the authoritarian personality

• P: although several studies have found that authoritarian participants are more obedient, there has been a good deal of suspicion about whether these participants really believed they were giving electric shocks.

  E: Dambrun and vatine overcame this problem by using an immersive virtual environment where an actor taking the role of the learner was filmed and displayed on a computer screen. participants were informed that the experiment was a simulation and the shocks and the victims reactions were not real, but stimulated. participants still tended to respond as if the situation were real.
• Link for dambrun and vatine

  L: in other words, participants who displayed higher levels of RWA were the ones who obeyed the most, confirming the link between authoritarianism and obedience.
• P: although milgram accepted that there might be a dispositional basis to obedience and disobedience, he did not believe the evidence for this was strong

  E: milgram showed that variations in the social context of the study were the primary cause of differences in participants levels of obedience, not variations in personality. He believed that the specific social situation participants found themselves in caused them to obey or resist regardless of their personalities
• Link for social context

  L: relying on an explanation of obedience based purely on authoritarianism lacks the flexibility to account for these variations
• P: Elms and milgram research also presented some important differences in the characteristics of the authoritarian personality and the characteristics of obedient participants

  E: for example, when elms and milgram asked participants about their upbringing, many of the fully obedient participants reported having a very good relationship with thei parents, rather than having grown up in overly strict environment associated with authoritarian personality
• link for differences

  L: it also seems plausible, therefore, given the large number of participants who were fully obedient in milgram's study, that the vast majority would have grown up in a harsh environment with a punitive father