AO3

• Evaluation of Authoritarian Personality:

  • P: As we cannot establish causation, a third variable may be responsible for both authoritarianism and obedience.
  • E: Middendorp and Meloen (1990) found that less-educated people are consistently more authoritarian than the well educated Milgram also found that participants with lower levels of education tended to be more obedient than those with higher levels of education.
• Evaluation of Authoritarian Personality: (2)

  • E: This suggests that instead of an authoritarian personality causing obedience, it could be that a lack of education causes both authoritarianism and obedience.
  • L: Therefore, although even after educational level was statistically controlled for the Elms and Milgram study, the more obedient subjects were still more authoritarian on the F-scale.
• P: A weakness of the authoritarian personality explanation for obedience is that not all obedient people are authoritarian.

  • E: Elms and Milgram (1966) found that there are important differences in the characteristics of the Authoritarian personality and the characteristics of obedient participants. For example, when Elms and Milgram asked about their upbringing, many of the fully obedient participants reported having a very good relationship with their parents, rather than having grown up in the overly strict family environment associated with the Authoritarian personality.
• E: This contradicts Adorno’s explanation because he argued that people with the Authoritarian personality have grown up with strict families. 65% of people went up to 450v, therefore it is unlikely that all of these families grew up in really harsh conditional love.

  • L: Therefore, the authoritarian personality is only a limited explanation as it is not universal and cannot be used to account for obedience in all people.