Social influence: The authoritarian personality Flashcards
What is authoritarian personality?
A distinct personality pattern characterised by strict adherence to conventional values and a belief in absolute obedience or submission to authority.
What are dispositional explanations of behaviour?
Explanations of behaviours such as obedience emphasise them being caused by an individual’s own personal characteristics rather than situational influences within the environment.
What is the F scale?
- Also known as the California F scale which was a measure of authoritarian traits or tendencies
- Used by Adorno to measure the different components that make up the authoritarian personality.
- Individuals with this type of personality are rigid thinkers, obeyed authority, and enforced strict adherence to social rules and hierarchies.
What did Adorno also discover?
Those who scored high on the f-scale tended to have been raised by parents who used an authoritarian parenting style.
What is right-wing authoritarianism?
A cluster of personality variables (conventionalism, authority submission and authoritarian aggression) that are associated with right-wing attitudes to life.
What are the three personality characteristics that high right wing authoritarian people show?
- An adherence to conventional norms and values.
- Aggressive feelings towards people who violate these norms.
- Uncritical submission to legitimate authorities.
What was Altemeyer’s test?
- Tested the relationship between RWA and obedience.
- Participants were ordered to give themselves increasing levels of shock when they made mistakes on the learning task.
- Significant correlation between RWA scores and the level of shocks that participants were willing to give themselves.
Outline procedure of Elms and Milgram’s experiment (1966).
- Used participants from Milgram’s original study.
- Selected 20 obedient participants (those who had continued to the final shock level) and 20 not-so-obedient (those who had refused to continue at some point).
- Each participant completed the MMPI scale which measures personality variables and the f scale to measure their levels of authoritarianism.
- They were also asked questions about their childhood and attitudes toward the experimenter.
Outline findings of elms and Milgram’s study.
- Little difference between obedient and not-so-obedient participants on MMPI variables.
- Higher levels of authoritarianism in obedient participants.
- Obedient participants reported being less close to their fathers during childhood and more likely to describe them in negative terms. They also saw the authority figure as more admirable. This wasn’t the case with the not-so-obedient participants.
- Suggests that the obedient group was higher on the trait of authoritarianism.
How does education determine authoritarianism and obedience?
- Research has generally found that less educated people are consistently more authoritarian than the well-educated.
- Milgram also found that participants with lower levels of education tended to be more obedient than those with higher levels of education.
- This suggests that instead of authoritarianism causing obedience, a lack of education could be responsible for authoritarianism and obedience.
How are left wing views are associated with lower levels of obedience?
- Right-wing authoritarianism suggests that people who define that people who define themselves as on the right side of the political spectrum would be more likely to obey authority.
- Therefore we might expect those who are left-wing to be less obedient.
- Bègue supported this. Carried out replication of Milgram’s study as part of a fake game show.
Contestants had to give fake electric shocks to other contestants. - Interviews showed that the more participants define themselves as left-wing, the lower the intensity of shocks they agreed to give to the other contestant.
- This suggests that situational context doesn’t exclude the possibility of individual differences as a determining influence in obedience.
What are characteristics of someone with an authoritarian personality?
Believe that people should completely obey or submit to their authority figures.
Do not challenge stereotypes due to their tendency to adopt absolutist thinking.
A03: The authoritarian personailty
+ Research support
- Correlational
- Social desirability bias
- Education may determine authoritarian and obedient participant
A03: Research support
A strength of this explanation is that it has research support. Elms and Milgram (1966) did a follow-up on participants from Milgram’s original study, featuring 20 ‘obedient’ and 20 ‘defiant’ participants. They found that, after participants completed the MMPI scale, the California F Scale, gave answers to open questions about childhood and attitudes towards the experimenter in the original study, that the ‘obedient’ people were significantly more authoritarian, were less close with their father, and were more admirable of the researcher than ‘defiant’ participants were. This is significant, as it supports the idea that people with an authoritarian personality are more obedient than those without, increasing the validity of the explanation.
A03: Correlational
Although the results of Elms and Milgram suggest a link between authoritarian personality and obedience, these results are correlational and it is, therefore, difficult to draw meaningful conclusions about the exact cause of the obedience. In addition, there are many other situational factors that contribute to obedience, including proximity, uniform and location. Therefore, although it is likely that authoritarian personality contributes to obedience, a range of situational variables can affect the level of this contribution.
