LS9 - The Authoritarian Personality Flashcards
What Is Obedience?
A form of social influence that causes a person to act in response to a direct oder from a figure with perceived authority implying the person is doing something they wouldn’t do otherwise.
Destructive Obedience
When orders are obeyed even though the individual understands the negative consequences e.g. WWII Auschwitz where there were 12,000 deaths a day.
Authoritarian Personalities
Adorno (1950) proposed a dispositional explanation that argues authoritarian personalities are more likely to obey authority figures, have a collection of traits that makes them more obedient.
Authoritarian Personality Traits
Servile towards people of higher status.
Hostile to lower status.
Preoccupied with power.
Inflexible in their beliefs and values.
Likely to categorise people as ‘us’ or ‘them’.
Dogmatic.
How Authoritarian Personalities Develop?
Adorno (1950) suggested that the personalities develop after extremely harsh discipline from their parents during their upbringing, creating feelings of hostility which are directed towards weaker others who cannot fight back and are therefore safe. They can’t take out their anger on their parents because they fear them, so instead they act in a submissive way towards them. They then extend this submissive behaviour to all authority figures.
What Is Fascism?
A governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcible suppressing opposition and criticism etc. and emphasising an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
Adorno (1950) & Facism
He developed a questionnaire that measures authoritarian personalities (The F Scale), where pps are asked to rate how much they agree with statements, he tested over 2000 middle class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups and found that there was a relationship between authoritarian personality and scoring high on the F scale.
The Authoritarian Personality Strengths
Research Support
Research Support (+)
Milgram (1966) link obedience and having an authoritarian personality, they selecting 20 obedient participants who had continued to deliver electric shocks all the way up to 450 volt, and 20 disobedient participants, who had refused to shock all the way up to 450 volts. Each did the F-scale and the obedient mans scored high and disobedient scored low showing authoritarian personalities is a strong dispositional explanation of obedience to authority and provides good research support in that there is definitely a link between the F scale and obedience.
Research Support 2 (+)
Miller (1975) who found individuals who scored high on F scale were more likely to obey an order to hold some electric wiring whilst completing a test, showing that you will obey authority even if harming yourself suggesting that this must be due to your personality.
Weaknesses Of Authoritarian Personality (-)
Limited Explanation.
Methodological Explanations
Limited Explanation (-)
Why we obey authority is due to our authoritarian personality, but it doesn’t explain the majority of the population e.g. high obedience in Germany. An alternative is the Social identity Theory, which explains obedience whereby the Germans people identified with the anti-Semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the ‘outgrip’ of Jews. In other words, the Social Identity Theory is a more relevant explanation of obedience than the authoritarian personality.
Methodological Problems (-)
It’s based on flawed methodology - the questionnaire has bare problems, it’s easy to get a high score, moreover, the questions are closed leaving no room for explanation.
