The Journal of General Psychology, 1978, 99, 133-139. AN EMPIRICAL VALIDITY TEST OF FROMM'S PERSONALITY
ORIENTATIONS THEORY*1
St. Mary's University, Canada, and Illinois Institute of Technology SHRIPAD G. PENDSE SUMMARY _j, -� .. 1 :1
,.:/ � k �· Erich Fromm has described each of four personality orientations by a list of
adjectives. Do these adjectives have a reasonable degree of cohesiveness to
constitute one orientation? In order to answer this question, 92 male and
female university students were asked to check adjectives on Fromm's list that
applied to them. Adjectives were alphabetically presented. Average intercorrelation among adjectives comprising each orientation was calculated and
compared with average intercorrelations for 1000 randomly selected combinations of adjectives. Fromm's orientations obtained high percentile ranks
compared to simulated combinations. Adjective combinations were then
chosen on the basis of factor analysis of half the data. The factor analytic
combinations were also compared with 1000 simulated combinations. Percentile ranks of Fromm's combinations were similar to those obtained by factor
analytical combinations. Fromm's descriptions of personality orientations are
seen to have a reasonable degree of cohesiveness, especially Exploitative and
Marketing orientations.
A. . " INTRODUCTION Erich Fromm's (4, 5) well-known personality theory asserts that a person's
personality may be characterized as being either productive or nonproductive. A nonproductive personality, in turn, may be dominated by one of four
orientations. These orientations are constructs proposed by Fromm as underlying and organizing behavior. People dominated by the Receptive orientation
believe that all that is good lies outside of them and the only way to get the 1 134 JOURNAL OF GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY good things in life is to receive them from others. People dominated by the
Exploitative orientation also believe that all that is good lies outside of them.
But they do not expect to receive the good things of life freely; they tend to grab
them from others. People dominated by the Hoarding orientation, on the
other hand, do not believe that good things can be either received or
exploited; they believe that security comes from owning things, protecting
them, and becoming self-sufficient. Finally, persons with the Marketing
orientation (a development of the modern, industrial society) tend to look at
themselves and others as impersonal commodities, to be bought and sold to
the highest bidder. A particularly poignant example of a person with the
Marketing orientation is Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
(9, p. 79) who says at one point to the apparition of his dead brother".... it's
not what you do, Ben. It's who you know and the smile on your face! It's
contacts, Ben, contacts!....aman can end with diamonds.... on the basis
of being liked!"
While Fromm's theory is well known and discussed in many personality
texts (e.g., 2, 8), relatively little empirical work has been done to test its
validity. Keniston (7) studied 12 college males through repeated interviews;
his study, however, is intuitive and impressionistic and lacks statistical and
methodological rigor. Benson (3) and Reimanis (10), on the other hand, have
rigorously studied the incidence of alienation and anomie in school children
and college students, but the relevance of their work to adults is in question
[see Maddi (8, p. 416) for further details]. Fromm and Maccoby (6) have done
a longitudinal, anthropological study in a Mexican village, administering a
lengthy questionnaire to over 400 villagers (95% of the total population).
Using global as well as factor analytic techniques, the authors found some
support for the existence of the Exploitative, Hoarding, and Receptive orientations, as well as for aproductive orientation. The Marketing orientation did
not emerge, and the authors believe th.is to be a result of the fact that the
village was a nonindustrial society. Perhaps the only major test of Fromm's
theory in an industrial society was made by Alsofrom (1) as a Doctoral
dissertation. She prepared a set of 15 statements for each of the four orientations (a total of 60 statements) by rewording Fromm's descriptions of the
respective behavioral traits. By administering the statements to 311 students
and factor analyzing the responses, she extracted seven factors and rotated
five of them. She considered that there was modest evidence in favor of the
Receptive and Hoarding orientations in two of her factors, and a third factor
seemed to be a combination of the Marketing and Exploitative orientations.
The other two factors were independent of Fromm's theory. ... ' f,- ,; 1 ' SHRIPAD G. PENDSE 135 In view of the sparseness of validity studies done on Fromm's theory in an
industrial society, it seems desirable to do more such studies. The present
work is one such study. It asks a rather fundamental question about Fromm's
theory: namely, are his four orientations sufficiently cohesive among themselves and distinct from one another to be considered separate orientations?
