Social Influence - Dispositional Explanations Flashcards
What is a dispositional explanation?
Any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individual’s personality (i.e., their disposition). Such explanations are often contrasted with situational explanations.
What is the authoritarian personality?
A type of personality that Adorno argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in authority. Such individuals are also thought to be submissive to those of higher status and dismissive of inferiors.
What was the aim of Adorno et al.’s study on the authoritarian personality?
Adorno et al. (1950) aimed to investigate causes of the obedient personality in a study involving more than 2000 middle-class, white Americans. They used the potential for fascism scale (F-scale) to measure unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups.
What were the findings of Adorno et al.’s study?
Adorno et al. found that individuals with authoritarian leanings (those who scored high on the F-scale) identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak.’ They showed excessive respect, deference, and servility to higher-status individuals and had a cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people. There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.
What are the characteristics of the authoritarian personality?
People with an authoritarian personality have an extreme respect for authority and are submissive to it. They show contempt for people they perceive as having inferior social status, have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race, and gender, and believe society needs strong leaders to enforce traditional values. They are inflexible in their outlook, seeing no ‘grey areas’ and being uncomfortable with uncertainty.
What is the origin of the authoritarian personality?
Adorno et al. concluded that the authoritarian personality forms in childhood as a result of harsh parenting. This includes extremely strict discipline, impossibly high standards, and severe criticism. The parents’ love and affection are conditional upon the child’s behaviour. This creates hostility in the child, which they displace onto others perceived as weaker (scapegoating). This is a psychodynamic explanation.
What is one evaluation point related to research support for the authoritarian personality?
Research support comes from Milgram and Alan Elms (1966), who conducted interviews with a small sample of fully obedient participants, finding higher F-scale scores among them. However, this is merely a correlation and cannot conclude that authoritarian personality causes obedience, as other factors like education may be involved.
What is one evaluation point about the authoritarian personality being a limited explanation?
A limitation is that it is unlikely that all individuals who obeyed in a country, such as Germany under the Nazi regime, displayed an authoritarian personality. Instead, social identity theory provides a more realistic explanation, where people identified with the anti-Semitic Nazi state and scapegoated the ‘outgroup.’
What is one evaluation point about political bias in the F-scale?
The F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology, but Christie and Jahoda (1954) argue this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality. Extreme left-wing ideologies, such as those of Russian Bolshevism, also emphasise complete obedience to legitimate political authority, meaning the explanation lacks comprehensiveness.
What is one evaluation point about methodological issues in Adorno et al.’s study?
The F-scale has been criticised for being flawed, as all its items are worded in the same direction, leading to acquiescence bias (the tendency to agree with everything). Furthermore, Adorno and his team interviewed participants after knowing their F-scale scores, increasing the risk of researcher bias.
