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Authoritarian Personality - Coggle Diagram
Authoritarian Personality
Adorno et al 1950
Aim - To justify why the holocaust happened and why those involved obeyed their authority figures.
Procedure - 2000 white, middle class Americans completed the F-Scale questionnaire giving them a numerical score. He then interviewed them about their childhood.
Findings - those with strict parents scored higher on the F-Scale and so were more likely to develop an authoritarian personality.
Causes and Behaviours
Causes can include childhood factors such as trauma, military exposure, class, political opinions and low confidence.
Those who scored highly generally identified with 'strong' people and were contemptuous against those they perceived as 'weak'.
The behaviour of those with an authoritarian personality often include being materialistic, capitalist, fearful and patriotic
Harsh parenting, expectations of complete obedience, impossibly high standards, conditional love and criticism of failure make individuals with these situational factors more likely to score higher.
Effects
Those with an authoritarian personality can often be shy, intolerant and want to do what they consider right.
They are aware of the social hierarchy and show excessive respect and submission to authority.
They have a cognitive thinking style so there are no moral grey areas. This gives them an inflexible attitude and distinct, fixed stereotypes of other groups.
Evaluation
Limitation - F-Scale questionnaire written so it was easy to score highly and be classified as having an AP.
Limitation - Adorno found many people with AP had strict parents, but this is correlation not causation.
Strength - Forms an explanation for obedience.
Limitation - Generalisability issue, all participants were white, middle class Americans so no representation of minorities.
Other cultures could have different parenting styles, politics and traditions that influence whether a person develops an AP.
Temporal Validity - 1950s US vs 2020s UK. Society has changed, WW2 had just ended during the research so people were trying to work out why such atrocities occurred.