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What is a dispositional explanation?
An explanation of behaviour due to someone’s personality traits.
This type of explanation will often be contrasted with situational explanations eg. they behaved in that way and obeyed because of the situation they were in.
What is an Authoritarian Personality?
Adorno et al. (1950) argued that someone with this type of personality was very susceptible to obeying authority.
Someone with an authoritarian personality are likely to be submissive to those of a higher status and dismissive of inferiors.
How did Adorno et al. measure levels of authoritarian personality?
They developed a questionnaire called the California F scale (F for Fascism).
What was the sample for Adorno’s study of measuring levels of authoritarian personality?
The study investigated the causes of obedient personality in a study of more than 2,000 middle class white Americans.
What are 3 main aspects of Authoritarian Personality?
Authoritarians (who scored high on the F-Scale) identified with ‘strong people’ and were contemptuous of the ‘weak’.
They were conscious of their own and others’ status, showing excessive respect and deference to those of higher status.
Authoritarian people had a cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups.
What did Adorno conclude about the origins of the authoritarian personality / why do people develop the personality?
Formed in childhood as a result of hard parenting.
Parenting style followed strict discipline and impossibly high standards.
Characterised by conditional love - parents love for their child depends on their behaviour.
These experiences create resentment but the child cannot express these feelings directly against their parents so the feelings are displaced onto those who are perceived to be weaker.
Characteristics of someone with an authoritarian personality.
Obedient to authority with extreme, excessive respect to authority.
Highly controversial attitudes to race, sex, gender etc.
Want strong power and leadership.
Want traditional values such as ‘we love our country’ enforced.
Inflexible in their outlooks.
Everything is seen in black or white, there are no grey areas.
Evaluating the Authoritarian personality - strengths (1).
Elms and Milgram’s follow up study, they found that the obedient participants from the original Milgram study scored higher on the F scale, in comparison to disobedient participants, as well as reporting being less close to their fathers during childhood and admiring the experimenter which was the opposite for disobedient participants.
Evaluating the Authoritarian personality - name and explain one weakness.
There are individual differences in each person, if you look at the hundreds of thousands of people who followed Hitler, they surely do not all have the same personality types. (Although they could be acting in agentic state). Also, Milgram found that the impact of uniform had drastic effects of obedience, suggesting that legitimate authority may be a stronger explanation of obedience as a lab coat conveys scientific credibility.
Evaluating the Authoritarian personality - name and explain one weakness.
The F-Scale can be criticised for its methodology, Greenstein (1969) suggests that a key weakness exists in the way that the questions are worded in the same direction, with a scale that actually just measures the tendency to agree to everything. This suggests that the data collected from the F-Scale is meaningless and the concept of an authoritarian personality lacks validity.
Evaluating the Authoritarian personality - name and explain one weakness.
Both obedience and an authoritarian personality may be caused by a lower level of education, Research by Middendorp and Meleon (1990) found that less-educated people are more likely to display authoritarian personality characteristics, than well-educated people. If these claims are correct then it is possible to conclude that it is not authoritarian personality characteristics that lead to obedience, but levels of education.
