Eval for Authoritarian personality Flashcards
Limited explanation
It is difficult to explain obedience in terms of individual personality in some countries. For example in pre-war Germany millions of individuals displayed obedient, racist and anti-semetic behaviour. It is extremely unlikely to say that they all possessed an authoritarian personality because their personalities may have differed from each other. Limitation because there is an alternative way to describe obedience ad this is the Social identity theory. Goldhagen argued that the majority of German people identified with anti semetic Nazi state and scapegoated the out group of Jews.
Political bias
F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right wing ideology. Christie and Jahoda argued that this is a politically biased interpretation pf authoritarian personality. As a matter of fact there left wing authoritarianism does exist such as the Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism. They also stated that right wing and left wing ideologies have much in common such as the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority. Limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that can account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum
Methodological problems
The authoritarian personality explanation is that it is based on flawed methodology. Greenstein calls the F-scale a comedy of methodological errors. For example it is possible to get a high score for authoritarianism just by ticking the same line of boxes down one side of the page.. Therefore the scale just measures the tendency to agree to everything and this is called acquiescence bias. They also interviewed their ppt and the interviewers knew the hypothesis. This means this is a form of interviewer bias and they knew in advance if the interviewee had an authoritarian personality so their questioning may have been guided by this knowledge. Also they might have only recorded things they needed to confirm their hypothesis
Correlation, not causation
Adorno et al found many significant correlations. For example authoritarianism was strongly correlated with measures of prejudice against minority groups. However correlation between two variables doesn’t imply causation. Therefore Adorno cannot claim that harsh patenting style causes the development of an authoritarian personality. This is a limitation as it undermines the validity of the explanation as there might be a third factor linked between the two variables such as the level of education.
Research evidence for the link between authoritarianism and obedience
Several studies have found that the authoritarian participants are more obedient but did these ppt really believe they were giving shocks. Dambrun and Vatiné overcame this problem by using immersive virtual environment where an actor taking the role of the learner was filmed, recorded and displayed on a computer screen. Participants were informed that the shocks were not real and that everything was simulated. Despite this ppt still tended to respond as if the situation was real and there was a clear significant correlation between ppts RWA scores and the maximum voltage administered. In other words those who displayed high levels of RWA obeyed the most which confirms the link between authoritarianism and obedience.
