authoritarian personality: dispositional obedience

• in response to anti-semitism displayed in WW2, adorno argued high levels of obedience was a psychological disorder linked to personality, disagreeing with Milgram who suggested we are all capable of extreme obedience
• adorno studied personality with questionnaires. questions revealed unconscious feelings towards minority groups.
• developed the F scale, one of the 9 factors measured was authoritarian aggression: tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values
• people who scored highly on the F scale showed high respect for people with higher social status, had fixed stereotypes for other groups, identified with 'strong' people, and disliked 'weak' people
• adorno suggested these people had their personality shaped early in life by strict authoritarian parenting with harsh physical punishments. anger from this experience was displaced (freud) onto others, mainly minority groups
• elmes and milgram interviews of participants who had taken part in the first 4 milgram studies showed those that had shocked to the full 450V scored higher on the F-scale than those that refused to continue
• the link between authoritarian personalities and following orders is correlational. it could be a third factor, such as lower income or poor education that result in both behaviours
• the original F scale questionaire lacked internal validity. all the questions were written in one direction, meaning that agreeing to all questions will label someone as authoritarian. this is known as response bias
• authoritarian personality can be seen as a left-wing theory and inherently biased, as it identifies many individuals with a conservative political viewpoint as having a psychological disorder