Authoritarian Personality Test: Your Score Across the Nine F-Scale Themes

You rate 30 statements from strongly disagree (0) to strongly agree (4), for a total between 0 and 120. Nine of the statements are written in the opposite direction, so that disagreeing with them is what raises your score; the engine flips those before adding. Your total lands in one of four bands: low on the pattern (0 to 30), some conventional leanings (31 to 60), a marked pattern (61 to 90), or a strong pattern (91 to 120). These bands are educational quarters of the range we chose for readability, not cutoffs from a validated instrument, and nobody has normed them on a population.

Below the total you get nine bars, one per theme. The three themes that later research treated as the core of the construct, conventionalism, submission to authority and aggression toward rule-breakers, carry four statements each (a maximum of 16), and the other six carry three each (a maximum of 12). The grouping of statements into themes is our own editorial mapping onto the 1950 descriptions, not a factor structure anyone has tested, so read the bars as a map of which ideas you agreed with, not as nine validated subscales.

Agreeing with a single statement means nothing by itself. Plenty of thoughtful people believe children should respect their elders or that some rules deserve firm enforcement. The pattern the test looks for is a cluster: convention plus deference plus punishment plus a dim view of human nature plus a distaste for looking inward. Only when several of those travel together does the total climb into the upper bands.

In 1950 Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford published The Authoritarian Personality, a Berkeley study funded in the aftermath of the Second World War that tried to find out whether some people were, by temperament, more receptive to anti-democratic propaganda. Their central instrument was the F-scale (F for a pre-fascist potential), a set of agree-or-disagree statements organized under nine themes. The book was enormously influential and almost immediately criticized. Critics pointed out that every statement was worded so that agreeing raised the score, that the psychoanalytic story about harsh fathers was hard to test, and that the scale only looked at one political direction.

Bob Altemeyer spent the following decades rebuilding the idea on firmer ground. His right-wing authoritarianism scale kept three of the nine themes, submission, aggression and conventionalism, used balanced wording, and showed that the trait predicted real-world judgments in laboratory and survey studies. John Duckitt later argued that authoritarianism is one of two separate ideological attitude dimensions, driven more by seeing the world as dangerous than by any party membership. The modern reading is that authoritarian attitudes exist on a continuum, show up across the political spectrum in different forms, rise when people feel threatened, and sit far closer to a set of beliefs about order and safety than to a clinical condition.

What it is not: a personality disorder, a diagnosis, a measure of intelligence, or a verdict on your character. It is also not a measure of where you sit on a left-right axis. Someone can hold strongly conservative or strongly progressive views and score low here, and someone can be politically disengaged and score high. The test asks about how you think rules, leaders and rule-breakers should be treated, not about what you want those rules to be.

The authoritarian pattern overlaps with several things this site measures separately. The Moral Foundations Test looks at which moral intuitions, including loyalty, authority and sanctity, carry the most weight for you, which is the values side of the same territory. The Big Five Personality Test measures the traits behind it: low openness to experience is the Big Five trait most consistently linked to authoritarian attitudes in the research, and conscientiousness and agreeableness shape how those attitudes get expressed. The Locus of Control Test asks whether you experience outcomes as driven by your own actions or by powerful others and chance, which relates to the power and toughness and projectivity themes here.

People also arrive at this page after searching for the F scale on the MMPI. That is a different thing entirely: the MMPI's F scale is a validity check for unusual or careless responding, not a measure of authoritarianism. If the broad personality inventory is what you were after, the Multiphasic Personality Test (MMPI-Style) test is an original educational profile written in that tradition, and the FAQ below explains the difference.

A low score is not a medal and a high score is not an accusation. The useful move at any level is to look at the theme bars and ask where your answers came from. Submission and conventionalism often trace back to a family or a community where order kept people safe. Aggression toward rule-breakers and a cynical view of human nature often rise during periods of threat, financial stress or real betrayal, and they soften again when life feels secure. Anti-intraception, the discomfort with looking inward, is worth noticing because it is the one theme that makes all the others harder to examine.

If a high score bothers you, the research on reducing authoritarian attitudes points to the same small set of things: sustained contact with people from groups you distrust, exposure to situations where rule-following and goodness come apart, and lowering felt threat where that is possible. If you want a structured place to reflect on where your beliefs came from and whether they still serve you, a therapist who works with values and identity can help without pushing any political view, and the directory link on your result page filters for personality and self-exploration work.