The Authoritarian Personality (dispositional factors)

• Like Milgram, Adorno and his colleagues wanted to understand the anti-Semitism (hostility to or prejudice against Jews) of the holocaust. Their research led them to draw very different conclusions. They believed high levels of obedience was a psychological disorder and tried to locate the cause in the personality of the individual.
• Authoritarian Personality is a type of personality that Adorno et al (1950) argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in authority. Such individuals are also thought to be submissive to those of higher status and dismissive of inferiors. The personality is thought to be caused by a strict upbringing where the parents raise the child to follow with extremely strict discipline, impossibly high standards and severe criticism.
• Adorno et al (1950)

  Aim: Adorno and his colleagues wanted to understand the anti-Semites of the holocaust, and the potential and cause of the authoritarian personality.
• Adorno et al (1950)

  Procedure: Adorno investigated the cause of obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle-class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups. They developed several scales to investigate this, including the potential for fascism scale (F-scale) to measure authoritarian personality.

  • Two examples of items from the F-scale are: 'Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn', 'There is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel a great love, gratitude and respect for his parents'
• Adorno et al (1950)

  Findings: He found that who scored high on the F-scale and other measures identified with 'strong' people and were contemptuous of the 'weak'. They were very conscious of their own and others' status, showing excessive respect, deference and servitude to those of higher status. He 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.
• Conclusion:

  • He concluded that people with an authoritarian personality have a tendency to be especially obedient to authority. They also show contempt for people they perceive as having inferior social status, and have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race and gender. They view society as 'going to the dogs', and there 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 with their outlook- for them there are no 'grey areas'. Everything is either right or wrong.
• Continuing conclusion:

  • They also concluded that the authoritarian personality is formed in childhood, as a result of harsh parenting. This typically included strict discipline, an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossible high standards and severe criticism of perceived failings. This also means the relationship is also categorised by conditional love- that is, the parents' love and affection for their child depends entirely on how he or she behaves.
• Continuing conclusion:

  • Adorno argues 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 a dislike (and even hatred) for people considered to be socially inferior or who belong to other social groups. This is a psychodynamic explanation.
• Weakness:The use of the F-scale. The F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology, as well as the authoritarian personality. It's a politically biased interpretation of the authoritarian personality, as there is a left-wing authoritarian too. Extreme left and right-wing ideologies have a lot in common, they both show the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority. This undermines the authoritarian personality as an explanation for obedience. From research, we can't support that it is a dispositional explanation for obedience to authority.
• Study for the weakness for the use of the F-scale:

  • Christie and Jahoda (1954) argued that this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality. They point out the reality of the left-wing authoritarian in the shape, for example, of Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism. In fact, extreme right-wing and left-wing ideologies have much in common- not the least of which is that they both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority.
• Weakness:The research on the dispositional explanations of obedience (e.g. Elms, Milgram and Adorno) has found significant correlations. Meaning that a third factor could be involved. E.g., in Elms and Milgram perhaps both obedience and the authoritarian personality are associated with lower levels of education and are not directly linked with each other at all. Meaning that from the research, it's impossible for us to conclude that the authoritarian personality (Adorno et al).So, from the research, we cannot strongly support the internal validity of the dispositional explanations of obedience
• Weakness:Finds it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country's population. For example, in pre-war Germany, millions displayed obedient, racist and anti-Semitic behaviour. Despite the fact that they must have had different personalities. It's a limitation of Adorno's theory because it is clear that an alternative explanation is much more realistic e.g. social identity/social psychological factors explain obedience,where the majority of the German people identified with the anti-Semitic state and scapegoated the outgroup of Jews.Hence it itsn't completely valid explanation
• Weakness: It's based on flawed methodology. Greenstein (1969) goes as far as to describe 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'. This means that it is impossible 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.
• Continuing the weakness flawed methodology:In Adorno's study, he knew the hypothesis conducted the interviews, knew the ppts scores and so knew who had an authoritarian personality. This suggests that the research into dispositional explanations of obedience may lack internal validity, as investigator bias may have affected the results and so there were confounding variables in the research. From the research we cannot strongly support the dispositional explanations of obedience as research may not have measured what it intended to (relationship between the authoritarianism and obedience)