Dispositional Factors 

Authoritarian personality (Adorno et al 1954)

Adorno (a German sociologist and philosopher) believed that adult personality and attitudes stemmed from childhood influences, particularly the actions of their parents.  Harsh and disciplinarian parents would result in children displacing their anger onto others.  Outwardly they would still idolise their parents whilst fearing or loathing them at an unconscious level (reaction formation).  Likely targets for their displaced anger would be those seen as being weak and unable to fight back, what we call scapegoating.  Minority groups, the poor, unemployed would be ideal.  This is clearly a psychodynamic theory of personality!

How do we become authoritarian?
According to Adorno, the personality stems from harsh treatment and overly strict upbringing and by parents who impose conditional love, i.e. affection is dependent on the child behaving in accordance with parental wishes.  Children are brought up to be fearful of failure, believing it will let their parents down.

Children become resentful, but because of the respect for parents that they feel, they have to displace this resentment and sometimes hatred elsewhere.  Usually it is focused on those perceived to be weak by the process of scapegoating.

Adorno’s Research:

Aim:

He aimed to find out which factors play a role in an obedient personality by investigating unconscious attitudes

Sample:

2000 white middle class Americans 

Procedure: 

Adorno argued that deep-seated personality traits were a huge influence on behaviour. The evidence he gave to support this conclusion included:

• Case studies, e.g., Nazis
• Psychometric testing (use of the F Scale – http://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm) The F scale was used to measure an authoritarian personality
• Clinical interviews revealed situational aspects of their childhood and background

Findings:

Those who scored highly on the F scale showed a high level of an authoritarian personality. The characteristics they presented include:

• A strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice
• Identifying themselves to ‘strong’ people and were contemptuous of the ‘weak’
• Categorize people into “us” and “them” groups, seeing their own group as superior and others as inferior
• Intolerance of ambiguity, preferring simple issues with plain yes/no answers. Very rigid rules and rigid ideas on what is right and wrong 
• Submissive to authority figures… always doing as they’re told without question or hesitation – highly obedient
• Belief that authority should be aggressive, for example support the use of capital and overly aggressive corporal punishment such as public beatings

Origin of the authoritarian personality:

Style of parenting:

• Extreme discipline and punishments 
• An expectation of absolute loyalty 
• Impossibly high standards where failure is not an option. If failure does occur, it is met with severe criticism 
• Conditional love (do you remember this from the humanistic approach)

Adorno believed that this style of parenting created internal resentment and hostility as they were not able to express emotion towards their parents (for being strict and critical).  Consequently, the person would then displaces this aggression / hostility onto safer targets, namely those who are deemed weaker (remember this defence mechanism from Freud and the psychodynamic approach)

In other words, according to Adorno, the Eichmanns of this world are there because they have authoritarian personalities and therefore are predisposed to cruelty, as a result of their upbringing.

Evaluation

Strengths: 

• Research to support: Elms and Milgram (1966) wanted to see if the obedient participants in Milgram’s research were more likely to display authoritarian personality traits, in comparison to disobedient participants. Their sample consisted of 20 obedient participants, who administered the full 450 volts and 20 disobedient participants, who refused to continue. Each participant completed several personality questionnaires, including Adorno’s F scale, to measure their level of authoritarian personality. In addition, participants were also asked open-ended questions about their relationship with their parents and their relationship with the experimenter and learner, during Milgram’s experiment. Elms and Milgram found that the obedient participants scored higher on the F scale, in comparison to disobedient participants, Therefore finding a positive correlation between high obedience and high score on F scale. In addition, the results also revealed that obedient participants were less close to their fathers during childhood [all of the participants in Milgram’s original experiment were male] and admired the experimenter in Milgram’s experiment, which was the opposite for disobedient participants. Challenge: Research was correlational and therefore cannot establish cause and effect!

Weaknesses: 

• Alternative Explanations: In Nazi Germany, millions of people obeyed and were involved in the holocaust at some level.  It is difficult to believe that all of these had an authoritarian personality.  Mass obedience of this sort seems to be much easier to explain using situational rather than dispositional factors.
• Alternative Explanation: Milgram, Bickman, Hoffling and Rank and Jacobson all showed differences in situational factors causing obedience, such as uniform, location and proximity. This therefore suggests that situational variables do contribute towards increasing or encouraging obedient behaviour. Whilst, some evidence does show that some people have the disposition for it too. Perhaps a theory which considers both situational and dispositional factors would be a more accurate explanation of obedience rather than looking at perspective.
• Deterministic: by explaining that obedience is a result of unconscious ego defense mechanisms, this demonstrates hard psychic determinism. Due to this happening unconsciously, it explains that behaviour is not a result of our own choosing. This is a weaknesses because it suggests that we do not have choice over obedient behaviour, and when given an order, that is potentially harmful to someone else, we might have the predisposition to blindly follow. As a consequence this could be problematic when considering crimes committed during wars or other examples were an order was given, as it suggests that individuals didn’t have personal choice, or free will over their actions as our criminal system suggests .
• Reductionist: Try taking the questionnaire online. This way of studying/ assessing someone’s personality is narrowing it down to a singular, quantitative score. Its reducing the complexity of someone’s behaviour down to this, which is over simplifying how complex our personality actually is. As a consequence, whilst we might be able to get a clear indication of who has or hasn’t got this personality type, this might not be that useful if it’s only giving us a limited understanding.
• Research method – correlation: Being correlational we cannot be sure that the authoritarian personality caused the obedience.  Therefore, the dispositional explanation lacks research that supports the cause and effect of obedience, because other factors may have contributed to it, for example low level of education could just as easily be responsible for both.
• Social Sensitivity: This theory suggests that overly harsh parenting can cause someone to have an authoritarian personality. This could be viewed as a negative behaviour, especially when put within the context of the problems of blind obedience. Therefore suggesting that parents and parenting styles are to blame when individuals follow orders that are destructive or damaging. As a consequence, this can ethical implications within society whereby parents are reluctant to implement appropriate behaviour modification techniques, such as punishment, when raising their children. Researchers and psychologists need to be mindful of how this explanation is communicated to society and used in the real world in order to prevent this.