Dispositional Explanations

• Adorno et al conducted an experiment into whether prejudice is due to personality types. His study involved 2000 white Americans who completed a questionnaire called the F-Scale (fascism scale) which asked questions such as "the businessman are more important to our country than the artist or professor" and answers were on a scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree. Those who scored highly on the test were likely to have authoritarian personalities.
• Authoritarian Personalities


  Obedient to authority figures and hostile to those of inferior status. More likely to categorise people into "us" and "them", with their group being superior. Also likely had strict upbringings and were fairly rigid in their opinions and beliefs which were probably traditional values.
• Adorno argued that those with authoritarian personalities likely experienced harsh parenting:

  • extremely strict
  • expectation of absolute loyalty
  • impossibly high standards
  • severe criticism of failure
  • conditional love
• How can authoritarian parenting styles affect a child?

  It creates resentment and hostility which they can't take out on their parents due to fear of punishment and therefore displaces their feelings on others, usually those perceived as weaker; scapegoating
• Right-Wing Authoritarianism: Altemeyer


  Altermeyer redefined authoritarian personalities with three key characteristics. Conventionalism is the adherence to social norms, accompanied by authoritarian aggression which is aggression to those who violate these norms. Authoritarian submission is uncritical submission to legitimate authorities.
• Authoritarian Personalities: Evaluation Points

  • Methodological problems
  • Correlation not causation
  • Middendorp & Meleon
• Authoritarian Personalities: Methodological Problems

  All questions in the F-Scale were angled in the same direction. This means that people answering them could just tick the same answer for each one as it is convenient, providing invalid results. They tend to do this because they can't decide or concentrate. This causes the F-Scale to suffer from response bias or social desirability, as people may choose answers they believe are socially correct.
• Authoritarian Personalities: Correlation not Causation

  Adorno measured a range of variables and found a correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice against minorities, however this does not show causation. If two variable correlate, there may be a third variable which explains the link between the two. For example, the level of education mediates the relationship between authoritarianism and obedience. This means that a harsh parenting style does not cause authoritarian personality, which limits the validity of the dispositional explanation
• Authoritarian Personalities: Middendorp and Meleon


  Middendorp and Meleon found that less-educated people are more likely to display authoritarian personalities. This suggests that the level of education plays a more important role in authoritarian personalities than parenting style. This questions the validity of the authoritarian personality explanation.