obedience: dispositional explanations
- Created by: IvyVega
- Created on: 23-02-18 16:15
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- Obedience: Dispositional explanations
- Explanation: the authoritarian personality
- a high level of obedience is pathological
- Theodore Adorno et al wanted to understand the anti-Semitism of the holocaust
- they believed that unquestioning obedience is a psychological disorder
- And tried to find its cause in the individual's personality
- Authoritarian personality includes extreme respect for authority and contempt for inferiors.
- Adnorno et al concluded that people with an authoritarian personality are especially obedient to authority
- they
- have exaggerated respect for authority and submissiveness to it
- express contempt for people of inferior social status
- have conventional attitudes towards race and gender
- Authoritarian personality originates in childhood.
- Authoritarian personality forms in childhood through harsh parenting
- Extremely strict discipline, expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards, and severe criticism
- it is also characterised by conditional love
- parents love depends entirely on how their child behaves
- Authoritarian personality forms in childhood through harsh parenting
- hostility towards/ fear of parents is displaced onto those who are socially inferior
- These experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, but they cannot express these feeling directly against their parents because they fear reprisals
- so the feelings are displaced onto others who are seen as weaker
- this is scapegoating
- this explains hatred of people seen as socially inferior
- a psychodynamic explanation
- this explains hatred of people seen as socially inferior
- this is scapegoating
- a high level of obedience is pathological
- Key study: adnorno et al the authoritarian personality
- procedure
- the study investigated unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups of more than 2000 middle- class white americans
- several scales were developed
- including the potential for fascism scale.
- Examples from the F-scale
- Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues for children to learn
- there is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel great love, gratitude and respect for his parents
- findings and conclusion
- Authoritarians identified with strong people were contemptuous of the weak
- they were conscious of their own and others status
- showing excessive respect and deference to those of higher status
- Authoritarian people also had a cognitive style where there was no fizziness between categories of people
- with fixed and distinctive stereotypes abut other groups
- procedure
- Explanation: the authoritarian personality
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