The authoritarian personality Flashcards
The authoritarian personality and obedience
basic:
extreme respect for authority and obedience to it, inflexible outlook, contempt for inferiors.
more in depth:
Extreme respect for and submissiveness to authority.
View that society is weaker than it once was
Need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values
More likely to obey orders from a source of authority.
Only black and white view
Show contempt for those of inferior social status
Origins
Harsh parenting (conditional love) results in hostility but cannot be expressed so displaced onto weaker others (scapegoating).
more in depth
orms in childhood result from harsh parenting
Strict discipline absolute loyalty high standards and severe criticism of perceived failings.
Conditional love
Create resentment and hostility in a child cant show due to fear of punishment
Fears are displaced onto others- scapegoating
research
studied over 2000 middle-class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes to ethnic groups.
f scale
Agree/disagree with items e.g. ‘Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn’.
finding
High F-scale scores linked with identification with the ‘strong’, contempt for the ‘weak’, deference to higher status.
more in depth
No fuzziness between categories of people. Fixed and distinctive stereotypes. Cognitive
Positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.
eva list
limited explanation
political bias
flawed evidence
correlation not causation
limited explanation
Cant explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population
Pre-war german millions displayed obedient and antisemitic behaviour but they must have different personalities and it would be very unlikely that they could all possess an authoritarian personality. Alt view is that german people identified with the anti-semitic nazi state and scapegoated the outgroup of Jews a social identity theory approach. Therefore the theory is limited because an alternative explanation is more realistic.
political bias
The f scale only measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology. The extreme right and left-wing ideologies have a lot in common. For example, they both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to political authority. This means the theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that accounts for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.
flawed evidence
A strength is that the findings of the studies using the f scale have allowed researchers to develop an explanation of obedience by measuring authoritarian personality. But the evidence base is flawed because the f scale suffers from several limitations, eg response bias where an individual can get a high score by agreeing with every item. So research studies that use the f scale may not be measuring authoritarian personality accurately. Therefore the concept of authoritarian personality and the explanation of obedience may not be valid if the method of measuring it is flawed.
correlation not causation
It undermines the validity of the explanation and limits the power of the Authoritarian Personality to explain why people obey. If two variables are correlated, they may both be caused by a third factor which explains the link between the two. So it may be that level of education, for example, mediates the relationship between obedience and the Authoritarian Personality – it leads to the Authoritarian Personality and also leads to higher obedience.
