Obedience - dispositional explanation

Question 1

What is the Authoritarian personality?

Answer 1

Explanation:
- Theodor Adorno
- argued people with authoritarian personality show respect for authority
they view people as weaker in lower social statuses
they believe we ned strong powerful leaders to enforce traditional values
right or wrong/black or white

Origins:
- Adorno believed it stemmed from childhood = due to harsh parenting/high discipline
- parents give conditional love
- childhood experiences create hostility and resentment in a child but they are unable to let it out because they fear punishment from their parents, so they displace this fear and anger on others who they perceive to be weaker = scapegoating
- this is a psychodynamic explanation

Question 2

Adorno’s research (1950)

Answer 2

Procedure:
- studied more than 2000 middle - class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups
- researchers developed several measurement scales including the potential for fascism scale (f-scale)
this scale is still used to measure authoritarian personalities

Findings:
- people with authoritarian learnings identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’
- they were very conscious of status = respect and obedience to those with a higher status
- adorno also found that authoritarian people had a certain type of cognitive style in which there was no fuzziness between categories of people
- they had fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups.
- Adorno et al found a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice

Question 3

Evaluation of the dispositional explanation of obedience (Adorno)

Answer 3

Research Support:
- Milgram’s study
- interviewed small sample of participants and they all scored significantly higher on the F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient participants.
the two groups clearly quite different in terms of authoritarianism
the findings support Adorno’s view that obedient people show similar characteristic to people who have an authoritarian personality