obedience: dispositional explanation

• authoritarian personality (AP)

  • Adorno et al = believed that unquestioning obedience is a psychological disorder and tried to find its causes in individual's personality
  • believes high obedience is pathological
• characteristics of authoritarian personality

  • have exaggerated respect for authority and submissiveness to it
  • express contempt for people of inferior social status
  • authoritarians tend to follow orders and view 'other' groups as responsible for society's ills
• AP originates in childhood

  • it forms in childhood through harsh parenting:
  • extremely strict discipline, expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards and severe criticism
  • also characterised by conditional love = parents' love depends entirely on how their child behaves
  • eg = 'I will love you if'
• hostility is displaced onto social inferiors

  • the childhood experiences create resentment and hostility in the child BUT they cannot express these feelings directly against their parents because they fear reprisals
  • so the feelings are displaced onto others who are weaker - this is scapegoating
  • a psychodynamic explanation
• AP test procedure

  • study investigated unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups of more than 2000 middle class white Americans
  • several scales were developed (including the potential-for-fascism scale, F-scale)
  • examples from F-scale = rated on scale 1-6 (6=agree strongly):
  • 'obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues for children to learn'
  • 'there is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel great love, gratitude and respect for his parents'
• AP test findings

  • authoritarians (who scored high on the F-scale and other measures) identified with 'strong' people and were contemptuous of the 'weak'
  • they were conscious of their own and others' status, showing excessive respect and deference to those of higher status
  • authoritarian people also had a cognitive style where there was no 'fuzziness' between categories of people = with fixed and distinctive stereotypes (prejudices) about other groups
• strength = evidence that authoritarians are obedient

  • Elms and Milgram = interviewed 20 fully obedient pps from Milgram's original obedience studies
  • they scored significantly higher on the F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient pps
  • suggests that obedient people may share many of the characteristics of people with an authoritarian personality
• counterpoint to supporting evidence

  • sub scales of the F-scale showed that obedient pps had characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians
  • eg = they did not experience high levels of punishment in childhood
  • suggests a complex link and means that authoritarianism is not a useful predictor of obedience
• limitation = authoritarianism can't explain a whole country's behaviour

  • millions of individuals in Germany displayed obedient and anti-semitic behaviour - but can't all have the same personality
  • it seems unlikely that the majority of Germany's population had an authoritarian personality - a more likely explanation is that germans identified with the Nazi state
  • => social identity theory may be a better explanation
  • SIT = behaviour/attitudes are strongly influenced by those of the groups we identify with
• limitation = F-scale is politically biased

  • Christie and Jahoda = suggest the F-scale aims to measure tendency towards extreme right-wing ideology
  • but right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism (eg Chinese Maoism) both insist on complete obedience to political authority
  • => Adorno's theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation as it doesn't explain obedience to left-wing authoritarianism (ie is politically biased)
• extra evaluation = flawed evidence

  • the F-scale has been used in many research studies that have led to an explanation of obedience based on the authoritarian personality
  • BUT = the F-scale is flawed
  • eg = people who tend to agree to the statements (response bias) are scored as authoritarian
  • => explanations of obedience based on research with the F-scale may not be valid