Obedience: dispositional explanations

• What is dispositional explanation

  Any explanation of behaviour that highlighted the importance of the individuals personality. Such explanations are often contrasted with situational explanations
• What was the procedure of Adorno Et Al?

  it was conducted in 1950. Adorno Et Al investigated the class of the obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle class, white Americans and their unconsciousness attitudes towards other racial groups. They developed several scales to investigate this. Including the fascism scale which is still used to measure authoritarian personality
• What were the findings from Adorno Et Al

  Those who scored high on the F-scale were identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ’weak”. They were very conscious of their own and others’ status, showing excessive respect defect and servility to those of higher status. Adorno Et Al also found that authoritatian people had a cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups. There was a strong correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice
• What are authoritarian characteristics?

  -they have a tendency to be especially obedient to authority

  -have an extreme respect for authority and submissiveness to it

  -show contempt for people they perceive as having inferior social status, and have highly conventional attitudes towards, sex, gender and race.

  -View society as ‘going to the dogs’, and therefore believe we need a strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as religion country and family. -Everything is either right or wrong, their arent any grey areas
• what is the origin of the authoritarian personality

  Concluded that it formed in Childhood as a result of harsh parenting. The parenting identified by Adorno features include extremly strict discipline, impossibly high standards. Adorno argued that these experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, but the child can’t express these feelings to the parents because of a well-founded fear of reprisals. So the fears are displaced onto others who are perceived to be weaker (Scapegoating). This explains a central obedience to higher authority and hate towards those who are socially inferior. This is a psychodynamic explanation.
• EVALUATION:limited explanation

  Any explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population. E.g, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals displayed obedient, radish and anti-Semitic behaviour. This was despite the fact that they must of differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways. It’s extremely unlikely that they could all possess authoritarian personality.