Dispositional Explanation

Question 1

Authoritarian personality

Answer 1

Adorno et al. argued that people with an authoritarian personality:

-Show respect for authority
-view society as weaker than it once was
-believe we need a strong and powerful leader to enforce traditional values.
- More likely to obey.
- show hatred for those of inferior social status.
-Everything is right or wrong, uncomfortable with uncertainty.
- people who are ‘other’ e.g. different ethnic groups, are responsible for the ills of society. E.g. Nazi germany and Jews.

Question 2

Origins of the authoritarian personality

Answer 2

Adorno et al. Believed the authoritarian personality type forms in childhood, mostly as a result of harsh parenting. Have high standards, absolute loyalty, criticise when fail and give conditional love.

Adorno said that this caused the child to feel resentment and hostility, but the child cannot express these feelings towards the parents, due to fear of punishment. Fears are displaced onto other, weaker members of society. Psychodynamic explanation.

Question 3

Adorno et al’s research

Answer 3

Procedure- Adorno et al(1950) studied more than 2000 middle class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards ethnic groups. Researchers developed potential for fascism scale (F-Scale) to measure authoritarian personality.

Question 4

Examples of items on F-scale

Answer 4

-science has its place, but there are many important things that can never be understood by the human mind

-nobody ever learned anything really important except through suffering.

Question 5

Findings of adornos research

Answer 5

People with high F-scale score identify with strong people, hate weak, conscious of status. Adorno found strong correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice of groups.

Question 6

Strength- research support

Answer 6

Evidence from Milgram supporting the authoritarian personality. Elms and Milgram interviewed a small sample of people who had been fully obedient. All completed F-scale as part of interview. These 20 obedient participants scores significantly higher of F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient participants.

Counterpoint- researchers analysed results, found obedient participants had a number of characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians. E.g. didn’t glorify fathers, not unusual levels of punishment in childhood and didn’t have particularly hostile attitudes towards mothers.

Question 7

Limitation- limited explanation

Answer 7

Authoritarianism cannot explain obedient behaviour in the majority. E.g. pre-war Germany, millions of individuals displayed obedient and anti-Semitic behaviour . Despite the fact they must have differed in personality.

Alternative view is that the majority of German people identified with anti-Semitic Nazi state, a social identity theory (SID).

Question 8

Limitation- political bias

Answer 8

Another limitation is that the f-scale only measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right wing ideology.

Christie and Jahoda argued that the F-scale is a politically-biased interpretation of authoritarian personality. Right wing and left wing ideologies have a lot in common, e.g. obedience to political authority.

Question 9

social desirability bias

Answer 9

Finally, Elms and Milgram used Adorno’s F scale to determine levels of authoritarian personality. It is possible that the F scale suffers from response bias or social desirability, where participants provide answers that are socially acceptable. For example, participants may appear more authoritarian because they believe that their answers are the socially ‘correct’ and consequently they are incorrectly classified as authoritarian when they are not.