Dispositional Factors (exp of obedience)

• Dispositional explanations (the authoritarian personality)

  Adorno (1950) was interested in investigating why Nazi soldiers

  were so willing to persecute and kill members of minority groups,

  such as Jews during WWII; could it be blamed on a personality

  trait?

  He claimed a particular personality type is more likely to obey an

  authority

  A high level of obedience is considered a psychological disorder.
• Procedure (dispositional)

  Adorno et al. (1950) investigated the causes of an obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle-class,white American males and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups. They developed an ‘F’ scale to measure the relationship between a person's

  personality type and prejudiced beliefs.
• Findings (dispositional)

  Those who had scored highly on the ‘F’ scale identified with ‘strong’ or ‘superior’ people and were generally hateful of the ‘weak’ or ‘inferior

  They were very conscious of their own and others’ status
• findings - dispositional

  authoritarian personality

  • High scorers had a particular mental state
  • there were no ‘grey areas’ between categories of people – black and white thinking
  • They had fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups
  • There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice (as one increases so does the other)
  • Extremely submissive/obedient to authority figures BUT
  • Extremely prejudicial/discriminatory against groups they consider below them.
• Origin of authoritarian personality

  Harsh and punitive upbringing;little love and much punishment can lead to unconscious fear of parents with leads to excessive respect of authority figures

  or

  It can lead to unconscious hatred of parents which leads to hatred and anger displaced onto others.
• Authoritarian personality

  Milgram and Elms (1966) conducted a follow-up study using Ps who had taken part in Milgram’s original study.They found that those who were fully obedient and went all the way to 450 volts scored higher on tests of authoritarianism and lower on scales of social responsibility than those who defied the experimenter.These findings support Adorno’s claims and there is a large body of evidence to indicate that people who are very rigid, conservative, and prejudiced have been brought up in the way that Adorno described. Strong explanation of why people obey.
• A limitation of Adorno's study into the authoritarian personality is that his sample is not representative of all genders and cultures. Adorno's sample was more than 2000 middle class white,American males. Because he only used White Americans this is Ethnocentrism. He also only used middle-class males which is Androcentrism. Therefore,the authoritarian personality research is weak as it can't be generalised to all cultures and genders.
• Instead of authoritarianism it could be a lack of education causing high levels of obedience. Middendorp found that generally less educated people are consistently more authoritarian than more well educated people. Milgram also found that p's with lower levels of education tended to be more obedient than those with higher levels of education. This suggests that instead of authoritarianism education levels could be responsible. Therefore, the authoritarian personality is an invalid explanation of obedience.
• The social context might be more important for obedience than dispositional factors. Milgram showed that variation in the social context of the study was the primary cause of differences in the participants level of obedience not variation in personality. The problem with relying on personality based explanations is that it lacks flexibility to account for these variations. Therefore,this suggests authoritarian personality is an incomplete explanation of obedience.