Shortly after the end of World War II, Nevitt Sanford and a small team of psychologists, including Daniel Levinson, Else Frenkel-Brunswick and Theodor Adorno, set to figure out the root cause of what made these war criminals different to ordinary people. Due to the nature of the war and the slaughter of millions of Jews, they started their research into personality, fascism and anti-Semitism. They began with the assumption that peoples actions and attitudes are a result of their personality. On this basis, they created four attitude scales to help identify certain personality traits, including the infamous F-scale. Once Adorno et al. had completed their scales, these were distributed in the form of questionnaires to 2,000 participants across America in order to complete their final version of the F-scale. These scales were used to try to measure a potential for ani-Semitism and fascism, which Adorno et al. believed to be directly linked to an authoritarian personality type. The authoritarian personality is described as a kind of personality typified by obedience to authority, strict adherence to rules, and hostility towards anyone different from oneself (McAvoy, 202, p.23).
In 96, motivated by the same events and the work of Adorno et al. (950), Stanley Milgra
m took a different approach to conducting research into obedience to authority. Before his study began, Milgram presented a question to the public, students and other psychologists to see if they thought it likely that a person would intentionally cause harm to another when told to by an authority figure. It was widely assumed by all who took part that no one participating in the study would cause lethal harm to another person. This, however, was not the case. 40 male volunteers were used to test how far an ordinary person would go to cause harm to others. The participants were told that they were taking part in a simple memory experiment where they were playing the role of teacher and another volunteer playing the role of learner. What the participants didnt know was that the learner was a confederate of the experimenter. The participants were then told by the experimenter to administer shocks to the learner upon receiving an incorrect answer to a memory question. These shocks increased in 5V increments each time, starting at 5V and ending at 450V a potentially lethal shock. Contrary to Milgrams initial survey, all of the participants went to at least 300 volts and 65% continued to the full 450 volts, following prompts and instructions from the experimenter.