| What creates authoritatrian personality? | Strict and harsh parenting in childhood, creates resentment and hostility. |
| What do people with authoritarian personality do with their emotions and obedience? | Emotions are displaced onto poeple who are inferior and weaker. They need little pressure to obey. Correlation with prejudice, discrimination behaviour according to Adorno |
| Why are people with authoritarian personality act like according to Adorno? | Extreme resposect and are submissive.
They hold more traditional values and they beleive that a strong leader is needed to enforce traditional values.
Inflexible in their outlook and they unconfortable with uncertainty.
Contempt for people with inferior social status |
| What did Adorno and colleagues create? and what did it do | The F-scale, it measued fascist tendencies as it was thought that fascism was at the core of authoritarian personality |
| Personalities of people who scored highly on the F-scale test? | Identified with strong people and disrespect towards the weak.
They are status-conscious
Categorising poeple into specific stereotypcal categories, linking authoritariansim and prejudice. |
| A strength of authoritarian personality? | Supporting reserach about authoritarian personality being linked to high levels of obedience
Milgram and Elms studied 20 obedient and 20 disobedient ppts from original study, completed F-scale, as well as other personality questionnaires
Correlation with obedience and the authoritarin personality. People that were fully obedient scored highly on the F-scale, similar characteristics.
But its complex, found that many obedient ppts didn't demonstrate same typical characterists of authoritarian personalities, eg: glorifying their fathers |
| A weakness of authoritarian personality ? | Cannot explain obedience in the majority of a country's population
Pre-war germany, many people were obedient to authroity figure and had anti-semitic behaviour but all had varied personalities, not all authoritarian
Alternative view that they identifed with anit-semtic nazi state and scapegoated the jews in social identify theory, 'us' and 'them' approach
Limited, alternate explaination which is a more realistic description |
| A weakness of authoritarian personality? | F-Scale only measures extreme form of right-wing ideology, facism
Christie and Jahoda argued that is politically biased, ignoring left-wing authoritariansim, like Chinese Masoisma nd Russian Bolshevism
Far right and far left have common ideologies, empasise the importance of complete obedience to political authority
Adorono's thoery was oversimplifed and cannont account for obedience acorss the whole political spectrum |
| A weakness of authoritarian personality | Heavily criticised
Greenstien described that is was 'a comdey of methodological error's saying that the questions were worded in the same directions
People could tick all the boxes down one side, people could get a high score by answering quickly and not thinking about their response, demonstrating response bias
The measurement scale is flawed |
