Authoritarian personality

Question 1

dispositional factor affecting obedience

Answer 1

Authoritarian personality

Question 2

Authoritarian personality characteristics

Answer 2

respectful to authority figures
cannot tolerate behavior that is wrong in any way
has a dominating and bullying manner
very traditional ideas

Question 3

development of authoritarian personality

Answer 3

Disciplined upbringing
unconscious hostility
displacement
prejudice

Question 4

research support

Answer 4

Milgram repeated his study with his ppts from his original study. He found that people that scored higher on the authoritarianism test and lower on the social responsibility test were more submissive to authority and went all the way to 450 volts. This supported Adorno’s claim that there is a relationship between the types of people that obey.

Question 5

Problem with research support

Answer 5

no correlation could be determined meaning that we can’t establish a cause and effect relationship. This means there might be another reason for the results found in this experiment.

Question 6

Limited explanation

Answer 6

An explanation of obedience in terms of personality can only apply to the individual however it can’t be applied to a whole country’s population. E.g in Germany during world war 2 million individuals displayed obedient, racist and anti-semitic behaviour, the whole country couldn’t have had the same personality.

Question 7

Methodological problems

Answer 7

The interviewers were vulnerable to interviewer bias. They knew the hypothesis of the study, this means they could have consciously or unconsciously hinted or given them the answer they needed to get the results they were hoping for.