Authoritarianism as a personality trait: Evidence from a longitudinal behavior genetic study

• A community twin sample was assessed for authoritarianism twice over 15 years.
• Authoritarianism scores at Time 1 correlated .74 with scores at Time 2.
• Stability in authoritarianism was primarily accounted for by genetic influences.
• These results are comparable to those observed for standard personality traits.
• The more educated members of the sample exhibited particularly high stability.

Authoritarianism has long been conceived of as a highly stable personality trait (Adorno et al., 1950 and Altemeyer, 1981), though recent accounts have argued that authoritarianism is too malleable to justify this conception. We provided a test of the trait conception of authoritarianism by measuring its stability in a community sample of twins over a 15 year period, and by identifying the source of any stability with biometric modeling. Our results showed that authoritarianism exhibited a high degree of rank-order stability (r = .74). Biometric analyses indicated that this stability derived primarily from genetic influences, with changes in authoritarianism due to the unique experiences of the individual. In both of these respects, our results were highly comparable to those reported for other personality traits in previous work, indicating support for the trait conception of authoritarianism. Other results of note included a higher degree of stability among the more educated portion of the sample, supporting a hypothesis by Krosnick and Alwin (1989).