Authoritarian personality

• Adorno et al believed that unquestioning obedience is a psychological disorder, and tried to find its causes in the individual's personality
• Adorno et al concluded that people with an authoritarian personality are especially obedient to authority:

  • have exaggerated respect for authority and submissiveness to it
  • express contempt for people of inferior social status
  • tend to follow orders and view other groups as responsible for society's ills
• Authoritarian personality forms in childhood through harsh parenting - extremely strict discipline, expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards and severe criticism
• It is also characterised by conditional love - parents love depends entirely on how their child behaves
• These experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, but they cannot express these feelings directly against their parents because they fear reprisals. So the feelings are displaced onto others who are weaker - this is scapegoating, which is a psychodynamic explanation
• One strength is evidence that authoritarians are obedient. Elms and Milgram interviewed 20 fully obedient participants from Milgrams original obedience studies. They scored significantly higher on the F scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient participants. This suggests that obedient people may share many of the characteristics of people with an authoritarian personality
• A counterpoint to evidence supporting authoritarians is that the subscales of the F scale showed that obedient participants had characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians. For example they did not experience high levels of punishment in childhood. This suggests a complex link and means that authoritarianism is not a useful predictor of obedience
• One limitation is authoritarianism cant explain a whole country's behaviour. Millions of individuals in Germany displayed obedient and anti-Semitic behaviour - but cant all have the same personality. It seems unlikely the majority of Germany's population had an authoritarian personality. A more likely explanation is that Germans identified with the Nazi state. Therefore social identity theory may be a better explanation
• Social identity theory is the view that our behaviour and attitudes are strongly influenced by those of the groups we identify with (our ingroups)
• One limitation is that the F-scale is politically biased. Christie and Jahoda suggested the F scale aims to measure the tendency towards extreme right-wing ideology. But right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism (e.g: Chinese Maoism) both insist on complete obedience to political authority. Therefore Adorno's theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation as it doesn't explain obedience to left-wing authoritarianism i.e: it is politically biased