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authoritarian personality as an explanation for obedience
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Outline and evaluate the authoritarian personality as an explanation for obedienceThe dispositional explanation suggests that unquestioning obedience is a psychological
disorder, embedded in an individual's personality. Adorno concluded that people with an
Authoritarian personality have an exaggerated respect for authority and a submissiveness to
it, express contempt for people of inferior social status, and have conventional attitudes
towards race and gender. They view society as ‘going to the dogs' therefore we need strong
and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as patriotism and religion. Often
authotraians have inflexible outlooks on life; nothing is ever ‘grey' instead simply right or
wrong.
This personality type is said to form in childhood through harsh parenting, strict discipline,
high standards and severe criticism. The parents often display conditional love. These
experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, this is then displaced onto others
who are seen as weaker. This explains their hatred of people seen as socially inferior. This
is what's known as a psychodynamic explanation.
A strength of this explanation comes from supporting research evidence. Milgram and his
assistant Elms (1966) conducted interviews with a small sample of fully obedient
participants, who scored highly on the F-scale, and found that there might be a link between
obedience and authoritarian personality. However, this link is merely a correlation between
two measured variables. This makes it impossible to draw the conclusion that authoritarian
personality causes obedience on the basis of this result. It may be that a 'third factor' is
involved. Perhaps both obedience and authoritarian personality are associated with a lower
level of education, for instance, and are not directly linked with each other at all.
Another issue with this concept of authoritarianism, is that it is limited in its explanation for
obedience in the majority of a country's population. For example in pre war germany millions
of individuals in displayed obedient and anti-Semitic behaviour, but didn't have the same
personality. It is highly improbable that they all possessed an authoritarian personality. This
is therefore a wesakness for this explanation as the social identity theory is more likely; most
Germans identified with the anti-semitic Nazi state and adopted it's views.
Moreover, this explanation has been criticised for being politically biassed. Jahoda
suggested the f-scale aims to measure the tendency towards extreme right-wing ideology.
However, right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism both insist on complete obedience to
political authority. Adorno's theory is therefore not a comprehensive dispositional explanation
of obedience because it does not consider left-wing authoritarianism.
Additionally, the F-scale has also been criticised for a flawed methodology. Greenstein
called it 'a comedy of methodological errors'. For example, items are worded in the same
'direction' so the scale just measures the tendency to agree with everything. Also,
researchers knew the participants' test results when they interviewed them, so they knew
who was authoritarian. This makes biassed results very likely.
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