authoritarian personality

Who proposed the idea of a dispositional explanation of obedience?

Adorno

What is the common name for the dispositional explanation for obedience?

Authoritarian personality

What are the characteristics of someone with an authoritarian personality?

Extreme respect for authority and show contempt towards those of lower social status. They have very conventional views about sex, race and gender and believe that we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values. They are very inflexible in their outlook and believe in right or wrong with no grey areas.

When is this type of personality believed to stem from and how?

Childhood with those who have been brought up in a household based on strict discipline, conditional love and severe criticism of past failings.

According to the theory, the child experiences what feeling towards the parent?

Resentment and hostility

What defence mechanism is used by the child who cannot express their feelings?

Displacement

Who are the feelings displaced onto?

Those who are perceived as weaker in a process of scapegoating.

how has the authoritarian personality been investigated?

Using a questionnaire called the F-Scale

What does the F-scale test?

People’s unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups.

how many were tested using the f scale and what were the findings

More than 2000 middle-class white Americans and a positive correlation between prejudice and the f scale

evidence in support related to Milgram

There is empirical evidence to suggest that those people with authoritarian personalities are actually more obedient. For example, participants’ right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) scores were correlated with the maximum shock given, As participants with a higher RWA score were the most obedient, it would suggest that dispositional factors could explain obedience.

High scorers on the F-scale gave more powerful electric shocks to another person when urged by an authority figure than low scorers in Milgram’s study. This shows that high scorers are more differential to authority.

fails to consider situtaional factors

The authoritarian personality fails to account for situational factors that may also explain why people obey. For example, when Milgram changed his study to rundown offices, obedience decreased from 65% to 47.5% and when the role of the experimenter was played by a member of the public, obedience decreased to just 20%. This means that obedience might actually be the result of the situation that the person finds themselves in and not their personality.

issues with the questionaire

The questionnaire used by Adorno suffers from acquiescence bias because all of the statements go in the same direction. This means that people who agree aren’t necessarily authoritarian but more acquiescers. Furthermore, those who were interviewed afterwards were known to have high test scores by the interviewers who also knew the hypothesis being tested which may have introduced researcher bias and the self-fulfilling prophecy.