Describe And Evaluate Psycholo Essay Research Paper

Describe And Evaluate Psycholo Essay, Research Paper

Zimbardo et al (1995) have defined prejudice as a learned attitude toward a target object, involving negative affect dislike or fear and negative beliefs stereotypes that justify the attitudes .

Theories if the origins of prejudice fall into the major categories (i) prejudice stemming from personality variables, and (ii) those which emphasize the interaction between personal and social variables.

In 1950, Adorno, Frankel Brunswick, Levinson and Sanford proposed the concept of the authoritarian personality, a type of person who is prejudiced by virtue of specific personality traits which influence him/her to be hostile towards ethnic, racial and other minority or out groups.

They began by studying anti Semitism in Nazi Germany in the 1940 s by using a number of scales were developed in the course of their research designed to measure (i) anti Semitism; (ii) ethnocentrism and (iii) political economic conservatism. Out of these emerged the F scale (fascism scale), which measures anti democratic tendencies indirectly by not mentoring specific minority groups or ideological beliefs; but reveals anti Semitism is part of a general factor rather than an isolated prejudice so that the authoritarian personality is prejudiced in a very generalized way.

Typically, the authoritarian personality is hostile to people of inferior status, servile to those of lighter status, disapproving and uncertainty, unwilling to introspect feelings and an upholder of conventional values and ways of life. This belief is convention and intolerance of ambiguity combine to make minorities them and the authoritarian s membership group us , they are by definition bad and we are by definition good .

Authoritarians have often experienced a harsh, punitive, disciplinarian upbringing, with little affection and they often reveal considerable latent hostility towards their parents. Such feelings (unconsciously) may be displaced onto minority groups and or groups projected onto these groups.

As far as the relationship between the authoritarian personality and upbringing is concerned, the F scale of college students and their parents, and Levinson and Huffman (1955) reported that authoritarian parents are more likely to stress discipline, conventionalism and submission in their child rearing methods compared with non-authoritarian parents.

In the laboratory, authoritarian personalities have been shown to be intolerant of ambiguity, and outside negative bias towards pornography, are highly susceptible to social influence, especially in relation to people of higher status and are more likely to give a verdict of guilty and recommend longer sentences when serving on juries. They are also more likely to hold sexiest attitudes, vote conservative and obey the orders of an authority figure to give electric shocks to an innocent stranger.

Adorno et al s theory has a number of problems; Brown (1988) discusses tow of them. First, the theory cannot explain the spread uniformity of prejudice in certain societies or sub groups within societies. If prejudice is to be explained in terms of individual s differences, how can it then be manifested in a whole population or at least a vast majority of that population. In pre war Nazi Germany fro example consistent racist attitudes and behaviour were shown by hundreds of thousands of people who must have differed on most other psychological characteristics.

Secondly, how can the theory account for the sudden rise and falls of prejudice in particular societies at specific historical periods. Again taking the example of anti Semitism in Nazi Germany, this arose during a decade or so, which is:

..much too short a time for a whole generation of German families to have adopted new forms of child rearing practices giving rise to authoritarian and prejudiced children (Brown 1988)

Even more dramatic was the anti Japanese prejudice among Americans following the attack on Peal Harbour. Such examples:

strongly suggest that the attitudes held by members of different groups towards each other have more to do with the objective relations between the groups relations of political conflict or alliance, economic inter dependence and so on than with the familiar relation in which they grew up (Brown 1988).

Another criticism made from the authoritarian personality is that it assumed that authoritarianism is a characteristic of the political right and so implied that there is no equivalent authoritarianism on the left.

The best know attempt to redress the balance is Rokeach (1960), who has developed a dogmatism scale; ideological dogmatism refers to a relatively rigid outlook on life and intolerance of those with opposing beliefs. High scores o the dogmatism scale reveal: (i) closed ness of mind, (ii) lack of flexibility and (iii) authoritarianism, regardless of particular social and political ideology.

So an individual with left wing or progressive beliefs can espouse them in just as rigid and dogmatic a way as someone with right wing or reactionary views they can be equally extreme (and closed) regardless of their particular content.

The dogmatic individual tends to accentuate differences between us and them , displays self – aggrandizement, a paranoid outlook on life and is uncompromising in his/her belief

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