Authoritarian personality

• Adorno et al (1950) - “obedience is like a psychological disorder. The cause of it lies in the personality of an individual.“
• Adorno et al (1950) investigated “obedient personality” with 2000 middle class white Americans. The F-scale was used to identify unconscious attitudes towards hierarchy, power, and other groups of people in society.
• Authoritarian personality - a person that has an extreme respect for authority and is more likely to be obedient
• People that scored higher on the F-scale were more authoritarian. This originates from Freud’s idea that personality is determined by childhood experiences.
• F-scale AO3. There is research support. Milgram and Elms (1966) Found in interviews with fully obedient ppts and found that they scored highly on the F-scale, showing that they had authoritarian personalities. However, only the ppts that showed full obedience were interviews, meaning there was no one else to compare them to. Also, they had already been debriefed, meaning they may have showed demand characteristics in the interview.
• F-scale AO3 - the research shows many different kinds of bias. The sample contained 2000 white, middle class Americans. This makes it difficult to generalise the findings as not only was the sample ethnocentric, it also cannot be applied to people of different races nor incomes.