Authoritarian Personality

• Authoritarian personality

  Dispositional explanation of obedience proposed by Adorno, referring to people who have extreme respect for authority and obey them
• Authoritarian personality

  • Usually developed from over strict-parenting e.g. extreme strict discipline
  • Leads to feelings of resentment which are displaced towards those seen as 'weak' or 'inferior'
• F-Scale

  A questionnaire created by Adorno that looks and measures different elements of personality
• Adorno's investigation

  1. Assessed 2000 white middle class Americans on their unconscious thoughts towards others (ethnic groups) with the use of the F-Scale

  2. Those who scored highest on the F-scale were deemed as having an authoritarian personality

  3. Being more submissive to superiors

  4. More likely to obey authority figures

  5. More aggressive towards those of lower social status/'weak and inferior' people
• Research support from Milgram and Elms (AO3) + 20 obedient and 20 disobedient participants from the Milgram shock study were assessed on the F-scale
• Obedient participants scored higher on the F scale compared to disobedient participants
• Obedient people

  May share many of the characteristics of people with an authoritarian personality
• Lack of population validity (AO3) -

  Findings from a study cannot be generalised to the rest of the population as the sample is not representative
• Adorno investigation

  • Ethnocentric sample - only included white middle class Americans
  • Findings cannot be generalised to rest of population as we do not know whether other cultures would have responded in the same way
• F scale suffers from social desirability bias (AO3) -

  Participants may have given answers seen as socially acceptable instead of honest answers
• Participants giving socially acceptable answers

  May appear more authoritarian than they really are
• What are the consequences?

  May have been incorrectly classified as authoritarian personality
• Incorrect classification of participants

  Reduces internal validity
• Cannot explain obedience in large groups (AO3) - For example, In WW2 germans obeyed nazis and committed crimes despite not being told to do so at times.
• It is unlikely that the majority of the german population had an authoritarian personality
• The majority of the german population may have identified with the nazi state