Dispositional Obedience

Question 1

What is The Authoritarian Personality?

Answer 1

Suggested by Adorno,
The authoritarian personality is a psychological disorder of unquestioning obedience.

Question 2

What are the traits of an Authoritarian Personality?

Answer 2

• Individuals have exaggerated respect for authority and submissiveness to it

• Individuals express contempt for people of inferior social status

Authoritarians tend to follow orders and view other groups as being responsible for society’s ills.

Question 3

Where does the Authoritarian personality originate from?

Answer 3

The AP forms in childhood through harsh parenting; extremely harsh discipline, expectations of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards and severe criticism.

Question 4

Due to The Authoritarian Personality how is hostility displaced?

Answer 4

Hostility is displaced onto social inferiors.

These experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, but they cannot express there feelings directly against their parent because they fear reprisals.

So the feelings are displaced onto weaker individuals - Scapegoating

Question 5

Outline the procedure in Adornos (1950) study.

Answer 5

The study investigated the unconscious attitudes towards other ethnics groups of more than 2000 middle class white americans

• The F-scale was developed and examples such as “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues for children to learn” were rated 1-6 where 6 was strongly agree.

Question 6

What were the findings in Adorno’s study?

Answer 6

Authoritarians who scored highly on the F-scale identified with strong people and were contemptuous of the weak

They were conscious of their own and other status, showing excessive respect and deference to those of higher status

Authoritarians also had a cognitive style where there was no distinction between categories of people, Stereotypes were fixed and distinctive

Question 7

What is one strength of the Authoritarian Personality?

Answer 7

Evidence that authoritarians are strong

• Elms and Milgram (1966) interviewed 20 fully obedient participants from Milgrams baseline study
• They scored significantly higher on the F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient participants
• This suggests that obedient people may share many characteristics of people with an Authoritarian Personality.

Question 8

What is one limitation of the Authoritarian Personality?

Answer 8

Authoritarianism cannot explain a whole county’s behaviour

• Millions of individuals in Germany displayed obedient and anti-semitic behaviour, but can’t all have the same personality
• It seems unlikely that the majority of Germanys population had an Authoritarian Personality. A more likely explanation is that the Germans identified with the Nazi State.
• Therefore social identify theory may be a better explanation for this behaviour

( Our behaviours and attitudes are strongly influenced by those of the groups we identify with)

Question 9

Identify another limitation of The Authoritarian Personality?

Answer 9

One limitation is that the F-scale is politically biased

• Jahoda (1954) suggests the F scale aims to measure tendency towards extreme right wing ideology
• But right wing and left wing authoritarianism both insist on complete obedience to political authority
• Therefore Adornos theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation as it doesn’t explain obedience to left wing authoritarianism, so it’s politically biased.