above the mere lack of intelligence in the ordinary sense, certain dispositions in thinking which are closely akin to prejudice, even though they might not hamper intelligent performance in the extraceptive sphere. These dispositions can be understood, in part at least, as expressions of ego weakness. Stereotypy is a form of obtuseness particularly in psychological and social matters. It might be hypothesized that one reason why people in modern society – even those who are otherwise »intelligent« or »informed« – resort to primitive, oversimplified explanations of human events is that so many of the ideas and observations needed for an adequate account are not allowed to enter into the calculations: because they are affect-laden and potentially anxiety-producing, the weak ego cannot include them within its scheme of things. More than this, those deeper forces within the personality which the ego cannot integrate with itself are likely to be projected onto the outer world; this is a source of bizarre ideas concerning other peoples' behavior and concerning the causation of events in nature.
Superstitiousness indicates a tendency to shift responsibility from within the individual onto outside forces beyond one's control; it indicates that the ego might already have »given up,« that is to say, renounced the idea that it might determine the individual's fate by overcoming external forces. It must, of course, be recognized that in modern industrial society the capacity of the individual to determine what happens to himself has actually decreased, so that items referring to external causation might easily be realistic and hence of no significance for personality. It seemed necessary, therefore, to select items that would express ego weakness in a nonrealistic way by making the individual's fate dependent on more or less fantastic factors.
9. Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a more red-blooded, active way of life.
35. There are some activities so flagrantly un-American that, when responsible officials won't take the proper steps, the wide-awake citizen should take the law into his own hands.
47. No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished.
70. To a greater extent than most people realize, our lives are governed by plots hatched in secret by politicians.
74. What this country needs is fewer laws and agencies, and more courageous, tireless, devoted leaders whom the people can put their faith in.
This variable refers, in the first place, to overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego. The underlying hypothesis is that overdisplay of toughness may reflect not only the weakness of the ego but also the magnitude of the task it has to perform, that is to say, the strength of certain kinds of needs which are proscribed in the subject's culture. The relations of ego and impulse, then, are at least as close as the relations of ego and conscience. Nevertheless, they may be separated for purposes of analysis, and other variables of the F scale refer to the deeper strata of the individual's emotional life.
Closely related to the phenomenon of exaggerated toughness is something which might be described as a »power complex.« Most apparent in its manifestations is overemphasis on the power motif in human relationships; there is a disposition to view all relations among people in terms of such categories as strong-weak, dominant-submissive, leader-follower, »hammeranvil.« And it is difficult to say with which of these roles the subject is the more fully identified. It appears that he wants to get power, to have it and not to lose it, and at the same time is afraid to seize and wield it. It appears that he also admires power in others and is inclined to submit to it – and at the same time is afraid of the weakness thus implied. The individual whom we expected to score high on this cluster readily identifies himself with the »little people,« or »the average,« but he does so, it seems, with little or no humility, and he seems actually to think of himself as strong or to believe that he can somehow become so. In short, the power complex contains elements that are essentially contradictory, and we should expect that sometimes one feature and sometimes another will predominate at the surface level. We should expect that both leaders and followers will score high on this variable, for the reason that the actual role of the individual seems to be less important than his concern that leader-follower relations shall obtain. One solution which such an individual often achieves is that of alignment with power figures, an arrangement by which he is able to gratify both his need for power and his need to submit. He hopes that by submitting to power he can participate in it. For example, a man who reports that the most awe-inspiring experience for him would be »to shake hands with the President« probably finds his gratification not in submission alone but in the idea that some of the big man's power has, as it were, rubbed off onto him, so that he is a more important person for having »shook his hand« or »known him« or »been there.« The same pattern of gratification can be obtained by acting in the role of »the lieutenant« or by functioning in a middle position in some clearly structured hierarchy where there is always somebody above and somebody below.
The power complex has immediate relations with certain aspects of ethnocentrism. An individual who thinks of most human relations in such terms as strong versus weak is likely to apply these categories in his thinking about ingroups and outgroups, e.g., to conceive of »superior« and »inferior races.« And one of the psychologically least costly devices for attaining a sense of superiority is to claim it on the basis of membership in a particular »race.«
g. Destructiveness and Cynicism
3. America is getting so far from the true American way of life that force may be necessary to restore it.
9. Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a more red-blooded, active way of life.
