The purpose of this essay is to look at various studies of memory, friendship and personality and to assess the relevance within the context of these subjects, whether other people, such as family and authority figures, influence human behaviour and performance. There may be other multiple sources of influence and these too will be assessed and examined.
Adorn et al (1950) proposed that prejudice and the predisposition to aggressive behaviour is the result of a person’s personality type. Basing their research methods on the principles of psychoanalysis, they sought to measure these personality types by using psychological scales. One of the scales that they used was named the F-scale, which indicated whether a person had an authoritarian personality, which was a predisposition for Fascist tendencies such as ethnocentrism. Those participants who scored highly on the f-scale were classed as having authoritarian personalities, and therefore make them more likely to support violence towards groups or people who they deemed as different from themselves. Whereas Adorno et al did not claim that those who scored highly were Fascists or commit acts of aggression, what they did claim was that they are more likely than those who scored lower, if in a society that prejudice was tolerated, would be more like to support those types of ideas. Adorno et al then decided to look at why some people had authoritarian personalities, and some did not. To look at these underlying causes they conducted in-depth interviews, asking participants a series of open ended questions, and because they were influenced by psychoanalysis included questions about the participant’s family life when they were children and their parents or caregivers (McAvoy 2012). When they compared those that scored highly on authoritarianism with those that had scored low in authoritarianism, they found that the participant that had scored higher had grown up in families that had been strict disciplinarians....