DISPOSITIONAL EXPLANATIONS

~THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY~

• Forms in childhood, mostly as a result of harsh parenting

• Shows extreme respect and submission to authority

• View society as weaker than it once was (blind obedience)

• Rigid moral standards

• Hostile to people who are ‘other’ (particularly other ethnic groups)

~PARENTING STYLE~

• Strict discipline

• Expectations of absolute loyalty

• Impossibly high standards

• Conditional love (e.g. ‘I will love you if…’)

~PARENTING STYLE IMPLICATIONS~

• Creates resentment and hostility in the child

• Child cannot express these feelings directly towards their parents because of a fear of punishment

• So their fear is displaced onto others they perceive as weaker than them (this process is called scapegoating)

Scapegoating → hatred towards people considered to be socially inferior or who belong to other social groups (typically minority groups)

~ADORNO ET AL’S RESEARCH (AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY)~

PROCEDURE:

• 2000 middle-class, white Americans

• Investigated their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups

• They developed the Facism Scale (F-SCALE) to measure authoritarian personality

FINDINGS:

• Those who scored high on the F-SCALE were identified as ‘strong people’ and were generally contemptuous of ‘weak people’ (those below them in societies standards)

• Authoritarian people have a cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people

EVALUATION

Research Support

→ RESEARCH SUPPORT

• One strength is evidence from Milgram supporting the Authoritarian Personality.

• Milgram interviewed a small sample of people who had participated in the original obedience studies and been fully obedient.

• They all completed the F-scale as part of the interview.

• These 20 obedient participants scored significantly higher on the overall F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient participants.

• This finding supports Adorno et al’s view that obedient people may well show similar characteristics to those who have an authoritarian personality.

• However, when the researchers analysed the individual subscales of the F-scale, they found that obedient participants had a number of characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians.

• For example, Milgrams obedient participants generally did not glorify their fathers, or have hostile attitudes towards their mothers.

• This means that the link between obedience and authoritarianism is complex.

• The obedient participants were unlike authoritarians in so many ways that authoritarianism is unlikely to be a useful predictor of obedience.

Conflicting Evidence

→ LIMITED EXPLANATION

• One limitation is that authoritarianism cannot explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population.

• For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals displayed obedient behaviour. This was despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways. It seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess an authoritarian personality.

• An alternative view is that the majority of the German people identified with the anti-Semantic Nazi state, and scapegoated the ‘outgroup’ of Jews.

• Therefore, Adorno’s theory is limited because an alternative explanation is much more realistic.

→ FLAWED EVIDENCE

• Another limitation of the F-scale is that it is subject to bias.

• The findings of the F-Scale have allowed researchers to develop explanations of obedience. However, this evidence base is flawed, because the F-Scale suffers from the response bias where people do not answer truthfully

• This means that studies using the F-Scale probably do not measure the Authoritarian Personality accurately

• Therefore, the concept of the Authoritarian Personality suffers from a lack of internal validity due to the method being so flawed.