AO1

• Authoritarian personality

  • A personality typified by strict compliance to traditional values, belief in obedience and submission to authority
• Characteristics

  • Extreme respect for authority
  • Contempt towards ‘inferior people and status’
  • See everything as black and white - rigid thinkers
  • Very obedient to authority figures
• Forms

  • During childhood due to harsh parenting such as: strict discipline, high expectations, Expect loyalty, severely critical of failure, conditional love
  • creates hostility and resentment in the child but they are unable to express their feelings directly to their parents so they displace this feelings towards other - explains hostility to those inferior
• Adornos experiment

  • F-scale - used to rate a series of statements 1-6, 6 being strongly agree and 1 being strongly disagree.
  • Statements would be questions that linked to how facist someone was in order to see if they had an authoritarian Personality
  • Questions were things like: obedience and respect for authority are the most Important virtues for children to learn
• Adorno findings

  • Authoritarians Identified with strong people and were disproving of the weak
  • Showed excessive respect and admiration to those of higher status and power
  • They have fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups