Dispositional explanation (personality)

• What is meant by dispositions factors?

  Dispositional factor— people obey because of internal factors, meaning that personality and individual characteristics are the reason we obey.
• What is meant by an authoritarian personality?

  • When the person believes that people should completely obey or submit to authority figures + suppress their own beliefs.
• How does Authoritarian personality form during childhood?

  • Harsh parents- Strict discipline, high expectations, conditional love
  • Idolize their parents on a surface level- would fear them unconsciously
  • Cannot express their feelings to their parents - this anger is displaced to those who are weaker / inferior
  • Forms prejudices
• Adorno - F.Scale

  • 2000 middle-class, white ppts rated statements on a scale
  • Authoritarian identified with strong people + disapproved of the weak
  • Respect high status
• Elms and Milgram AO3 procedure

  • 20 obedient participants (gave full 450 volts) + 20 disobedient participants ( refused to continue).
  • Participants completed personality questionnaires, including Adorno's F-scale + answered open-ended questions about their relationships with their parents and the experimenter
• Elms + Milgram AO3 results

  • obedient participants scored higher on the F-scale
  • They were less close to their fathers in childhood, and admired the experimenter more than disobedient participants.
• Strength- Questionaires

  • replicable (f scale) :
  • Standardised questions, Quantitative data = Large datasets more easily analysed
  • Ppts can answer Q’s over and over again to test if their responses remain consistent
  • (test-retest method) = Reliability
• Weakness - Questionaires

  • not 100% valid
  • Subjectivity and response bias (the tendency to agree to statements)
  • Truthfulness – may want to present themselves in a positive light or according to what they think researcher wants - (social desirability = demand characteristics
• Weakness - Oversimplified

  • incomplete explanation :
  • Reductionist – personality reduced to scale measure. Simplistic (not reflective of complexity of personality)
  • Deterministic – if you possess certain personality trait/were raised a certain way, you will be obedient (no free will)
• Weakness - correlation doesn't = causation

  • Just because there is a relationship between the authoritarian personality and levels of obedience - doesn’t mean having an authoritarian personality means you will be more obedient
  • E.g. there is a correlation between sleeping with your shoes on and waking up with a headache