Social Influence - Dispositional Explanations For Obedience: The Authoritarian Personality Flashcards
What is an authoritarian personality?
Susceptible to obeying people in authority. Such individuals are also thought to be submissive to those of higher status and dismissive of inferiors.
What is meant by dispositional explanation?
Highlights the importance of the individual’s personality (e.g their disposition). Contrasts with situational explanations.
What were the similarities between Milgram and Adorno?
Adorno (like Milgram) wanted to understand the anti-semitism of the Holocaust.
What did Adorno’s fascism scale measure?
The authoritarian personality
What are authoritarian personality characteristics?
Adorno concluded that people with an authoritarian personality have a tendency to be obedient to authority.
Extreme respect to authority and submissiveness to it.
Contempt for people they perceive as having inferior social status, and have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race and gender.
View society as ‘going to the dogs’ and therefore believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values.
Inflexible in their outlook.
Uncomfortable with uncertainty.
What are the origins of an authoritarian personality?
Formed in childhood as a result of harsh parenting. These experiences create resentment and hostility in the child that can’t be expressed.
These fears are displaced onto others who are perceived as weaker (scapegoating).
This explains a dislike for people considered inferior.
This idea comes from a Freudian, psychodynamic approach.
What was Adorno’s procedure?
Adorno et al (1950) investigated the causes of the obedient personality, studying more than 2000 middle class, white American’s and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups.
What was Adorno’s findings?
They found people with authoritarian leanings (high score on F-scale), identified with strong people and were contemptuous of the weak.
They were very conscious of their own and others’ status showing excessive respect, deference and servility to those of higher status.
They also found they had a cognitive style, where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between characteristics of people, with fixed stereotypes about other groups.
There was a strong positive correlation between an authoritarian personality and prejudice.
