Personality
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Abstract
Chapter 5 considers the role of personality in the Holocaust. The idea that psychopathology or insanity characterized the individual leaders of the Third Reich or the German population was simply not supported by the evidence. Perhaps these leaders, or even the German population as a whole, were not characterized by a psychological disorder but were nevertheless different from other people in some important way. The authoritarian personality, a construct derived from Freudian thought, was suggested as a possible explanation. German child-rearing practices were implicated in the production of this personality, which was thought to be related to perpetrator behavior. Defining and measuring the authoritarian personality has posed some challenges, and researchers have not convincingly tied authoritarian traits to perpetrator behavior. The concept of “national character,” a kind of societal-level personality, has similarly been difficult to define and connect to perpetrator behavior. Personality approaches have also been applied to the study of rescuers.