From W.A.S.T.E. on FB. With my response. Have at it. Should be interesting.

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

In terms of science, even taken the soft standards of social science, 
the F scale was a failure. It claimed to measure deeper dynamics of the 
mind (in the sense of psychoanalysis), but only managed to identify 
clusters of social and political attitudes on the surface. And so the 
issues of conservatism and authoritarianism got mixed up. As a 
consequence, the authoritarianism of the left could not be detected by 
the F scale.

How little it actually had to to with serious science you realize when 
confronted with the fact that the answers of test subjects on many 
issues were evaluated completely different - the Cold War had kicked in, 
and this required political adjustments - when the F scale was used 
again by the Frankfurt Institute during the 1950s to, well, measure the 
'democratic maturity' of West Germans.  For Adorno and Horkheimer this 
was no problem, because they considered their theories to stand on their 
own feet and, in general, used data "only to derive from it concrete 
questions for investigations" (Adorno). That's the continental style - 
compare also Luhmann -, and as such, since there has been and always 
will be a certain gap between elaborated social theory on the one and 
empirical social research on the other side, perhaps not problematic. 
But it's funny to see how the F scale is used till today as some kind of 
fetish to make plausible two things which simply are not true: That the 
Frankfurt School contributed significantly to empirical social research, 
and that the societal dynamics of anti-democratic processes can, at 
least in principle, be stopped by social psychology.

In the case of the Frankfurt Institute, the unshakable believe in the 
general importance of Freud's approach damaged the validity of its 
social research seriously. While there might be exceptions - the 
ethnopsychoanalysis of people like Devereux or Morgenthaler -, the use 
of psychoanalysis for the social sciences seems to me, by now, rather 
limited. Actually you do not improve one problematic science - sociology 
- by adding another one in case of which the status as a science is even 
more questionable. (That Freud, in terms of style, was among the 
greatest authors of German science prose is nevertheless true.)

And I agree with you, Mark, that - the dog-comparison is striking! - the 
spirit of the whole project is not too far away from Pointsman's 
Pavlovian social technology. Hey, hey, we're doing Big Science ...

If you want to read more on that, you can either have a look at Lorenz 
Jäger's "Adorno: A Political Biography" (Yale University Press, 2004) or 
at "Roots of Radicalism. Jews, Christians, And The New Left" (Oxford 
University Press, 1982) by Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter. While 
Jäger - among the half of dozen biographies that appeared on occasion of 
Adorno's 100. birthday, Jäger's was the only non-hagiographic one -  
delivers an honest account of Adorno's merits and failures and analyses 
his life in the context of German Jewish history, Rothman and Lichter, 
who explored the authoritarianism of the New Left, as it unfolded during 
the students' movement - not only in the US - in the 1960s and early 
1970s, with questionnaires  and thematic apperception tests (TATs), 
discuss the "The Authoritarian Personality" in context of their own 
research project. To finish this mail, let me give you a longer quote 
from their instructive study (yes, you could put it on any 'secondary 
literature' list for "Vineland"!):

"The F scale was developed to measure attitudes that typically expressed 
an underlying authoritarian character structure. Yet there is a crucial 
gap between Fromm and Adorno's psychodynamic theories and the traits 
measured by the test. Quite simply, the F scale cannot test the 
relationship between psychodynamics and sociopolitical attitudes because 
the scale measures only the attitudes. It's simply assumed that these 
attitudes express deeper personality trends. (...) Clearly, Sanford and 
his co-workers simply inferred the alleged emotional substratum of such 
'authoritarian' attitudes from psychoanalytic theory./ Whatever the 
intended latent content of F scale items, their manifest content 
consists primarily in beliefs about human nature and one's proper 
relationship to other people. That is, the F scale measures certain 
aspects of social ideology which may or may not reflect deeper 
personality dispositions. The most that can be inferred from the 
correlation of 'F' with other attitude scales is a unified social 
outlook, rather than the unity of personality and ideology found by 
Adorno and his colleagues./ All this resulted in considerable confusion 
as to precisely what it is that the F scale measures. In trying to 
capture the psychodynamic complexity and latent emotional basis of 
fascist proclivities with a single paper-and-pencil test, the authors 
produced the opposite of what they intended. The F scale can create the 
impression that authoritarianism is nothing more than a set of beliefs, 
a cast of mind combining political conservatism with intolerance toward 
social deviance. (...) Use of the F scale has not only led to 
superficial readings of the concept of authoritarianism but also 
narrowed the the concept to include only the ideological 'right'. The 
resemblance of conservative and 'authoritarian' attitudes is so strong 
that some writers simply treat the two as parallel concepts. But if 
authoritarianism is nothing more than an extreme conservative ideology, 
why should it be considered an integral aspect of personality 
functioning? Edward Shills thus condemned the F scale as 'political 
attitudes masquerading as personality dispositions ... designed to 
disclose not authoritarian personality as such but rather the 'Right' 
--- the nativist-fundamentalist Authoritarian'./ The test was 
intentionally 'loaded' toward the political right because its creators, 
who were trying to identify potential fascists, saw fascism as a 
right-wing phenomenon. But if the potential for fascism lies not in 
conservative attitudes themselves but in the underlying personality 
trends they express, there should be some way of determining whether 
these trends might also be expressed in other attitudes." (pp. 157-159)

Attitudes like Frenesi's ...


On 04.06.2016 13:20, Mark Kohut wrote:
> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/how-world-war-ii-scientists-invented-a-data-driven-approach-to-fighting-fascism/
>
> Mark Kohut <https://www.facebook.com/mark.kohut.1?fref=ufi>"human 
> character can be measured the same way the temper of a dog can be 
> measured"...'scientific rationality"-----just another variation on the 
> disease so viciously, rightly, righteously, deeply satirized by 
> Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow--and one of his most profound depth 
> charges against America's, the West's, culture of slouching toward death.

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