Dispositional Explanations for Obedience: The Authoritarian Personality Flashcards
Define the dispositional/individual explanation
behaviour caused by a feature of the person (e.g. personality, genes)
Define the situational explanation
environment causes behaviour (e.g.; upbringing, poverty)
Who ‘discovered’ the authoritarian personality?
Theodor W. Adorno
It is said that people with an authoritarian personality are more likely to ______, and such traits can be measured using the __________
- obey
2. F-scale
What does the F in F-scale stand for?
fascist
When was the F-scale created?
1947
What is the F-scale?
a personality inventory that was created in California in 1947 as a measure of authoritarian traits or tendencies, as well as capacity for independent thought and self-will.
What is an authoritarian personality?
when you believe that people should completely obey or submit to their authority figures, and suppress their own beliefs
What psychological theory did Adorno strongly believe in?
the psychodynamic theory
What is the psychodynamic theory?
that a person’s personality traits and attitudes as an adult stemmed from childhood influences such as that of one’s parents.
From the psychodynamic theory, what did Adorno find?
He found that when a child had overly harsh and disciplinarian parents, the child would displace their anger with their parents onto seemingly ‘inferior’ others, through the process of scapegoating. On a surface level, they would idolise their parents, but on an unconscious level, they would fear and despise them, and so arises the need to displace such anger.
The child would be more likely to target their displaced anger on those who seem weak and
unable to defend themselves, such as minority groups.
What is reaction formation?
a defense mechanism in which a person unconsciously replaces an unwanted or anxiety-provoking impulse with its opposite, often expressed in an exaggerated or showy way. A classic example is a young boy who bullies a young girl because, on a subconscious level, he’s attracted to her.
What is the evaluation paragraph for ‘lacking in validity and reliability’?
There are serious methodological issues associated with the F-scale, as suggested by Greenstein. This scale is particularly susceptible to acquiescence bias, which describes the phenomenon of respondents always responding, in the same way, using the scales provided, regardless of the content shown in the scales. Therefore, this suggests that the findings produced by the F-scale may be lacking in validity and reliability.
What is the evaluation paragraph for ‘doesn’t explain all cases of obedience across the whole political spectrum’?
The Authoritarian Personality may not be able to explain all cases of obedience across the whole political spectrum, according to Christie and Jahoda. This is because the F-scale technically measures the likeness between an individual to Fascism (far-right on the political scale), but left-wing authoritarianism is also present, such as Bolshevism, and has been ignored by the current theory. Since there are more similarities between the two ends of these spectrums than differences, most notably a large emphasis on utmost respect for legitimate authority, this suggests that Fascist-like views can be found across the whole
spectrum, which the Authoritarian Personality does not account for.
What is the evaluation paragraph for ‘has little ecological validity’?
The Authoritarian Personality has little ecological validity because it cannot explain many real-life examples of mass obedience. For example, it is very unlikely that the whole German population during Nazi occupation had an Authoritarian Personality, but rather many shared the same struggles in life and displaced their fear about the future onto a perceived ‘inferior’
group of people, through the process of scapegoating. This means that such a theory is a limited explanation for some examples of obedience.
