Adorno et al (1950)

Question 1

What did he investigate

Answer 1

The causes of the obedient personality and their conscious attitude towards racial groups

Question 2

How many participants were there

Answer 2

2000 middle-class white Americans

Question 3

What was the name of the scale they used to investigate this

Answer 3

Fascism scale

F- Scale

Question 4

What were people with authoritarian leanings more likely to be

Answer 4

• Prejudiced against certain groups
• Disrespectful to those classed as weak and showed excessive respect to those of a higher status
• conscious of their own status

Question 5

How did authoritarian personality form according to him

Answer 5

During childhood as a result of harsh parenting and strict discipline, this then creates resentment and hostility in a child they then display onto those who are deemed as ‘weaker’ when they’re older eg hitler

Question 6

what type of style did an authoritarian have

Answer 6

A cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people, this means that there were fixed stereotypes of people

Question 7

what was the strong positive correlation between

Answer 7

Authoritarianism and prejudice

Question 8

weaknesses of adorno et al

Answer 8

• F scale is a questionnaire, self report techniques, social desirability bias, retrospective judgement
• cultural differences, used white american males
• conflicting evidence, Milgram stated that an authoritarian personality may have a role in obedience but he believed situational factors such as location, proximity and uniform held more weight
• political bias, wrong to say that all conservatives will be authoritarian based on these findings, biased as this was done through the left-wing perspective