Authoritarian personality-Evaluations
- Created by: MollyL20
- Created on: 05-10-20 18:18
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- The authoritarian personality- Evaluations
- Research support
- Milgram (1966) conducted interviews with a small sample of fully obedient participants, who scored highly on the F-scale, believing that there might be a link between obedience and authoritarian personality
- No real correlation found between obedience and authoritarian personality, meaning they cant draw conclusions that authoritarian personalities causes obedience. May be a third factor involved
- Both authoritarian personality and obedience may be linked to another factor such as a low income or a low level of education
- Limited explanation
- There will always be a struggle to explain obedience in terms of individual personality in the countrys population
- For example, pre-war Germany. Millions of people displayed obedient, racist and anti-Semitic behaviour despite the fact that they had different pesonalities
- It seems highly unlikely that they all have authoritarian personalities
- This is a limitation because there an alternative explanation would be much more realistic such as social identity
- Daniel Goldhagen (1996) argued that in 'Hitlers willing executioners' people identified with the anti-Sematic Nazi State and scapegoated the outgroup of Jews.
- Political bias
- The F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology.
- Christe and Jahoda (1954) measured that this is a politically bias interpretation of authoritarian personality. They pint out the reality of left wing authoritaranism
- Extreme right wing and left wing ideologies have similarviews
- They both emphasise the importance of a complete obedience to legitimate political authority
- This is a limitation because it isn't a comprehensive dispositional explanation that can account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum
- Research support
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