Weakness

• Although the results of Elms and Milgram suggest a link between authoritarian personality and obedience, these results are correctional and it is therefore difficult to draw meaningful conclusions about the exact cause of the obedience.
• In addition, there are many other situational factors that contribute to obedience, including proximity, uniform and location.
• Therefore, although it is likely that authoritarian personality contributes to obedience, a range of situational variables can affect the level of this contribution.
• Finally, Elms and Milgram used Adorno’s F scale to determine levels of authoritarian personality.
• It is possible that the F scale suffers from response bias or social desirability, where participants provide answers that are socially acceptable.
• For example, participants may appear more authoritarian because they believe that their answers are the socially ‘correct’ and consequently they are incorrectly classified as authoritarian when they are not.
• P: There are methodological criticisms of the F-Scale used to measure authoritarianism.
• B: It is possible that the F-Scale suffers from response bias (just ticking the same responses throughout) or social desirability bias (where people answer in a way that they think is socially acceptable) which may mean a person is incorrectly categorised as authoritarian personality.
• E: This suggests that the questionnaire lacks internal validity and that it may not be an accurate measure of authoritarianism.
• 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 and anti-Semitic 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-Semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the 'outgroup' of Jews, a social identity theory approach.
• Therefore, Adorno's theory is limited because an alternative explanation is much more realistic.
• Political bias

  Another limitation is that the F-scale only measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology-
• Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda (1954) argued that the F-scale is a politically-biased interpretation of Authoritarian Personality. They point out the reality of left-wing authoritarianism in the shape of Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism, in fact, extreme right-wing and left-wing ideologies have a lot in common. For example, they both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to political authority.
• This means Adornos theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that accounts for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.