This question is answered with use of a simulation program especially designed to answer such ,questions.
B. METHOD 1. Subjects Ss were 92 male and female students from Saint Mary's University who
answered a questionnaire about their personality anonymously at the request
of the E. No monetary compensation or academic credit was provided. The E
did explain to the S s, however, after they had filled out the questionnaire, how
to score it, and what their scores might mean.
2. r '1 l">; . Materials Fromm (4, pp. 120-121) has provided a list of 46 adjectives which aresaid to
characterize the four orientations. The adjectives occur in pairs of opposites,
the positive ones being indicators of the productive aspects of an orientation,
and the negative ones indicating the nonproductive aspects. There are 13
adjectives describing the Receptive orientation, seven describing the Exploitative orientation, 12 describing the Hoarding orientation, and 15 describing
the Marketing orientation. (One adjective, "adaptable," is listed under both
the Receptive and the Marketing orientations, presumably by oversight.)
This list was rearranged in an alphabetical order. The positive adjectives
were on one page and the negative adjectives on another.
3. Procedure Each S was given the two lists of adjectives with the following instruction:
Please put a check mark (/) beside each of the following adjectives if you feel that
adjective describes your personality to at least a reasonable extent. Leave thespace
blank if the adjective does not apply to you. Please be as honest and objective about
yourself as you can. Please do not write your name anywhere on the paper. In the analysis of the results, it was found that S s had checked very few, if
any, adjectives on the negative list, and hence statistically useful analysis of
the negative list could not be done. (The Ss' reluctance to admit to any
negative qualities in themselves, even anonymously, is itself an interesting 136 JOURNAL OF GENER<\L PSYCHOLOGY finding to a personality theorist.) Hence results of only the positive list will be
reported.
The 46 positive adjectives in an alphabetical order, along with their identification number and the orientation to which they belong, are given in Table
1. The latter two items, of course, were not seen by the Ss. C. RESULTS When a researcher has gathered responses by S ·s to a large number of
variables, he or she usually does a factor analysis to reduce the number of
variables, and attempts to interpret the resulting factors. The situation regarding Fromm's theory, however, is quite different. Here we already have
four "factors" given by the theory, and we need to know whether those factors
are valid. A minimum requirement for their validity is that the correlations
between adjectives constituting an orientation be higher than correlations
between adjectives chosen at random.
In order, therefore, to test the minimum validity of each orientation, a 46 x
46 correlation matrix was computed for the list of 46 adjectives. The average
intercorrelation was calculated for the adjectives constituting each orientation. The average intercorrelations were as follows: Receptive, .2339 (13
adjectives); Exploitative, .2849 (seven adjectives); Hoarding, .1705 (12 adjectives); and Marketing, .1687 (15 adjectives).
These values of average intercorrelations by themselves are meaningless,
however, without a measure of their statistical significance. In order to obtain
such a measure, a simulation program was written. This program chose x
different random numbers between 1 and 46 (where x was 13 for the Receptive
orientation, 7 for the Exploitative orientation, etc.), and using the 46 x 46
correlation matrix, based on the 92 Ss' data and stored in memory, calculated
the average intercorrelation for this random combination of the x adjectives.
It repeated this process 1000 times and printed all the average intercorrelations arranged from the lowest value to the highest value.
For the Receptive orientation, for example, the lowest average intercorrelation for a random combination of 13 adjectives was .1223; the highest was
.3535. Within these 1000 simulated values, the average intercorrelation value
of .2339 for Fromm's particular combination of 13 adjectives ranked as
Number 714. In other words, Fromm's particular combination ranked at 71.4
percentile. Percentiles for the other three orientations were as follows: Exploitative, 98.0; Hoarding., 69.2; Marketing, 88.1.
In order to determine further the significance of the percentile values
obtained from Fromm's orientations, two other analyses were made. In the j· 137 SHRIPAD G. PENDSE TABLE 1
FROMM'S LIST OF P'OSITIVE ADJECTIVES ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY Adjective
1. Able to change
2. Able to make claims 3. Able to take initiative 4. Accepting 5. Active 6. Adaptable
7. Captivating 8. Careful 9. Cautious ':;;.\ 10.
11.
12.
13. 14.
15.
16. 17.
18.
19. 20.
21.
22.