14. After we finish off the Germans and Japs, we ought to concentrate on other enemies of the human race such as rats, snakes, and germs.
17. Familiarity breeds contempt.
24. Today everything is unstable; we should be prepared for a period of constant change, conflict, and upheaval.
30. Reports of atrocities in Europe have been greatly exaggerated for propaganda purposes.
35. There are some activities so flagrantly un-American that, when responsible officials won't take the proper steps, the wideawake citizen should take the law into his own hands.
42. No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only one reason.
56. After the war, we may expect a crime wave; the control of gangsters and ruffians will become a major social problem.
59. Human nature being what it is, there will always be war and conflict.
67. When you come right down to it, it's human nature never to do anything without an eye to one's own profit.
According to the present theory, the antidemocratic individual, because he has had to accept numerous externally imposed restrictions upon the satisfaction of his needs, harbors strong underlying aggressive impulses. As we have seen, one outlet for this aggression is through displacement onto outgroups leading to moral indignation and authoritarian aggression. Undoubtedly this is a very serviceable device for the individual; yet, the strong underlying aggression seems at the same time to express itself in some other way – in a nonmoralized way. It was assumed, of course, that primitive aggressive impulses are rarely expressed with complete directness by adults, but must instead be sufficiently modified, or at least justified, so that they are acceptable to the ego.
The present variable, then, refers to rationalized, ego-accepted, nonmoralized aggression. The supposition was that a subject could express this tendency by agreeing with statements which though thoroughly aggressive were couched in such terms as to avoid his moral censorship. Thus, some items offered justifications for aggression, and were formulated in such a way that strong agreement would indicate that the subject needed only slight justification in order to be ready for all-out aggression. Other items dealt with contempt for mankind, the theory being that here the hostility is so generalized, so free of direction against any particular object, that the individual need not feel accountable for it. Still another guiding conception was that a person can most freely express aggression when he believes that everybody is doing it and, hence, if he wants to be aggressive, he is disposed to believe that everybody is doing it, e.g., that it is »human nature« to exploit and to make war upon one's neighbors. It goes without saying that such undifferentiated aggressiveness could easily, by means of propaganda, be directed against minority groups, or against any group the persecution of which was politically profitable.
46. The sexual orgies of the old Greeks and Romans are nursery school stuff compared to some of the goings-on in this country today, even in circles where people might least expect it.
56. After the war, we may expect a crime wave; the control of gangsters and ruffians will become a major social problem.
65. It is entirely possible that this series of wars and conflicts will be ended once and for all by a world-destroying earth-quake, flood, or other catastrophe.
70. To a greater extent than most people realize, our lives are governed by plots hatched in secret by politicians.
73. Nowadays when so many different kinds of people move around so much and mix together so freely, a person has to be especially careful to protect himself against infection and disease.
The mechanism of projection was mentioned in connection with authoritarian aggression: the suppressed impulses of the authoritarian character tend to be projected onto other people who are then blamed out of hand. Projection is thus a device for keeping id drives ego-alien, and it may be taken as a sign of the ego's inadequacy in carrying out its function. Indeed, in one sense most of the items of the F scale are projective: they involve the assumption that judgments and interpretations of fact are distorted by psychological urges. The subject's tendency to project is utilized, in the present group of items, in an attempt to gain access to some of the deeper trends in his personality. If the antidemocratic individual is disposed to see in the outer world impulses which are suppressed in himself, and we wish to know what these impulses are, then something may be learned by noting what attributes he most readily, but unrealistically, ascribes to the world around him. If an individual insists that someone has hostile designs on him, and we can find no evidence that this is true, we have good reason to suspect that our subject himself has aggressive intentions and is seeking by means of projection to justify them. A notorious example is Father [Charles Edward] Coughlin's referring to anti-Semitism as a »defense mechanism,« i.e., a protection of Gentiles against the supposed aggressive designs of the Jews. Similarly, it seemed that the greater a subject's preoccupation with »evil forces« in the world, as shown by his readiness to think about and to believe in the existence of such phenomena as wild erotic excesses, plots and conspiracies, and danger from natural catastrophes, the stronger would be his own unconscious urges of both sexuality and destructiveness.
31. Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished.
42. No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only one reason.
46. The sexual orgies of the old Greeks and Romans are nursery school stuff compared to some of the goings-on in this country today, even in circles where people might least expect it.
75. Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere imprisonment; such criminals ought to be publicly whipped.
Concern with overt sexuality is represented in the F scale by four items, two of which have appeared in connection with authoritarian aggression and one other as an expression of projectivity. This is an example of the close interaction of all the present variables; since, taken together they constitute a totality, it follows that a single question may pertain to two or more aspects of the whole. For purposes of analysis, sex may be abstracted from the totality as well as any of the other variables. Which of these variables are most basic must be determined by clinical study. In any case, it seemed that countercathexis (repression, reaction formation, projection) of sexual wishes was well qualified for special study.
The present variable is conceived of as ego-alien sexuality. A strong inclination to punish violators of sex mores (homosexuals, sex offenders) may be an expression of a general punitive attitude based on identification with ingroup authorities, but it also suggests that the subject's own sexual desires are suppressed and in danger of getting out of hand. A readiness to believe in »sex orgies« may be an indication of a general tendency to distort reality through projection, but sexual content would hardly be projected unless the subject had impulses of this same kind that were unconscious and strongly active. The three items pertaining to the punishment of homosexuals and of sex criminals and to the existence of sex orgies may, therefore, give some indication of the strength of the subject's unconscious sexual drives.
2. The Formulation of Scale Items
The considerations which guided the formulation of items in the scales described in previous chapters held as well for the F scale. There were several principles which, though a part of our general approach to scale construction, had particular significance for the present scale. In the first place, the item should have a maximum of indirectness, in the sense that it should not come close to the surface of overt prejudice and it should appear to be as far removed as possible from our actual interest. From this point of view, items such as 2 (Astrology) and 65 (Flood) were regarded as superior to items such as 74 (Tireless leaders) and 3 (Force to preserve). The latter two items, admittedly, could very well express certain aspects of an explicit fascist ideology, yet, as indicated above, statements touching upon the leader idea and the idea of force were definitely called for on theoretical grounds. More than this, there was a question of whether the aim of constructing a scale to correlate with E would be better served by the most indirect items or by the more direct ones, and in this first attempt it seemed the better part of wisdom to include some items of both kinds.
A second rule in item formulation was that each item should achieve a proper balance between irrationality and objective truth. If a statement was so »wild« that very few people would agree with it, or if it contained so large an element of truth that almost everyone would agree with it, then obviously it could not distinguish between prejudiced and unprejudiced subjects, and hence was of no value. Each item had to have some degree of rational appeal, but it had to be formulated in such a way that the rational aspect was not the major factor making for agreement or disagreement. This in many cases was a highly subtle matter; e.g., social historians might conceivably agree that Item 46 (Sex orgies) is probably quite true, yet it was here regarded as a possible index of projected sexuality, the argument being that most subjects would have no basis on which to judge its truth and would respond in accordance with their feelings. Since each item contained an element of objective truth or rational justification, an individual's response to a particular item might conceivably be determined by this fact alone. Hence, no item taken by itself could be regarded as diagnostic of potential fascism. The item's worth to the scale would have to be judged mainly in terms of its discriminatory power, and the meaning of an individual's response to it would have to be inferred from his total pattern of response. If a man marks +3 on Item 46 (Sex orgies) but marks -3 or -2 on Items 31 (Homosexuality) and 75 (Sex Crimes), it might be concluded that he is a man of knowledge and sophistication; but a +3 on Item 46, accompanying agreement with Items 31 and 75 would seem to be a fairly good indication of concern with sexuality.
Finally, it was required of each item that it contribute to the structural unity of the scale as a whole. It had to do its part in covering the diverse personality trends that entered into the broad pattern which the scale purported to measure. While it was granted that different individuals might give the same response to a given item for different reasons – and this apart from the matter of objective truth – it was necessary that the item carry sufficient meaningfulness so that any response to it could, when responses on all items were known, be interpreted in the light of our over-all theory.