Obedience: Dispositional Explanation Flashcards
What is the authoritarian personality?
Someone shows extreme respect and submissiveness towards authority. They believe current society is weak and requires strong leaders to enforce traditional values. They also show contempt for those of lower social status than themselves and use their own power to ‘bully’ them.
Who first discovered/ published the Authoritarian personality?
Adorno et al
How does the authoritarian personality originate?
In childhood due to harsh parenting, e.g strict discipline and impossibly high standards. Adorno said these harsh parenting styles create resentment in children. They fear punishment, so obey authority and displace their hatred onto those ‘below’ them within society. This is a psychodynamic explanation.
Describe the procedure of Adorno et al’s research
Studied more than 2000 middle-class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups. They developed the F- scale to measure the authoritarian personality, where participants had to rate their agreement with a range of statements on a scale of 1-10.
Describe the findings of Adorno Et al’s research
People who scored highly on the F-scale had authoritarian personalities identified with ‘strong’ people and were contemptuous of the ‘weak’. They were conscious of status and showed extreme respect and obedience for those of authority. Adorno et al also found that these people had a specific cognitive style, where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories (people had fixed and distinctive stereotypes). There was a strong correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.
What are the strengths of the authoritarian personality theory?
—Milgram’s research supports: interviewed a small sample of obedient participants from his original study. These individuals scored highly on the F-scale. (Although these individuals did not share other authoritarian traits e.g. they did not experience unusual levels of punishment and children).
What are the weaknesses of the authoritarian personality theory?
— limited explanation: in pre- war Germany, many people obeyed nazi regimes and displayed anti-Semitic behaviour. Not all these people could share the same authoritarian personality. An alternative opinion is that they all identified with the nazi state, a social identity theory approach. Therefore Adorno’s theory is limited as it is not the most realistic explanation.
—the F-scale is politically biased as it measures a tendency towards right wing ideology, so does not account for obedience across the whole political spectrum.