23. 24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34. 35. 36.
37.
38. 39.
40.
41. 42.
43.
44. 45. 46.
.I Charming
Composed under stress
Curious
Devoted
Economical
Efficient
Experimenting
Forward-looking
Generous
Idealistic
Imperturbable
lmplusive
Intelligent
Loyal
Methodical
Modest
Open-minded
Optimistic
Orderly
Patient
Polite
Practical
Proud
Purposeful
Reserved
Responsive
Self-confident
Sensitive
Social
Socially adjusted
Steadfast, tenacious
Tender
Trusting
Tolerant
Undogmatic
Witty
Youthful Orientation
Marketing
Exploitative
Exploitative
Receptive
Exploitative
Receptive
Exploitative
Hoarding
Hoarding
Receptive
Hoarding
Marketing
Receptive
Hoarding
Marketing
Marketing
Marketing
Marketing
Receptive
Hoarding
Exploitative
Marketing
Hoarding
Hoarding
Receptive
Marketing
Receptive
Hoarding
Hoarding
Receptive
Hoarding
Exploitative
Marketing
Hoarding
Receptive
Exploitative
Receptive
Marketing
Receptive
Hoarding
Receptive
Receptive
Marketing
Marketing
Marketing
Marketing 138 JOURNAL OF GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY first analysis, data for all 92 5 s were factor analyzed. After comparisons were
made in the factor loadings obtained from principal component and principal
factor methods, and the loadings in each method before and after orthogonally
rotating them, it was determined that the principal components after varimax
rotation and Kaiser normalization gave the best results. (Best results here
mean that the number of variables with loadings of .30 or more was
maximized.) Four factors were extracted to make the number comparable to
Fromm's four orientations.
The 46 adjectives were thus classified into four mutually exclusive factors
by assigning every variable to the factor on which its loading was the highest.
For example, Factor 1 comprised 10 adjectives: namely #2, 3, 5, 15, 16, 17,
22, 27, 32, and 36._ Each of the four factors was then subjected to the
simulation test previously used for Fromm's four orientations. The significance of average intercorrelations for adjectives constituting a factor was
as follows (in percentiles): Factor 1, 99.99; Factor 2, 99.99; Factor 3, 99.92;
Factor 4, 99.98.
Obviously the factor analysis has given much better combinations than
Fromm has. This is, however, not fair comparison because the same data
were used in extracting factors and then testing their significance.
The second test was therefore made in a different and fairer way. First,
factors were extracted with use of half of the sample. Then by means of the
simulation technique, the significance of these factors was calculated for the
other half of the sample. This procedure gave the following result (in percentiles): Factor 1, 62.4; Factor 2, 93.1; Factor 3, 95.4; Factor 4, 89.9. a D. CONCLUSION The basic question to be answered by this study was this: How cohesive are
the adjectives that make up each of Fromm's four orientations? If they seem to
be reasonably cohesive, then a researcher could use those adjectives to determine an S's orientation. On the other hand, if the adjectives in an orientation
do not belong together any more than a group of adjectives chosen at random,
the basic framework of Fromm's theory is in question.
The average intercorrelations among the groups of adjectives chosen by
Fromm were higher than could have been expected by chance alone. In
comparison to 1000 random combinations, Fromm's four orientations ranked
at 71.4, 98.0, 69.2, and 88.1 percentiles, respectively. The Exploitative
orientation's 98 percentile ranking is particularly impressive. The 88.1 percentile ranking of the Marketing orientation is also quite respectable.
By comparison, factors obtained from factor analysis of half the data had :'\ ..
\- ' SHRIPAD G. PENDSE . .:.. 139 rankings of 62.4, 93.1, 95.4, and 89.9 percentiles, respectively. This performance is only slightly better than Fromm's. When one considers that Fromm's
choice of adjectives was made some 30 years ago, on purely theoretical
grounds, while the factor analytic choices were based on a sample comparable
to that on which they were to be tested, Fromm's percentile ranks look all the
more impressive.
We conclude, therefore, that Fromm's orientations are much more cohesive
than could be expected by chance alone, especially the Marketing and Exploitative orientations. With our confidence thus increased in Fromm's concept of
the personality orientations, the way is clear for further validity studies. These
studies can now be aimed at investigating whether each orientation has any
behavioral predictive power.

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