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OBEDIENCE: DISPOSITIONAL EXPLANATIONS - Coggle Diagram
OBEDIENCE: DISPOSITIONAL EXPLANATIONS
AO1
EXPLANATION: THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
A high level of obedience is pathological
Theodore Adorno et al (1950) wanted to understand the anti-Semitism of the Holocaust. They believed that unquestioning obedience is a psychological disorder, and tried to find its causes in individual's personality
Authoritarian personality includes extreme respect for authority and contempt for 'inferiors'
Adorno 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 + gender
Authoritarian personality originates in childhood (e.g., overly strict parenting)
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
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 findings directly against their parents because they fear reprisals (the fear of retaliation)
So the feelings are displaced onto others who are seen as weaker - this is scapegoating. This explains hatred of people seen as socially inferior, psychodynamic explanation
Procedure
Several scales were developed, including the potential for fascism-scale (F-scale)
Examples of 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'
The study investigated unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups of more than 2000 middle-class white Americans
Findings + conclusions
Authoritarians (who scored high on the F-scale and other measures) identified with 'strong' people and were contemptuous of the 'weak'
They were conscious of their own and others' status , showing excessive respect + deference to those of higher status
Authoritarian people also had a cognitive style where there was no 'fuzziness' between categories of people, with fixed + distinct stereotypes about other groups
A03