Adorno’s Years in California 295conformity. ‘This is by its intrinsic logic tantamount to contempt for
the truth per se’, if ‘one selects a Weltanschauung after the pattern of
choosing a particularly well advertised commodity, rather than for its
real quality.’^104 As early as one of the first letters informing Horkheimer
of the plans for the project, Adorno made detailed proposals for an
empirical approach to understanding potential anti-Semitism: through
direct indicators ‘that would be both necessary and sufficient conditions
of anti-Semitism’. In the same letter he also mooted the idea of includ-
ing prisoners and prison guards in the study, although this proved to be
impossible in the event. Adorno had hoped that by enlarging the scope
of the survey in this way it might be possible to have an immediately
educative effect: ‘If it could be reliably shown that a particularly high
percentage of criminals were extreme anti-Semites, the result would
in itself be effective propaganda.’ In addition, he again spoke out in
favour of content analysis. He had the idea of scrutinizing comics and
funnies so as to ‘work out the underlying stereotyping and link it to the
anti-Semitic syndrome’.^105
Sociological dimensions played an important part because the anti-
Semitism arising from authoritarian dispositions could be interpreted as
a way of inwardly digesting the socially predominant ‘cultural climate’.
What was innovative about the research strategy from Adorno’s point
of view was, on the one hand, the use of standardized methods such
as questionnaires and the scales with which to measure attitudes to
anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism and conservatism. On the other hand, there
were the so-called projective procedures supplemented by qualitative
interviews. Adorno described the projective [i.e., open-ended] questions
of the attitude scales (e.g., ‘obedience and respect for authority are the
most important virtues children should learn’) as presenting the subject
with ‘ambiguous and emotionally toned stimulus material. This material
is designed to allow a maximum of variation in response from one
subject to another and to provide channels through which relatively
deep personality processes may be expressed.’^106 The extreme groups
of unambiguously authoritarian or anti-authoritarian personalities who
emerged from a statistical analysis of the questionnaires were then
subjected to clinical interviews, as well as a so-called Thematic Appercep-
tion Test, in order to validate the findings of the scale.^107 This innovative
combination of methods was as important as the attempt to measure
fascist predispositions indirectly in a number of different groups of the
population. Adorno himself took great pains with the adequate formu-
lation of the scale ‘items’ (i.e., statements to which subjects could respond
affirmatively or negatively), which were particularly revealing about
the nine variables (including conventionalism, authoritarian aggression,
superstitiousness and stereotyping). In a letter of November 1944 to
Horkheimer, who had returned to New York for several months in order
to coordinate the nine separate projects and arrange for their financing,
he wrote that an enormous number of questions had been worked out