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AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY - Coggle Diagram
AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
Explanation
Adorno created the F (fascism) scale which includes statements such as “People can be divided into two distinct classes: the weak and the strong”.
if a person agreed with the statements and scored highly - this indicated an authoritarian personality
the reason people obey is not due to situational cues, but due to their personality
dispositional explanation of obedience
explanation cont.
parents who demand unquestioning obedience, where love and affection is conditional on such behaviour
creates someone who values an authority structure and who defers to an authoritarian hierarchy of power
parenting styles during childhood create an authoritarian personality
show excessive respect to those in higher power, identifying with ‘strong’ people and showing disrespect towards the ‘weak’.
they tend to have rigid cognitive style
strength
empirical evidence demonstrating that people with certain dispositional characteristics are more likely to be obedient
MILGRAM & ELMS assessed the personality of a number of the participants who were involved in classic MILGRAM - type studies
They found that individuals who scored highly on tests of AUTHORITARIANISM, demonstrated higher levels of obedience
validating the claim that an authoritarian personality will lead to obedience.
weakness
For example, the obedient participants did not generally glorify their fathers and did not experience unusually high levels of punishment in childhood
the link between high obedience and authoritarianism is not straightforward
Milgram & Elms analysed the various sub-scales, they found that their fully obedient participants had characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians
authoritarianism is unlikely to be a useful predictor of obedience