The authoritarian personality
- Created by: MollyL20
- Created on: 05-10-20 17:03
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- Dispositional explanations- The authoritarian personality
- Theodor Adorno and his colleagues wanted to understand that the anti-Semitism of the Holocaust. Their research was largely different to what Milgram found.
- Procedure
- Adorno et al (1950) investigated the causes of obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards over racial groups
- A scale that is still used today is the F-scale which is still used to measure authoritarian personality. One item from the scale is 'obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn
- Findings
- Found that the authoritarian personality had a cognitive style where there was no fuzziness between categories of people with fixed distinctive sterotypes
- There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice
- Authoritarian characteristics
- Concluded that people with an authoritarian personality have a tendency to be especially obedient to authority
- They have an extreme respect for authority and their submissiveness to it
- People with an authoritarian personality are inflexible in their outlook. Everything is black and white and are uncomfortable with uncertainty
- Origin of the authoritarian personality
- They concluded that it formed in the childhood as a result of harsh parenting, typically strict discipline and an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards and severe criticism of perceived failings and also conditional love
- Adorno creates resentment and hostility in the child because they cant express their feelings to their parents because of a well-founded fear of reprisals
- So the fears are displaced on to another person this is called scapegoating. Explain the central trait of obedience to higher authority, this is a psychodynamic explanation
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