My sense as an outsider is that political psychology is inextricably influenced by The Authoritarian Personality, even though most people in the field regard this work somewhere between deeply flawed and pseudoscience.

The fundamental project of attempting to understand the psychology of fascist movements, or of political violence, or really of any political outcomes from the lens of personal predisposition lives on.

The criticism of Adorno et al I see (again as an outsider) is about the lack of methodological sophistication and inproperly done survey and psychometric work. I also have seen some critics of pathologizing what are just bad social relations. I agree completely with both.

Nevertheless, people now have more methodological sophistication and are willing to write more "clinically" about causal relationships or "predisposition" without pathologizing. So they continue the project.

Seeing so much of this work I was really confused as to why Adorno would co-author such a book. It seems so strange when compared with The Dialectic of Enlightenment which posits that fascism arises when societies can use the fruits of the enlightenment for oppression.

It seems like a book which tries to draw a causal arrow between a static picture of a person's psychology and support for fascism is the exact opposite kind of book that someone who cares so much about fascism as a historical process.

But in an unfinished chapter that got cut from the book Adorno addresses this. This is a good write up: https://platypus1917.org/2020/06/01/critical-anthropology-about-adornos-remarks-on-the-authoritarian-personality/

He argues that the point is not that fascism or submission to authority arises from static psychological predisposition, but instead that the modes of oppression are so deeply internalized that their logic and contradictions become reflected in our psychology.

That's the theoretical framing that I think political psychology misses a lot of times. The way in which we relate to our world is so deeply historically contingent, and what we measure is often an internalization of those contingent relationships.

Which means that the empirically established causal arrow from psychology -> politics can often be evidence for insights into the relationship of the effect and the ambient ideological and historical space, and probably tells us nearly nothing about psychology at all.

And by being less explicitly psychologizing and being less political in the language we use we become more "scientific", but in a way we actually obfuscate further the larger political relations. We treat psychological predisposition as a fetish in the Marxist sense.

This is actually exactly what the Dialectic of Enlightenment is about, it's about treating the fruits of the enlightenment (like science and discourse) as fetishes in the sense that we treat them as objects absent social relations. A sort of pro forma science, but absent insight.

Anyway, there is a lot Adorno is egregiously wrong about (jazz, for example, but many other things), and The Authoritarian Personality is pseudoscience in my view, but there are really valuable lessons to be learned in the way Adorno thought about it as a theoretical project.

Also I know nothing about political psychology or critical theory, so take all of this with a heavy discount.