Authoritarian Personality Theory

• What did Adorno et al (1950) investigate?

  investigated the causes of the obedient personality
• What was the sample?

  more than 2000 middle class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups
• What was the procedure?

  They developed several scales to investigate this, including the potential fascism scale (F-scale) which is still used to measure authoritarian personality. Examples from the F scale are: 'Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn' and 'There is hardly anything lower that an person who does not feel a great love, gratitude and respect for his parents.
• What was the findings?

  those with authoritarian leanings (scored high on the F-scale) identified with strong people and were generally contemptuous of the weak.

  They were very conscious of their own and others status, showing excessive respect, deference and servility 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.
• What are the authoritarian characteristics?

  especially obedient to authority

  extreme respect for authority and are submissive to it

  contempt for people who they perceive as having inferior social status and have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race and gender.

  believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as patriotism, religion and family.

  inflexible in their outlook, there are no grey areas, everything is either right or wrong.

  uncomfortable with uncertainty.
• What is the origin of authoritarian personality?

  It is formed in childhood as a result of harsh parenting which features extremely strict discipline, an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards and severe criticism of perceived failings (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 as weaker in a process called scapegoating. This explains a central trait of obedience to higher authority, which is a strong dislike for people considered to be socially inferior or who belong to other social groups, this is a psychodynamic explanation.
• +Research support

  E- Milgram and Alan Elms (1966) conducted interviews with a small sample of fully obedient ppts, who scored highly on the F scale, believing that there may be a link between obedience and authoritarian personality.

  E- However this link is merely a correlation between two measured variables which makes it impossible to draw the conclusion that authoritarian personality causes obedience on the basis of this result, it may be a third variable such as a lower level of education and obedience and authoritarian personality may not be directly linked at all (Hyman and Sheatsley 1954)

  L- This means that whilst there at first seem there is research support for the impact of the AP on obedience, we need to question the impact of methods used and this may question the internal validity of research into the AP and as an explanation for obedience
• - a limited explanation

  E- Any explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country's population. For example, pre-war Germany, millions displayed obedient,racist and anti-Semitic behaviour. It seems unlikely that they could all possess an authoritarian personality.

  E- Better explained by Social Identity Theory, as Daniel Goldhagen (1996) argued in Hitlers willing executioners, majority identided with anti-semitic Nazi stae and scapegoated the outgroup of Jews.

  L- So dispositional explanations like the authoritarian personality is highly unlikely to explain mass scale destructive obedience eg in Nazi Germany. It is a reductionist explanation that lacks credibility when applied to whole societies. Questions application and validity of the explanation
• -The F-scale is a politically biased measuring tool for authoritarianism

  E- F scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology. Christie and Jahoda (1954) argued that this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality. They point out the reality of left-wing authoritarianism in the shame of Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism.

  E- Extreme right wing and left wing ideologies have much in common- they both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority.

  L- strong limitation because it is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that can account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.
• - Further methodological limitations

  E- Greenstein (1969) describes the F scale as a comedy of methodological errors. For example, the scale has come in for severe criticism because every one of its items is worded in the same direction, making it possible to get a high score for authoritarianism just by ticking the same line of boxes down one side of the page. People who agree with the items on the F-scale are therefore not necessarily authoritarian but merely 'acquiescers' and the scale is just measuring the tendency to agree to everything. E- Adorno and colleagues interviewed their ppts about childhood experiences, the researchers knew the ppts test scores so knew which had authoritarian personalities, they also knew the hypothesis of the study

  L- strong limitation as it lacks external validity
• -found correlations, not causation

  E- Adorno and colleagues measured a range of variables and found significant correlations between them. For example they found authoritarianism was strongly correlated with measures of prejudice against minority groups.

  E- however no matter how strong a correlation between two variables might be, it does not follow that one cause the other

  L- Showing that Adorno could not claim that a harsh parenting style caused the development of authoritarian personality.