Nevitt Sanford

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Nevitt Sanford (31 May 1909 – 11 July 1995) was an American professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and later at Stanford University. A Harvard doctoral student of Gordon Allport, PhD in social psychology and Henry Murray, MD at the Harvard Clinic,^[1] as a young Cal professor Sanford studied ethnocentrism and antisemitism, and was the senior author along with Columbia University philosopher Theodor Adorno of The Authoritarian Personality, also known as "the Berkeley Study."

Sanford's other co-authors in this classical social psychological study were UC Berkeley Psychology Clinic supervisor and Rorschach expert Else Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford's doctoral student Daniel Levinson, later a Yale psychology professor. In the study, Sanford and his colleagues queried the interactions between social systems and personality, concluding that social conditions encouraged those with dogmatic biases to persecute those groups against which they were prejudiced. Sanford was a psychoanalyst, but in his social psychological research was more empirical in his approach, and decades after the publication of The Authoriitarian Personality had to ask his doctoral student and later UC Berkeley professor Edward J. Hyman to explain Theodor Adorno's critical theoretical contributions to the theoretical tracts of the Berkeley Study.

The study had been sponsored by the wartime Office of Strategic Services, whose Dr. Herbert H. Hyman, a social psychologist, had commissioned it, as well as a psychological study of Hitler by Sanford's Harvard clinical psychology professor, Dr. Henry A. Murray, and also a study of wartime US soldiers by Sanford's Harvard colleague and friend Brewster Smith, later both a Harvard and UC Berkeley professor, and then provost of the University of California, Santa Cruz and president of the American Psychological Association.