AO3

• Weakness:

  • A limitation of Adorno's Authoritarian Personality is that the research is based on a biased sample.
  • For example, Adorno only studied 2000 middle-class white Americans, a group likely influenced by the socio-political climate of 1950s America.
  • This limits the population and historical validity of the findings, as they cannot be generalized to other cultures, social classes, or time periods.
  • This reduces the explanatory power of Adorno’s theory, suggesting dispositional factors alone may not fully explain obedience.
• Weakness:

  • Another limitation is the weak correlational link between obedience and authoritarian personality.
  • For instance, Hyman and Sheatsley argue that both obedience and authoritarian personality may result from other factors, such as lower education, undermining the explanation's validity.
  • Therefore, the explanation lacks internal validity as it cannot isolate authoritarian personality as the sole cause of obedience, raising doubts about the explanatory power of dispositional factors.
• Strength:

  • A strength for Authoritarian personality is the presence of research support.
  • For example, Milgram and Elms found fully obedient participants from Milgram's original study scored highly on the F-scale, suggesting a potential relationship between authoritarian personality traits and higher levels of obedience.
  • Therefore, this research supports the theory that dispositional factors, like authoritarian personality, influence obedience, adding credibility by providing empirical evidence that obedience depends on individual differences as well as situational factors.