SI - Dispositional explanation for Obedience (Adorno)

Question 1

Adorno’s authoritarian personality theory and its evaluation

Answer 1

• Dispositional explanation of obedience
• Proposed that over-strict parenting results in a child being socialised to obey authority unquestioningly because they learn strict obedience to their parents
• He also proposed that strict parenting results in prejudice. This is because strict parenting means the child feels constrained, which creates aggression this aggression cannot be reflected back to their parents as they are afraid they will be disciplined so is channelled towards people they see as weak or inferior to them

EV:
- Milgram found that participants who scored higher on the f-scale (so had more authoritarian traits) had been willing to administer bigger shocks in his experiment
- CONTEXT: Adorno developed a scale to measure how strongly people express authoritarian traits, called the f-scale (fascism scale)