Dispositional Explanation Flashcards
What is the dispositional explanation?
Any explanations of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individual’s personality.
What was the aim for Adorno’s research?
To understand anti-Semitism of the Holocaust.
Investigate the obedient personality.
Define the term authoritarian personality.
A type of personality that Adorno argued was vulnerable to obeying people in authority. Such individuals are also thought to be submissive to people who have a higher status and dismissive of inferiors.
What were the procedures of Adorno’s research?
Studied 2000+ middle class, White Americans.
Developed facism scale (F-scale) - measure how authoritarian a person is.
Give two examples of items from the F-scale.
Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.
Hardly anything lower than a person who doesn’t feel a great love, gratitude, respect for his parents.
What are the findings of Adorno’s reasearch?
That a high F-Scale score was linked with excessive respect to those of higher status, and concluded that an ‘authoritarian personality’ is a factor in obedience.
Features of authoritarian personality.
Strong positive correlation between authoritatian and prejudice.
List the features of authoritarian personality.
Strong
Contemptuous of the weak.
Very conscious of their own and other people’s status.
Showing excessive respect.
Defence and submission to those of higher status.
Had a cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people.
Fixed distinctive stereotypes.
What are the conclusions of Adorno’s research?
Adorno argues the origin of the authoritarian personality stems from childhood as a result of harsh parenting.
Strict expectations of the loyalty, impossibly high standards and severe criticism, along with ‘conditioned love’.
What are the strengths of Adorno’s disposition explanation research?
Research support - Milgram and Elms (1966) found a link between obedience participants and a high F-scale score, suggesting that having an authoritarian personality is associated with obedience.
Explain the counterpoint for there being research support.
When the researcher analysed the individual subscale of the F-scale, they found that the obedient participants had a number of characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians.
What are the limitations of Adorno’s disposition explanation research?
Limited explanation
Political bias - F-scale measures extreme form of right wing ideology.
How is authoritarianism a limited explanation?
It is hard to apply the explanation to large groups of people or whole populations such as Nazi Germany, as not everyone will have had an authoritarian personality. This weakens the explanation.
What did Christie and Jahoda (1954) argue?
F-scale politically biased interpretation of Authoritarian Personality.
Extreme right-wing and left-wing ideologies have a lot in common. For example, they both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to political authority.
Doesn’t account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.
