The authoritarian personality Flashcards
Who proposed the authoritarian personality type?
Adorno
What year was the authoritarian personality proposed?
1950
What type of study was conducted by Adorno?
A self report study
What was Adorno’s aim when conducting his experiment?
To understand why the Nazis had obeyed Hitler’s orders as well as understanding the anti-semitism displayed during ww2
How does Adorno differ to Milgram
Milgram suggests we are all capable of extreme obedience whereas Adorno argues that high levels of obedience was a psychological disorder linked to personality
What is a dispositional explanation?
Any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individual’s personality
What did Adorno do?
Investigated the causes of the obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups. They developed several scales to investigate this, including the F scale.
What did Adorno find?
People with authoritarian learnings identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’. They were very conscious of their own and others status.
Weakness - explaining behaviour
Adorno’s theory cannot explain all obedient behaviour.
In pre war Germany millions of people were obedient and racist, despite the fact they must’ve differed in their personalities.
Such behaviour can be better explained using social identity
Weakness - flawed methodology
Theory is based on flawed methodology.
Scale had severe criticism because every one of its items was warded in the same direction.
Weakness - may lack validity
Adorno and his colleagues collected retrospective data regarding participants’ childhoods, which may lack validity. This is because the researchers knew the participants’ test scores, so knew which of them had authoritarian personalities.
What is the authoritarian personality?
A type of personality that Adorno argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in authority
