PSYC12H3 Chapter 4: Chapter 4 Textbook Notes
Document Summary
Up until the nazis in germany from 1933 to 1945, psychologists had explained prejudice as a psychodynamic process of unconscious defence mechanisms. One of the first attempts to examine the prejudiced personality was put forth by adorno and his colleagues (1950), with their description. According to adorno et al. , some people have personality structures that are flawed in such a way that they are conditioned to be especially likely to adopt prejudiced attitudes. Adorno and his colleagues interviewed and tested hundreds of individuals and found that for a subset of these personsjthe authoritariansjcertain patterns of prejudice, childhood upbringing, and relationships with parents tended to be quite common. Specially, authoritarians tended to grow up in homes in which the parents or guardians were strict disciplinarians, often using harsh discipline to keep the children from misbehaving and to punish them when they disobeyed the parent or guardian.
