Dispositional Explanations For Obedience: The Authoritarian Personality

Question 1

Who proposed the authoritarian personality?

Answer 1

Adorno

Question 2

What is a dispositional explanation?

Answer 2

Any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individual’s personality.

Question 3

Authoritarian characteristics

Answer 3

Adorno concluded that people with an authoritarian personality tend to be especially obedient to authority.

• Highly conventional attitude towards sex, race, and gender.
• Traditional values
• Need for strong, power leaders
• Right or wrong, uncomfortable with grey areas

Question 4

Origins of the authoritarian personality - psychodynamic explanation

Answer 4

Mostly as a result of harsh parenting. This parenting they typically features extremely strict discipline, an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards and severe criticisms of perceived failings. Parents give conditional love. This creates resentment and hostility in a child. These feelings are displaced onto others who they perceive are weaker as they cannot express these feelings directly against their parents.

Question 5

Adorno et al. - Procedure

Answer 5

• 200 middle-class white Americans and their unconscious attitude towards other ethnic groups.
• Developed several scales to measure this including the F scale (potential for fascism)

Question 6

Adorno et al - findings

Answer 6

Those with authoritarian leanings (those who scored high on the F-scale) identified with strong people and were generally contemptuous of weaker people. Conscious of their own and other people’s status. They showed excessive respect to those of higher status. They had fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups, strong correlation between prejudice and authoritarianism.

Question 7

Counter-point - Milgram + Elms
Strength 1

Answer 7

P - Research support
E - Elms and Milgram interviewed a small sample of people who had participated in the original obedience studies and been fully obedient. They all completed the F-scale as part of the interview. These 20 obedient participants scored significantly higher on the overall F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient participants. The two groups were clearly quite different in terms of authoritarianism.

Question 8

Limitation - Methodological criticisms

Answer 8

P - Methodological criticisms
E - The F-scale may suffer from response bias or social desirability, where participants provide answers that are socially acceptable.
E - This matters because participants may appear more authoritarian as they believe their answers are socially correct, consequently they are classed as authoritarian when they are not.

Question 9

Limitations of the authoritarian personality

Answer 9

P - Authoritarianism cannot explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population.
E - Millions of individuals displayed obedient and anti-Semitic behaviour. This was despite the fact that they must behave differed in their personalities in all sorts of way. It seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess an Authoritarian Personality. An alternative view is that the majority of the German people identified with the antisemitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the ‘outgroup’ of the Jews, a social identity theory approach.

Question 10

Limitation - Political Bias

Answer 10

P - The F-scale only measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology.
E - Christie and Jahoda highlight a weakness in the F-scale for only measuring extreme-right wing ideologies.
E - Ignores the role authoritarianism has played in left-wing politics such as Chinese Maoism.