The Authoritarian Personality

Theodor Adorno was a psychologist working in the US in the late 1940's and early 1950's, along wiht a group of European psychologists who had fled Nazi prosecution in Europe.

Adorno argued that the key to understanding extreme obedience and racial prejudice lay in early childhood experience, when personality is formed.

He argued that people with an 'Authoritarian perosonality' have a tendency to be extremely obedient.

Adorno studied over 2000 American students from mainly white, middle-class backgrounds and he interviewed them about their political views and their early childhood experiences.

He also used projective tests, neutral stimuli as pictures that could be used to gain access into peoples thoughts, to assess whether or not they were racially prejudice.

Adorno found that people who had been brought up by strict parents who used harsh, physical punishments when they were children often grew up to be very obedient and under these conditions, children quickly learnt to obey and develop strong respect for authority.

Adorno drew on Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to build his explanation, arguing that harsh physicla punsihment lead to the child feeling hostile and angry towards their parents.

This hostility was uncomfortable for the child and created feelings of conflict that may be locked away in their unconscious mind and then the child displaces these hostile feelings onto others, often of a different racial group, who become an alternative target for their hostility.

From his research, Adorno developed a number of scales to measure aspects of behaviour and attitudes.

These included:

• Ethnocentrism (the preference of one's own racial group)
• anti- Semitism (prejudice against Jewish people) and,
• the potiential for fascism, which has become known as the F-scale.

The F-scale is now used to measure the 'authoritarian personality'

STRENGTH

There is a link between authoritarian personality and obedience as Elms and Milgram (1966) interviewed participants who went to 450volts and found that they all scored highly on the F-scale.

However, this link is just a correlation between measured variables and this means that we cannot conclude from this that the authoritarian personality causes obedience.

A 'third factor' may be involved in this.

Both obedience and the authoritarian personality may be caused by a lower level of education (Hyman and Sheatsley 1954)

LIMITATION

The authoritarian personality explanation is limited as millions of individuals in Germany displayed obedient and anti-Semitic behaviour but they did not have the same personality.

It seems unlikely that the majority of Germany's population possessed an authoritarian personality.

An alternate explanation is more realistic which is the social indentification theory, meaning that most Germans idnetified with the anti-Semitic Nazi state and adopted its views.

LIMITATION

Christie and Jahoda (1954) suggest the F-scale aims to measure tendancy towards extreme right-winged ideology BUT right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism (e.g. Maoism) both insist on complete obedience to political authority.

Adorno's theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation of obedience to authority because it does not explain obedience to left-wing authoritarianism meanig that is is politically biased.

LIMITATION

The explanation is based on flawed methodology as Greenstein (1969) suggested that the f-scale is 'a comedy of methodological errors' such as items being worded in the same 'direction' so the scale just measures the tendancy to agree to everything.

In addition, the researchers knew the participants' test scores when they interviewed them therefore meaning that they knew who had authoritarian personalities.

They also knew the study's hypothesis which makes biased results more likely suggesting that the data collected is meaningless and the concept of authoritarian personality lacks validity.

LIMITATION

Much of the research uses correlations as Adorno measured many variable and found significant correlations between them.

No matter how strong a correlation between two variables is, it does not mean that one causes the other, therefore Adorno could not claim that harsh parenting style caused the development of an authoritarian personality.