Obedience = Dispositional explanations

Question 1

What is the authoritarian personality?

Answer 1

• Adorno argued that people with an AP show extreme respect and submit to authority
• People with AP believe that we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values
• They also hate the inferior social status and have an inflexible outlook on the world
• They believe that weak people are the ills of society

Question 2

What are the origins of the authoritarian personality?

Answer 2

• Adorno believed the AP forms in childhood and harsh parenting
• This parenting includes extreme strict discipline, absolute loyalty, high standards, severe criticism and conditional love
• This creates resentment and hostility in a child. They can not express these feelings to their children so instead they are displaced on to weaker people
• This is a psychodynamic explanation

Question 3

Who developed the authoritarian personality

Answer 3

Adorno et al

Question 4

What was Adorno’s procedure?

Answer 4

• Adorno studied more than 2000 middle class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups
• They developed the F scale which measured the authoritarian personality
• An example is that ‘obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues for children to learn’

Question 5

What were Adorno’s findings?

Answer 5

• people with authoritarian personalities ranked highly on the F - scale and identified with strong people and hated the weak
• they were conscious of status and had distinctive stereotypes of other groups
• Adorno also found a positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice

Question 6

What is a strength of the AP?

Answer 6

• Milgram interviewed a small sample of participants who had been fully obedient and found that they scored higly on the F-scale
• These 20 obedient participants scored significantly higher than the 20 disobedient participants,
  -This suggests that obedient people share characteristics of those with an authoritarian personality
  Counterpoint = However, the obedient participants did not have all characteristics of an AP. For example, they did not glorify their fathers and did not recieve unusal levels of punishment

Question 7

What is a limitation (L)?

Answer 7

• Limited explanations
  -Authoritarianism can not explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a countries population
• For example, in pre - war Germany millions displayed anti - Semitic behaviour. It was extremely unlikely that they could all possess an Authoritarian Personality.
• An alternative theory is the social identity theory which explains that the majority of the German people identified with the anti - semitic state and scapegoated the outgroup of jews

Question 8

What is a limitation? (P)

Answer 8

• Another limitation is that there is political bias
• The F scale only measures the tendency towards and extreme form of right wing ideology
• Christie and Jahoda argued the F scale is a politically - biased interpretation of the AP and not left wing ideals
• This shows that Adorno’s theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that accounts for obedience across the political spectrum

Question 9

What is another limitation? (F)

Answer 9

• There is flawed evidence
• the F scale has methodological errors as it is possible to a high score by just selecting agree answers. This suggests that there is a response bias