AO1 Authoritarian Personality (Dispositional Variables)

• What are dispositional variables?


  Internal traits or characteristics that may be an explanation for behaviour
• Who suggested the authoritarian personality?


  Adorno
• What are some authoritarian characteristics?

  They have a tendency to be especially obedient to authority. They have extremes respect for authority and submissiveness to it. They also show contempt for people they perceive as having inferior social status, and have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race and gender.
• What is their view on society?

  It is regressing (‘going to the dogs’) and therefore believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of country, religion and family.
• People with an authoritarian personality are inflexible in their outlook – for them there are no ‘grey areas’. Everything is either right or wrong and they are very uncomfortable with uncertainty.
• What are the origins of the authoritarian personality?

  Formed in childhood, as a result of strict parenting style, including strict discipline, an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards and severe criticism of perceived failings. It is also characterised by conditional love
• Adorno argued that these experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, but the child cannot express these feelings directly against their parents because of a well- founded fear of reprisals. So the fears are displaced onto others who are perceived to be weaker, in a process known as scapegoating. This explains a central trait of obedience to higher authority, which is dislike (or even hatred) for people considered to be socially inferior or who belong to other social groups. This is a psychodynamic explanation.
• How did Adorno measure authoritarian personality?

  F-scale (potential for fascism scale)
• Adorno et al. (1950) investigated the causes of the obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups
• What are the findings of Adorno’s study?

  Those with authoritarian leanings (scored high on the F-scale) identify with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’. They were very conscious of their own and others’ status, showing excessive respect to those of higher status.
• Adorno et al. also found that authoritarian people had a cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups. There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.