dispositional explanation for obedience - authoritarian personality

Question 1

what is the authoritarian personality

Answer 1

when you believe that people should completely obey or submit to their authority figures and suppress their own beliefs

Question 2

what is reaction formation

Answer 2

when a child had overly harsh and disciplinarian parents, they would displace their anger onto seemingly ‘inferior’ others through the process of scapegoating

Question 3

what is the F-scale

Answer 3

• measures the authoritarian personality
• requires participants to rate the extent of their own agreement to certain statements

Question 4

what are some weaknesses of the explanation

Answer 4

• F-scale: unlikely all Nazis had authoritarian personality
• Only measures extreme right wing and doesn’t consider obedience to extreme left wing