If you've ever taken a personality test, it was probably in a lifestyle magazine ("What kind of adventurer are you? Take this quiz to find out!") or maybe at the behest of a friend who's a Meyers-Briggs believer. But these fluffy diversions have a serious, often dark history. In fact, one of the earliest personality tests was developed during World War II to determine who might become an authoritarian and join the Nazi movement.

In 1943, three psychology professors at the University of California at Berkeley were struggling to understand the most horrific European genocide in a generation. As the war raged overseas, Daniel Levinson, Nevitt Sanford, and Else Frenkel-Brunswik decided to use the greatest power at their disposal—scientific rationality—to stop fascism from ever rising again. They did it by inventing a personality test eventually named the F-scale, which they believed could identify potential authoritarians. This wasn't some plot to weed out bad guys. The researchers wanted to understand why some people are seduced by political figures like Adolf Hitler, and they had a very idealistic plan to improve education so that young people would become more skeptical of Hitler's us-or-them politics.

The rise of personality testing

As they cooked up a research plan, the Berkeley group borrowed ideas from a somewhat checkered tradition in psychology that held that personalities could be broken down into discrete character traits. In the late nineteenth century, pseudoscientists like Francis Galton, best known for popularizing the idea of eugenics, believed that human "character" could be measured the same way "the temper of a dog can be tested." This idea gained traction, and the first personality tests were developed by the US Army during World War I so millions of soldiers could be tested for vulnerability to "shell shock," an early term for post-traumatic stress.

If we could test soldiers for shell shock, why not test citizens for anti-Semitism and a tendency to follow dictators? That's what the Berkeley researchers decided to do. Their idea was compelling enough to net them a grant of $500 from the psychology department in 1943. In the year that followed, Sanford, Frenkel-Brunswik, and Levinson created several versions of a personality test they hoped would identify potential authoritarians, their term for people who would follow leaders with fascist or genocidal tendencies. They conducted in-depth personal interviews and administered written personality tests to hundreds of Berkeley students. Some of the answers they got seemed to reflect democratic values, such as when a business student told them that he wanted to hire a diverse workforce and work with people from all over the world. Other answers suggested a less welcoming attitude toward outsiders: a pre-law student claimed he could always "recognize" Jews and called Jewish immigration "a danger" because it meant America would "take on the burdens of people who have been misfits in other countries."

Eventually the Berkeley group's publications caught the eye of prominent social scientist Max Horkheimer, who was on the board of a civil liberties organization called the American Jewish Committee. Founded in 1906 by people who wanted to put a stop to the pogroms killing Jews in Russia, the group was on the lookout for researchers who could explain how everyday prejudices erupted into the Holocaust. Horkheimer secured more funding for the project and introduced the data-minded Berkeley researchers to the rather dystopian political philosopher Theodor Adorno. At that point, the group expanded its scope, bringing qualitative analysis into their quantitative framework. This allowed them to perfect the F-scale test after several false starts.

The F-scale

To create a personality test that actually revealed latent authoritarianism, the researchers had to give up on the idea that there's a strong link between anti-Semitism and authoritarianism. That perspective was too limiting. Though their experiences with the Holocaust suggested a causal connection between hatred of Jews and the rise of fascism, it turned out that people with authoritarian tendencies were more accurately described as ethnocentric. Authoritarians believed their own group was superior and expressed racism against a wide range of other people. Frenkel-Brunswik conducted many of the interviews, and she writes in The Authoritarian Personality that the group adjusted its work accordingly, testing people for prejudice against blacks, Filipinos, and immigrants. It found that the common thread among all the high-scoring authoritarians was a generalized disgust with people who seemed different and therefore "uncanny." When an authoritarian scored low on anti-Semitism, he or she was sure to score high on hatred of another outsider group.

Another discovery was that authoritarians tended to distrust science and strongly disliked the idea of using imagination to solve problems. They preferred to stick to tried-and-true traditional methods of organizing society. Many believed that force was the best way to deal with conflict, partly because war is an inevitable outgrowth of human nature. Another personality trait that emerged had to do with sexuality. Authoritarians were rigidly opposed to homosexuality, occasionally suggesting that homosexuals should be killed or at least jailed. But more generally, they were fascinated by regulating other people's sex lives, often speculating about the "wild sex life" of groups they hated, whether those were artists, "weak" politicians, or racial minorities. Overall, the Berkeley group described authoritarians' outlook as "cynical" because of a tendency to believe the powerful would always rule the weak, and it was best to be on the side of the powerful, which is also likely why authoritarians expressed a desire for politicians who would take charge, set rules, and crush dissent.

As a result of these findings, the F-scale in its final form was intended to measure ethnocentrism, superstition, aggression, cynicism, conservatism, and an inordinate interest in the private sex lives of others as the building blocks for a personality drawn to authoritarian leaders. Now the group began to gather data on a much wider scale. They tested students at the University of Oregon and George Washington University, as well as union members, war vets, the inmates of San Quentin Prison, and patients at a psychiatric clinic.

At this link, we've recreated a version of the original F-scale test that the researchers administered, all questions included. Originally, people had the option to respond to each question using a sliding scale from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree," but I've simplified this to "agree" and "disagree." As you'll see as you read through the questions, it's somewhat dated—remember, this was created in the late 1940s. To figure out your score, just add up how many times you checked "agree." The higher your score, the closer you are to being authoritarian. You can see why this might make the test easy to game, since the non-authoritarian answer is always "disagree." But the test's structure also created an additional problem. As University of Minnesota political psychologist Christopher Federico pointed out to Ars, there's a widely recognized psychological phenomenon called acquiescence bias, where some people have a predilection for agreeing with anything people say to them. So a high-scoring person might have authoritarian tendencies, but they might just suffer profoundly from acquiescence bias, too.

Though they hardly created the perfect test structure, the researchers were able to gather a fair amount of good data that's still considered relevant by scholars who study authoritarianism today. Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris told Ars that it "set the paradigm in the field of social psychology."