The authoritarian personality

The authoritarian personality

-this is when a person believes they should completely obey or submit to the authority figure and suppress their own beliefs

-Adorno says that the AP forms during childhood , mostly as a result of harsh parenting

-Adorno argued that extreme childhood experiences create resentment and hostility in a child ,but the child cannot express their feelings as they fear the punishment. So their fears are displaced onto others who they perceive to be weaker , this is called scapegoating

Adorno-Procedure

-Adorno et al studied more than 2000 middle class Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards ethnic groups. The F-scale was used to measure the Authoritarian personality

Adorno-Findings

He found that people with authoritarian leanings (people who scored high on the F scale) identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’ . They also show extreme respect to those of higher status and were very conscious of status . Authoritarian people had distinct stereotypes about other groups and Adorno found a strong positive correlation between Authoritarianism and prejudice

Adorno-Evaluation

• one limitation of the F-scale is that it only measures tendency towards an extreme form of right wing ideology , Christie and Jahoda (1954) argued that the F-scale is a politically biased interpretation of the AP.

• one strength is evidence from milgram supporting the AP . Milgram and Elms interviewed a small sample of 20 people who had participated in the original obedience studies and had been fully obedient. They all completed the F-scale , these 20 obedient participants scored significantly higher on the F-scale compared to a group of 20 disobedient participants. This supports Adorno’s view that obedient people may show similar characteristics to people who have the Authoritarian personality

• One limitation is that the authoritarian personality cannot explain behaviour in the majority of a country’s population - for example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals displayed obedient and anti-Semitic behaviour. This was despite the fact that they must have different in their personalities in all sorts of ways and it is extremely unlikely that they could all possess an Authoritarian personality