Authoritarian Personality

• Authoritarian personality - dispositional explanation for obedience (Theodor Adorno)
• Freud - defence mechanisms are psychological strategies that are unconsciously used to protect a person from anxiety arising from unacceptable thoughts or feelings
• Repression

  • unconscious mechanism employed by the ego to keep disturbing or threatening thoughts from becoming conscious
  • e.g. child abused by parents - no recollection of events but struggles forming relationships
  • women in childbirth forget pain to continue having children
• Displacement

  • redirection of an impulse (usually aggression) onto a powerless substitute targets
  • e.g. someone frustrated by their superior may go home and kick the dog, beat up family member or engage in cross-burnings
• Theodor Adorno tested authoritarian personality

  • over 2000 students white middle class background
  • interviews - political views + early childhood experiences
  • rorschach test - studies thoughts and racial prejudice, testing for ethnocentrism and anti-semitism
• Adorno Found

  • people brought up by strict parents who used harsh physical punishments when they were children often grew up to be very obedient
  • using harsh + physical punishments tend to feel angry + hostile to parents (hostility and uncomfortable and creates conflict)
  • child displaces hostility onto others which becomes target of hostility
  • scapegoat group (based on Freud's work)
• Adorno Concluded

  • extreme obedience + racial prejudice lay in early childhood where personality is formed
  • authoritarian personality = extremely obedient
• Describing authoritarian personality

  • collection of personality traits/disposition
  • obedience to people perceived higher status
  • harsh to people of lower status
  • measured through f-scale (fascism)
  • dogmatic
• Blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong
• Respect for submission to acknowledged authority
• Belief in aggression toward those who do not subscribe to conventional thinking, or who are different
• A negative view of people in general - i.e. the belief that people would all lie, cheat or steal if given the opportunity
• A need for strong leadership which displays uncompromising power
• A belief in simple answers and polemics - i.e. The media controls us all or the source of all our problems is the loss of morals these days
• Resistance to creative, dangerous ideas, a black and white worldview
• A tendency to project one's own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group
• A preoccupation with violence and sex