Obedience: Dispositional explanations

• Authoritarian personality

  People are particularly susceptible to obeying people in authority, are submissive to those of higher status and dismissive of inferiors (scapegoating)
• Authoritarian characteristics


  Extreme respect for authority, and have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race, and gender
• Adorno (1950)- The authoritarian personality procedure

  Procedure:

  -Investigated the causes of the obedient personality

  -2000 middle-class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups

  -Developed the F-Scale for potential fascism to measure the authoritarian personality
• Adorno (1950)- The authoritarian personality findings


  Findings:

  -Those who scored highly on the 'F-scale' had authoritarian leanings and identified with 'strong' people

  -They were also contemptuous of the 'weak'

  -Very conscious of their own and others' status, showing excessive respect/defence to those in higher status

  -Distinctive stereotypes about others, strong correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.
• Parenting style that develops authoritarian personality


  Suggested that this is the origin of the AP

  Strict discipline, absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards, and severe criticism of failings (conditional love)
• Positive Evaluation for the authoritarian personality

  Research support

  - Elms and Milgram (1966), conducted interviews with high F-scale scores. Found a correlation between obedience and the authoritarian personality
• Negative evaluation for the authoritarian personality 


  Research support- correlation does not distinguish a causation between factors. There may be a third factor involved, such as lack of lower education (suggested by Hyman and Sheatsley 1954)

  Political Bias- Christie and Jahoda (1954), missing out on left-wing authoritarianism and are bias to right-wing. Cannot account for obedience across the whole political spectrum.
• Negative evaluation for the authoritarian personality 2

  • Limited explanation of obedience
  • Individual personality and individual differences cannot be generalised as an explanation to a country's behaviour and attitudes
  • E.g. pre-war Germany, majority racist, obedient and anti-semitic, despite differing in dispositions
  • Extremely unlikely they could all have an AP
  • Limitation as it lacks explanatory ability, social identity seems for valid in explaining obedience
• What does the social identity explanation suggest about obedience (AO3 alternative to AP explanation)

  • Goldhagen argued the majority of Germans identified with the anti-semitic Nazi state
  • They scapegoated the outgroup of jews
  • This was therefore not due to their personality but to the fact that identifying within a large social group and conforming was a more likely explaantion
• STRENGTH- research support from Elms and Milgram (AO3)

  • Conducted a facism interview using F-scale as a measure of facism
  • Interviewed 20 fully obedient ppts and 20 disobedient from Milgram's study
  • Obedient ppts scored higher, correlation between obedience and authoritarian personality as presumed
  • However correlation /= causation