Understanding the Psychology of Authoritarianism and Obedience

Running head : Psychology
Psychology
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Running head : Psychology
Part two.
Reflective writing.
In the aftermath of Second World War, the atrocities afflicted by the Nazi regiment
were a matter of enquiry for a large segment of the research scholars. The research and the
scholarly work accrued out by Theodor Adorno and Stanley Milgram were premised on
understanding the reason why people tend to harm to people. I wanted to know that how and
why people has that innate urge to harm each other. Inflicting pain on the personal account
can still be negotiated; I wanted to know about the state mechanism of inflicting pain and
harm to people. My initial query was how a state administration arrive to a decision to cause
pain and sufferings to a targeted population. My search got aggravated, when I started
questioning the credibility of the official through which the Nazi government carried out the
mass eradication process.
Adorno has premised his understanding of authoritarian personality based of the
understanding of personality as defined by Sigmund Freud. To understand the different of
personality, two of the factors, namely conscious and unconscious mind needs to be analysed.
According to his understanding, the outward manifestation of one’s personality is only a part
of his conscious mind (Brace and Byford, 2010, Chapter one). The focus of Adorno was more
to know how personality shape the Authoritianism. The enquiry was wider, he along with
other social scientist wanted to know , whether there is enough possibility of “German
problem” to be in other places. Adorno and his colleagues soon realised that this particular
kind of personality is present everywhere, where a person will accept violence towards
anyone different from himself or herself so that they cohere with an extremist politics. This
the was predisposition of for what he termed as authoritarian personality.
On the other, by the Milgram’s experiment of giving lethal shocks in the closed
experiment depicts the reason why people tend to obey ins spite of knowing that they are