Authoritarian Personality Flashcards
What is an authoritarian personality?
A personality type susceptible to obeying people in authority
- extremely respectful to authority
-believe that strong leaders are needed to enforce traditional values
-believe that minorities are responsible for certain problems in society
What are the origins of authoritarian personality?
According to Adorno , it is formed from childhood mostly because of harsh parenting and extreme discipline and high standards.
What did Adorno gather about the authoritarian personality and childhood?
That children built up hate and resentment because of harsh parenting and displaced their resentment onto those who are weaker. This process is known as scapegoating
What procedure did Adorno use to measure authoritarian personality? And what did they find?
He used the f-scale to measure authoritarian personality.
Those who scored high on the F-scale looked down upon those they seen as weak , had fixed stereotypes of others and were conscious of other peoples status
Strong correlations between those with authoritarian personality and prejudice
They believe in traditional views and look up to forceful leaders
What did milligram find that supports authoritarian personality?
He found that obedient participants scored higher on the f-scale
He also found that the obedient viewed the experimenter as more admirable than the students
This supports that authoritarian personality makes us more likely to obey
What evidence about situation variables disproves authoritarian personality?
-bickmans study showed that uniform increases obedience as well as proximity
This shows that there are more external factors that affect obedience not just authoritarian personality
Why can’t authoritarian personality account for group obedience
This is because it is in likely that millions of people like all Germans back in World War Two could have the same personality
Why was Adorno’s use of methods a limitation to authoritarian personality?
This is because milgrams experiment was took place in a lab
However adornos experiment was a questionnaire
This lacked internal validity as people can lie in questionnaires or try to look more socially desirable by their responses
