evaluation of dispositional explanation Flashcards
what does it mean when we say that Adorno’s study had limited explanations
any explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population e.g. in pre word Germany millions of individuals all displayed obedient, racist and anti - Semitic behaviour
This is despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways
It seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess an authoritarian personality
This is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is clear that an alternative explanation is more realistic - that social identity explains obedience. This is evident as Daniel Golhagen (1996) argued in Hitler’s willing executioners, the majority of the German people identified with anti - Semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the “out group” of Jews
what does it mean when we say that Adorno’s study has a political bias
the F- scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form right of right - wing ideology.
Christle and Jahoda (1954) argued that this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality.
They point out the reality of left - wing authoritarianism in the shape, e.g. of Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism
In fact, extreme right-wing and left-wing ideologies have much in common - not the least of which is that they both emphasis the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority
The 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
what are the methodological problems with Adorno’s study
a limitation of authoritarian personality explanation is that it is based on a flawed methodology
Greenstein (1969) goes as far as to describe the F scale as “ a comedy of methodological errors”
e.g. the scale has come in for severe criticism because every one of it items is warded in the same “direction”
This means it is possible to get a high score for authoritarianism just by ticking the same line of boxes down one side of the page
People, therefore, argue that the scale is just measuring the tendency to agree to everything. Therefore, it is not testing what he intended ( lacks internal validity)
what does it mean when we say that authoritarian personality was merely correlation , not causation
Adorno and his colleagues measured an impressive range of variables and found many significant correlations between them
They found that authoritarianism was strongly correlated with measures of prejudice against minority groups
However, no matter how strong a correlation between two variables might be, it does not follow that one causes the other
Therefore, Adorno could not claim that a harsh parenting style caused the development of an authoritarian personality
what is an authoritarian personality
a type of personality that Adorno argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in authority. Such individuals are also thought to be submissive to those of higher status and dismissive of inferior
