Obedience - Authoritarian Personality

Question 1

Adorno’s authoritarian personality

Answer 1

• associated with higher levels of obedience
• forms in childhood through strict discipline, conditional love, high expectations, severe criticism.

Question 2

Dispositional explanations

Answer 2

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

• These expectations create hostility in the child, but they are unable to express their feelings directly because they fear reprisals.
• The feeling is therefore displaced onto others who are weaker - known as scapegoating, explains the hostility to those inferior to them.

Question 3

Adorno (1950) F scale Aim:

Answer 3

Investigated unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups of more than 2000 middle class white Americans.

Question 4

Adorno F scale procedure:

Answer 4

The F scale (fascism scale) was used to rate statements between 1-6 (6 being strongly agree)
E.g obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues for children to learn. OR there’s hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel great love and gratitude for his parents.

Question 5

Adorno F scale findings:

Answer 5

Authoritarians identified with strong people and were disapproving of the weak. They showed excessive respect and admiration to those of higher status. They have fixed and distinctive stereotypes/prejudices about other groups.

Question 6

Social identity theory

Answer 6

forming an in group where you follow the same values/morals of that group.

Question 7

AO3 STRENGTH and counter argument

Answer 7

+ Elms and Milgram (1966) interview 20 fully obedient participants from Milgram’s original studies. They scored significantly higher on the F-scale compared to a group of 20 disobedient people. This implies that obedient people may share characteristics of people with an authoritarian personality.

HOWEVER, not all participants had high levels of punishment from their parents during childhood - therefore this cannot be used as a predictor for obedience.

Question 8

AO3 WEAKNESSES

Answer 8

• Millions of Germans displayed obedient and anti-Semitic behaviour but cannot have an authoritarian personality. A more likely explanation is that Germans identified with the Nazi state. (Social identity theory may be a better explanation).
• Christie and Jahoda suggested that the F-scale aims to complete obedience to political authoritymeasure tendency towards extremism right-wing ideology.

BUT right wing and left wing authoritarianism both insist on complete obedience to political authority.

However this means that Adornos theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation as it doesn’t explain obedience to left wing authoritarianism (politically biased)

• The F-scale is a self-report measure, people tend to agree with the statements (known as response bias), these are scored as response bias. Therefore this explanation may not be valid in measuring whether someone has an authoritarian personality and their obedience level.
• Adorno only found a correlation between harsh parenting and authoritarian personality. They therefore can not infer cause and effect, it just shows that there is a relationship.