adorno's theory authoritarian personality

• Characteristics of the authoritarian personality:

  • Have an exaggerated respect for authority
  • Are far more likely to obey orders
  • Look down on people of inferior status
  • Aware of their own and other people’s social hierarchy
  • Have particular cognitive style: black-or-white thinking, strong ideas of right and wrong, strict and rigid stereotypes
  • Develops from strict parenting and conditional love
  • Engage in scapegoating or displacing anger to those social inferior
• Adorno's theory

  • explaining obedience in people's personality
• Adorno

  • based his theory on research that used a questionnaire (F-scale).
  • He concluded that people who had a harsh upbringing and critical/strict parenting, were more likely to have an Authoritarian Personality
• Weakness

  P- Theory was based on a flawed questionnaire

  • E- F-scale used has a response bias as the questions were written in such a way that anyone who answered yes would end up with a higher authoritarian score
  • C- Challenges validity of theory because it is based on poor evidence
• Weakness

  • P- Authoritarian personality cannot explain all cases of obedience
  • E- millions of Germans displayed highly obedient and prejudiced behaviour but didn't have the same upbringing and same personality
  • C- This mean that there are probably social factors that affect obedience as well as dispositional ones
• Strict parenting

  • child identifies with parents' moral values
  • they also feel bitterness towards parents which cannot be directly expressed for the fear of retaliation