🟣 Social Influence - The Authoritarian Personality

Question 1

Situational explanation for obedience

Answer 1

Explanations that focus on the influences that stem from the environment in which that individual is found

Question 2

Dispositional explanation for obedience

Answer 2

Explanation of individual behaviour cause by internal characteristics that reside within the individuals personality

Question 3

Who created the theory of the authoritarian personality

Answer 3

Adorno (1950)

Question 4

Characteristics of people who have an authoritarian personality

Answer 4

• especially obedient to authority
• respect doe authority
• submissive to authority
• show contempt for those perceived as having a lower social status
• highly conventional attitudes toward sex, race and gender
• inflexible and stubborn

Question 5

Where does an authoritarian personality come from

Answer 5

• in childhood as a result of harsh parenting
• strict discipline, high expectations, critisms of failure
• these experience create hate and resentment in a child, child cannot express these feelings directly towards the parents
• displace these feelings onto people who perceived to be weaker

Question 6

Adorno et al (1950) procedure

Answer 6

2000 white middle class Americans and their unconscious attitudes to other racial groups.

Developed FScale (fascist scale) which is still used today to measure authoritarian personality

Question 7

Adorno 1950 findings

Answer 7

• people who scored high on the f scale identified with strong people and were more contemptuous of the weak
• very conscious of their own social status as well as others. Show respect to those higher in the social hierarchy
• authoritarian style

Question 8

Support for authoritarian explanations

Answer 8

Milgram and Elms (1966)

Conducted interviews with small sample of fully obedient participants who score highly on F scale. Believed link betweeen authoritarian personality and obedience to authority

Question 9

4 limitations of authoritarian personality

Answer 9

• political bias, f scale measures tendency towards a right wing ideology
• correlation not causation, parenting style is not a direct cause for authoritarian personality
• flawed methodology, you can get same score by ticking same boxes down the list (Greenstein (1969) comedy of methodological errors.
• limited explanation, not all nazis had authoritarian personality