obedience: dispositional explanation

• authoritarian personality definition

  a type of personality that Adorno argued who were especially obedient to authority, they have an exaggerated respect for authority and submissiveness to it and express hatred for people of inferior social status
• Adorno (1950)

  Adorno believed that a persons personality traits and attitudes as an adult stemmed from childhood influences such as their parents, if a child had overly harsh and disciplinarian parents the child would displace their anger onto others who are weaker

  study - 2000 middle class white americans, studies their unconscious attitudes towards ethnic groups

  used F-Scale to find that AP identify with 'strong' people, have a fixed cognitive style, and hold stereotypes and prejudices
• dispositional explanations evaluation strengths

  research support - Milgrams 20 participants that obeyed scored higher on the F-scale suggesting that Adornos view that obedient people may well show similar characteristics to the authoritarian personality
• dispositional explanations evaluation limitations

  political bias - the F-scale only measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology meaning Adornos theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that accounts for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum

  
  

  in real life context of the WW2, all the Germans had many different personalities, not possible for the all to have authoritarian personalities, therefore the explanation of an authoritarian personality cannot explain why they obeyed to Nazis, cant apply yo large mass of people