Abstract
In their original report, The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, 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.
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