Dispositional factors - Adorno's authoritative personalities

Aim

To investigate the causes of more obedient personalities

Method

• Carried out case studies of Nazi individuals to investigate their obedience

• Carried out psychometric tests through the “F-Scale”, a scale designed to measure a person’s personality and unconscious attitudes towards other groups

• Carried out clinical interviews to research his participants’ childhoods and what effects they had on their current personalities

Participants

• 2000 middle class, White Americans

Results

Those who scored highly on the F-Scale were:

• Conscious of their own and others’ social status

• Did not see a “grey area” between categories of people

• Had fixed stereotypes about other groups of people

• Had strong authoritarian personalities

Conclusions drawn

Those who score highly on the F-Scale have more authoritarian personalities making them more susceptible to obeying authority and deferring to those they deem to have higher status than themselves

Milgram

Conducted interviews with his fully obedient participants who also scored highly on the F-Scale and observed a correlation between obedience and authoritarian personalities

Limited explanation

Does not explain obedience on a large scale such as in Nazi Germany where there must’ve been many dispositional differences yet people still obeyed

Christie and Jahoda

The F-Scale is politically biased