Authoritarian personality Flashcards
Authoritarian personality
The belief that people should completely obey or submit to their authority figures, and suppress their own beliefs.
F-scale
Developed in 1947 as a measure of authoriarian traits or tendencies.
Dispostional
Explanation of behaviours such as obedience emphasise them being caused by an individuals own person characteristics rather than situational influences within the enviroment.
Right-wing authoritarianism
A cluster of personality variables that are associated with the ‘right wing’ attitude to life.
Who first identified the Authoritarian personality?
Adorno et al (1950)
Elms and Milgram (1966)
Procedure
A follow-up study using 20 obedient and 20 disobident p’s from milgram’s study.
Each p completed a personalitiy scale the Minnestoa Multiphasic personality inventory or MMPI and the authorianism F (F-scale)
They were also asked questions about their upbringing and their attiudes to the experimenter and the learner in Milgram’s study.
Elms and Milgram (1966)
Little difference between obident and disobedient p’s of MMPI scores
> Higher level authoritarinism among obedient p’s than disobedient p’s
> Obedient p’s reported being less close their fathers during childhood and saw the authority figure as more admirable than the learner.
AO3
There is research evidence for the authoritarianism/obedience link
P: Although several studies have found that authoritarian p’s are more obident, there has been considerable suspicion about whether p’s really believed they were giving electric shocks.
E: Dambrun and Vantine (2010) used an ‘immersive virtual enviroment’ yet p’s still real, with a significant correlation between RWA scores and the maximum voltage shock level
E: As p’s who displayed higher levels of RWA were the ones who obeyed the most, this confirms the link between authoritarianism and obedience.
The social context is more important
P: Milgram did not believe that the evidence for a dispostional basis to obedience was the particularly strong.
E: Milgram showed that variations in the social context of the study (e.g proximity of the victim) were the primary cause of differences in p’s levels of obedience, not variations in personality
E: Relying on an explanation of obedience based purely on authoritarianism lacks the flexibility to account for these variations (Milgram 1974)
There are differences between authoritarian and obedient particpants
P: Elms and Milgram’s research found important differences in the characteristics of the authoritatiran personaility and the characteristics of obedient p’s.
E: For example, obedient p’s reported having a good relationship with their parents, rather having grown up in the overly strict family enviroment associated with auhtorian personality
E: Given the large number of p’s who were fully obedient in Milgram’s study, it is implausible that the majority would have grown up in a harsh parental enviroment.
Any cause relationship between authoritarinism and obedience may be more illusory than real
P: Research suggests that education may determine both authoritarinism and obedience.
E: Research has found that less-education people are consistently more authoritarian people than the well educatied. Milgram also found that p’s with lower levels of education tended to be more obedient than those with higher levels.
E: This suggests that instead of authoritarinsm causing obedience, lack of education could be responsible for both authoritarianism and obedience.
