Dispositional explanations

• Weakness of authoritarian personality

  • Adorno’s approach focuses exclusively on personality as the reason why some people obey and ignores other important factors. It is also highly deterministic as it fails to take into account that individuals can exercise free will and make their own choices about whether or not to obey.
  • This would particularly be the case for people with an internal locus on control who see themselves as responsible for their own actions rather than external forces.
  • This decreases the validity
• Weakness of authoritarian personality is contradictory research

  • Elms and Milgram interviewed a sample of people who had participated in his baseline study and found that those who were highly obedient, were significantly more authoritarian on the f-scale than disobedient participant
  • However, this link is merely conditional – when the researchers analysed the f-scale results, they found that the obedient participants had a number of characteristics unusual of authoritarians
  • This means that it is impossible to draw the conclusion that authoritarian personality causes obedience.