Adorno - Authoritarian Personality:

Adorno et al wanted to investigate the causes of the obedient personality
Adorno studied 2000 middle class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups
To do this he devised a questionnaire asking people how much they agreed with particular statements. For example 'obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn'
Adorno used the F-scale to investigate this, which measures the tendency towards fascism
People with authoritarian learnings and who scored highly on the F-scale identified with 'strong' people and were generally contemptuous of the 'weak'. They were very conscious of their own and others' status showing excessive respect, deference and servility to those of a higher status
Authoritarian people had a cognitive style where there was no fuzziness between categories of people with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups
There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice
Milgram and Elms conducted interviews with fully obedient participants. who scored highly on the F-scale, believing there may be a link between obedience and authoritarianism. However this is only a correlation between two measured variables making it impossible to draw the conclusion that authoritarian personality causes obedience. It is possible there are other factors involved for example obedience and authoritarianism may be linked with level of education
It is more likely that social identity explains obedience. Authoritarian personality cannot explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country's population. For example in pre-war Germany, millions of people displayed obedient, racist and anti-semitic behaviour despite having different personalities. It is unlikely they all had an authoritarian personality. However they did identify with the anit-semitic Nazi state. showing social identity can explain obedience better than authoritarianism
The F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology. However Christie and Jahoda pointed out this was politically biased, as left-wing and right-wing ideologies have a lot in common, including the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority. This is a limitation because it is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that can account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum
The F-scale is based on a flawed methodology. Its items are worded in the same direction making it possible to get a high score by ticking the same line of boxes down the page. There may also have been acquiescence bias which is the tendency to agree with everything, regardless of the content
Adorno found many correlations however it doesn't matter how strong a correlation is, correlation does not equal causation

	Created by Caitlyn Grayston about 7 years ago

AS level Psychology (Conformity) Note on Obedience - Dispositional Explanations, created by Caitlyn Grayston on 15/05/2017.

Obedience - Dispositional Explanations