Authoritarian Personality

• Authoritarian personality = a type of personality that Adorno argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in auhtority
• Dispositional explanation = any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individual's personality
• Adorno believed a high level of obedience was basically a psychological disorder, and tried to locate the cause of it in the personality of the individual
• Adorno studied more than 2000 middle-class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups. They developed several scales to measure this, including the potential for fascism scale (the F-scale) which is still used to measure authoritarian personality.
• Adorno found that people with authoritarian leanings identified with 'strong' people and were generally contemptuous of the 'weak'. They were very conscious of their own and others' status, showing excessive respect, deference and servility to those of higher status.
• Adorno et al. also found that authoritarian people had a cognitive style where there was no 'fuzziness' between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups. There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.
• Adorno concluded that people with an authoritarian personality have an extreme respect for authority. They also show contempt for people they perceive as having inferior social status, and have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race and gender.
• People with authoritarian personalities view society as 'going to the dogs' and therefore believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of country, religion and family. They are inflexible in their outlook- everything is either right or wrong.
• Adorno et al. concluded the authoritarian personality formed in childhood as a result of harsh parenting. The parenting style identified by Adorno features extremely strict discipline, an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards and severe criticism of perceived failings. It is also characterised by conditional love- parents love for the child depends on how they behave.
• Adorno argued these experiences in childhood create resentment and hostility in the child, but the child cannot express these feelings directly against their parents because of a well-founded fear of reprisals. So the fears are displaced onto others who are perceived as weaker in a process known as scapegoating.
• This scapegoating explains a central trait of obedience to higher authority, which is a dislike for people considered to be socially inferior or who belong to other social groups. This is a psychodynamic explanation.
• Milgram and Elms conducted interviews with a small sample of fully obedient participants, who scored highly on the F-scale, believing there may be a link between obedience and authoritarian personality. However, this link is merely a correlation between two variables. This makes it impossible to draw the conclusion that authoritarianism causes obedience. It may be that a 'third factor' is involved, for instance, both obedience and authoritarian personality are associated with a lower level of education.
• Any explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country's population. For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals all displayed obedient, racist and anti-Semitic behaviour. This was despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of way. It seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess an authoritarian personality.
• This is a limitation of Adorno's theory because it is clear that an alternative explanation is much more realistic- that social identity explains obedience. As Goldhagen argued the majority of the German people identified with the anti-Semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the 'outgrip' of Jews.
• The F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology. Christie and Jahoda argued this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality. They point out extreme right-wing and left-wing ideologies have much in common- including they both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority. This means Adorno's theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that can account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.