Dispositional Explanation

Question 1

What is the authoritarian personalilty?

Answer 1

• proposed by Adorno et al to understand the anti-semitism of the holocaust
• he argues that authoritarians show extreme respect for authority and see the importance in powerful authority figures so are more likely to obey
• he says that they are very uncomfortable with uncertainty and so things are either right or wrong which leads to their views on minority groups being that they are inferior and the ill of society
• he believed that authoritarian personalties stemmed from harsh parenting as a child and receiving conditional love
• he believes that this child creates hostility that can’t be directed to parents so its displaced onto ‘weaker’ groups of people

Question 2

What is Adorno et al.’s research into dispositional variables?

Answer 2

• in 1950 he studied more than 2000 middle-class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards minority groups and created a scale called the fascism scale (f-scale)
• results show that people who scored high on the f-scale identified with ‘strong’ people, were very conscious of their status and showed respect to higher status individuals
• he found that authoritarians had a certain cognitive style involving fixed stereotypes of people and a positive correlation of authoritarians and prejudice

Question 3

What is a strength of dispositional variables?

Answer 3

• strength of research support from Milgram’s study as he tested a small sample of people who participated in his original study on the f-scale and those who were obedient in the study scored higher on the f-scale - reliability of f-scale and authoritarians obeying more

Question 4

What are 3 limitations of dispositional variables?

Answer 4

• limitation of limited evidence as pre-war Germany was still displaying very racist behaviour despite having different upbringings and different personalities and it is unlikely that they were all authoritarians - lacking in validity
• limitation of political bias as Jahoda argued that there is still reality in left-wing authoritarians and that the f-scale is bias towards right-wing ideologies - not generalisable or applicable to all situations
• limitation of flawed evidence as the way that f-scale was measured relies on honesty in answers and in order to get a high score on the test all you had to do was click agree even if it wasn’t true- lacking in internal validity