AO3

• A weakness is that millions of individuals displayed obedient and anti-Semitic behaviour

  -This was despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways. It seems extremely unlikely that all of these people could possess an Authoritarian personality. 

  -An alternative view is that the majority of the German people identified with the anti-Semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the ‘outgroup’ of Jews, a social identity approach.

  -may be alternative exps have better explanatory power
• Another weakness is that Adorno and his colleagues measured an impressive range of variables and found many significant correlations between them.

  -For instance, they found that authoritarianism was strongly correlated with measures of prejudice against minority groups. However, no matter how strong a correlation between 2 variables might be, correlations cannot establish causality

  -there may be a third variable and as such we may need experiments to establish causality
• Another weakness is that Greenstein argues that..

  -F-scale is a ‘comedy of methodological errors’.

  -For example, the scale has had severe criticism because every one of its items is worded in the same ‘direction’.

  -This means it is possible to get a high score for authoritarianism just by ticking the same line of ‘agree’ boxes.  
• This means that people who agree with items on the f scale

  -are merely acquiesces and may not truly possess an authoritarian personality

  -scale is just measuring tendency to agree with everything

  -lack of validity
• Another weakness is possibility of investigator effects

  -Adorno and his colleagues interviewed their ppts about their childhood experiences. But the researchers knew the ppts’ test scores, so knew which of them had authoritarian personalities.

  -They also knew the hypothesis of the study. 

  -could have used a double blind trial to avoid this
• A strength is that Elms and Milgram

  -interviewed a small sample of people who had participated in the original obedience studies and been fully obedient.

  -They all completed the F-scale, amongst other measures, as part of the interview.

  -These 20 obedient ppts scored significantly higher on the overall F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient ppts.
• This is a strength as it shows

  -that it was not the situational factors that affected obedience but the ppts disposition may have had an effect