The current study attempts to enhance the body of knowledge in the field of authoritarianism, creativity, and career choice in three ways: (1) investigating the relation between authoritarianism and creativity, (2) including law and design students, and (3) examining the relation between creativity and career choice. One hundred and eleven undergraduate students studying design, behavioral sciences, and law, who filled out Altemeyer's (1988) Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) Scale, Tel-Aviv Creativity Test (TACT) (Milgram, Milgram, & Landau, 1974) and a demographic questionnaire, participated in the study. The Design students were significantly more creative and less authoritarian than both the Behavioral Sciences and the Law students. The results are discussed in the context of the role these two personality variables play in choosing a field of study.
“Authoritarian personality” describes a syndrome of conservative attitudes, religious, national, or attitudinal intolerance, inflexibility at the cognitive and emotional levels, and personality traits that stem from deep personal conflicts and are reflected in compulsiveness, inordinate recourse to defense mechanisms, and distorted satisfaction of repressed drives (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). Theorists of the syndrome argue that people who tend to be influenced by fascist propaganda developed early childhood hostility for authority figures (parents) that could not be expressed under any circumstances. According to this theory, reaction formation effects a replacement of this hatred by love and by a tendency to conform to authority, and the aggression originally developed toward the parents is displaced onto weak groups, such as ethnic minorities or people who deviate from social norms (e.g. homosexuals). Over the years, a consensus has been reached that prejudices against minorities, ethnic or others, constitute a generalized attitude (Gilbert, Fiske, & Lindzey, 1998).
Altemeyer (1981) presented a concept of authoritarianism that builds upon The Authoritarian Personality ( Adorno et al., 1950). Altemeyer's theory first appeared in his book Right-wing authoritarianism ( RWA; 1981), which includes a critical survey of the literature as well as reporting on psychometric validation of the RWA Scale over the years. Altemeyer formulates his results in terms of Bandura's (1977) social learning theory rather than in the framework of Freudian psychodynamics. His new scale, developed after years of sophisticated empirical validation, represents a unidimensional measure of three attitudinal clusters: authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism. The RWA has undergone extensive empirical testing by Altemeyer himself in Canada, and by other scholars in the United States ( Zwillenberg, 1983), South Africa and West Germany ( Altemeyer, 1988, p. 14), and Australia ( Heaven, 1984 and Ray, 1985). Hebrew and Arabic versions of the RWA have also proven to be valid and reliable in Israel both among Jewish ( Rubinstein, 1995) and Palestinian ( Rubinstein, 1996) subjects. Despite a very critical review published recently about the concept of the “authoritarian personality” in general and of Altemeyer, 1981, Altemeyer, 1988 and Altemeyer, 1996 work in particular, it is admitted that his work is “methodologically rigorous in substance” ( Martin, 2001, p. 21).
1.1. Creativity
Creativity has been perceived for many years as a mysterious trait attributed to geniuses and explaining their extraordinary capacity (Shye & Goldzweig, 1999). Vernon (1970) attributed the first attempt to measure creativity empirically to Galton, who developed some of the concepts later by creativity researchers. “Fluency”, the spontaneous flow of ideas and images, has been considered a characteristic of the creative mind. (Burt cf. Koestler, 1966). Eysenck (1996) defines creativity as the ability to produce ideas, insights, inventions or new or original art products, accepted by experts as scientifically, esthetically, socially, or technically valuable. MacDougal added a characteristic called “productive association” or “deviant association”, which later turned out into “flexibility”, the ability to integrate a variety of ideas taken from different areas (cf. Koestler, 1966). Guilford (1950) described creativity as a combination of abilities shared by all individuals to some extent. He perceived the difference between creative and non-creative individuals as quantitative only, and argued that everyone could be expected to show some creative acts. This idea of a range of creativity enables systematic research in the field. Guilford (1959) used factor analysis to identify the central components of creativity. He distinguished between divergent thinking, which he considered creative, and convergent thinking, a logical inference aiming at one right answer. Divergent thinking consists of 12 factors identified by Guilford, including fluency of thinking (the ability to produce many ideas) and originality (the ability to give right but unconventional answers), the two dimensions of the instrument used to measure creativity in the present study (see Method).
