Obedience- Dispositional explanations

• Dispositional explanations


  Authoritarian personality
• F-scale

  • Higher the score on facism scale the more authoritarian you are
  • Low score= Liberalists
• Dispositional factors


  An explanation of individual behaviour caused by internal characteristics that reside within the individuals personality.

  E.g Authoritarian personality
• Adorno’s aim

  • Adorno investigated whether personality (I.e dispositional factors) rather than situational (I.e environmental factors) could explain obedience.
• Procedure of Adorno’s study

  • 2000 middle class white Americans: Investigated the unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups.
  • Questionnaire investigated many scales but one them was called the f-scale, which measured the potential for fascism and authoritarian personality.
  • Participants had to rate their agreement with each item on a 6-point scale ranging from 1 (disagree strongly) to 6 (agree strongly)
  • E.g obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.
• Findings of Adorno’s study

  • Individuals who score high on the f-scale were people with an authoritarian personality.
  • These individuals were rigid thinkers who obeyed authority, saw the world as black and white and enforced strict adherence to social rules and hierarchies.
  • Those who had scores highly on the f-scale identified with ‘strong’ people, generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’
  • They were very conscious of their own and others status
  • High scorers- fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups and there was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.
• Conclusion from Adorno’s study

  • Individuals with an authoritarian personality tend to be especially obedient to authority.
  • They have extreme respect for authority and are submissive
  • They show contempt for people they perceive as having an inheritor social status and have higher conventional attitudes towards sex, race and gender
  • They believe we need a strong and powerful leader to enforce traditional values such as love of country, religion and family.
  • They are inflexible in their outlook, everything is either right to wrong.
• Scapegoating

  • Bad experiences and parenting style creates resentment and hostility within the child. But the child cannot express their feelings against parents because the fear of reprisals.
  • The fear is then displaced onto others who are perceived to be weaker.
  • Psychodynamic explanation
• Outline the authoritarian personality as an explanation of obedience (4 marks)

  • A dispositional explanation which suggests obedient behaviour id due to internal traits such as personality type, rather than situational factors
  • Dispositional have developed from rigid parenting
  • Dispositions include conformist, respect for authority
  • Obedient towards people perceived to be of higher status
  • F-scale is a way of measuring personality type
• Limited explanation

  • Cannot explain obedience behaviour in the majority of the country’s population
  • For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals all displayed obedient, racist and anti-Semitic behaviour
  • According to the example, it is unrealistic to assume that everyone possesses an authoritarian personality. This sheds light onto a more realistic explanation like social identity theory, whereby majority of the German people identified with the anti-Semitic nazi state and scapegoated the Jewish group.
  • does not help us to fully explain the cause of obedience
• Research support

  • Evidence from Milgram’s research
  • Milgram and Elms did a follow up study using Participants from Milgram’s previous experiments, 20 ‘obedient’ and 20 ‘defiant’ Participants were selected and they completed a questionnaire and open-ended questions about their childhood.
  • Results found high levels of authoritarianism amongst those classified as obedient as they scored higher on the f-scale compared to those that were defiant.
• Methodological issues

  • For example, green stein goes as far as to describe the f-scale as a comedy of methodological errors.
  • These include response bias where an individual can get a high score on the scale simply by agreeing with every item. This would show them to have an authoritarian personality even when they have not thought properly about their responses.
  • Research studies that use the f-scale may not be measuring authoritarian personality accurately, which means Adorno’s study lacks internal validity
• Adorno’s research is a correlation

  • Correlation doesn’t mean causation
  • For instance, Adorno and his colleagues found than authoritarianism was strongly correlated with measures of prejudice against minority groups.
  • Middendorp and Meleon found that less-educated people are more likely to display an authoritarian personality in comparison to well educated people. So level of education mediates the relationship.
  • So it is not justifiable for Adorno to reach the conclusion that authoritarian personality leads to obedience.