Obedience: Dispositional explanations

• What did Adorno et al discover?

  • Adorno and his colleagues wanted to understand the antisemitism of the Holocaust. Their research led them to draw very different conclusions than Milgram had. On the basis of their research they came to believe that a high level of obedience was basically a psychological disorder, and tried to locate the causes of it in the personality of the individual.
• What was the procedure of Adorno et al (1950) experiment?

  • Adorno et al (1950) investigated the causes of the obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle-class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups. They developed several scales to investigate this, including the potential for fascism scale (F-scale) which is still used to measure the authoritarian personality.
• Give me two examples of the F-scale?

  • 'Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn'
  • 'There is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel a great love, gratitude and respect for his parents'.
• What were the findings of Adorno et al's experiment (1950)?

  • The most interesting discovery from this study was that people with authoritarian leanings (i.e. those who scored high on the F-scale and other measures) identified with 'strong' people and were generally and were generally contemptuous of the 'weak'. They were very conscious of their own and others' status, showing excessive respect, deference and servility to those of higher status.
  • Adorno et al. also found that authoritarian people had a cognitive style where there was no 'fuzziness' between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive sterotypes about other groups. There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.
• What did Adorno conclude after doing his experiment?

  • Authoritarian characteristics- Adorno concluded that people with an authoritarian personality have a tendency to be especially obedient to authority. They have an extreme respect for authority and submissiveness to it. They also show contempt for people they perceive as having inferior social status, and have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race and gender. They view society as 'going to the dogs' and therefore believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of country, religion and family. People with an authoritarian personality are inflexible in their outlook- for them there are no 'grey areas'. Everything is either right or wrong and they are very uncomfortable with uncertainty.
• What is the origin of the authoritarian personality?

  • Adorno et al sought to identify the origin of the authoritarian personality type. They concluded that is formed in childhood, as a result of harsh parenting. Typically, the parenting style identified by Adorno features extremely strict discipline, an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards, and severe criticism of perceived failings. It is also characterised by conditional love- that is, the parents' love and affection for their child depends entirely on how he or she behaves.
• What is the origin of the authoritarian personality (part 2)?

  • Adorno argued that these experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, but the child cannot express these feelings directly against their parents because of a well-founded fear of reprisals. So the fears are displaced onto others who are perceived to be weaker, in a process known as scapegoating. This explains a central trait of obedience to higher authority, which is a dislike (and even hatred) for people considered to be socially inferior or who belong to other social groups. This is psychodynamic explanation.
• What is one advantage of the authoritarian personality? (research support)

  • Research support- Milgram and his assistant Elms (1966) conducted interviews with a small sample of fully obedient participants, who scored highly on the F-scale, believing that there might be a link between obedience and authoritarian personality.
• What is the counterpoint to Elms (1966) research support of the authoritarian personality?

  • However, this link is merely a correlation between two measured variables. This makes it impossible to draw the conclusion that authoritarian personality causes obedience on the basis of this result. It may be that a 'third factor' is involved. Perhaps both obedience and authoritarian personality are associated with a lower level of education, for instance, and are not directly linked with eachother at all (Hyman and Sheatsley 1954).
• What is one disadvantage of the authoritarian personality?

  • 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 personality.
  • For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals all displayed obedient, racist and anti-semitic behaviour. This was despite the fact that they must have differed in her personalities in all sorts of ways. It seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess the authoritarian personality.
  • This is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is clear that an alternative explanation is much more realistic- that social identity explains obedience. The majority of German people identified with the anti- semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the ‘outgroup’ of Jews.
• What is another disadvantage of the authoritarian personality?(political bias)

  • Political bias- The F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology.
  • Christie and Jahoda (1954) argued that this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality. They point out the reality of left- winged authoritarianism in the shape
  • For example, of Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism. In fact extreme right-wing and left-wing ideologies have much in common-not the least of which is that they both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority.
  • This is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that can account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.
• What is another limitation of the authoritarian personality?(methodology)

  • Methodological problems- Based on a flawed methodology.
  • Greenstein (1969) goes as far as to describe the F-scale as a ‘comedy of methodological problems.’
  • Every one of the items is worded in the same ‘direction‘. This means it is possible to get a high score for authoritarian just by ticking the same line of boxes down one side of the page.
  • People who agree with the items on the F-scale are therefore not necessarily authoritarian but merely ‘acquiescers’, and the scale is just measuring the tendency to agree to everything.
  • Also, Adorno and his colleagues interviewed their participants about their childhood experiences. abut the researchers knew the participant’ test scores, so knew which of them had authoritarian personalities. They also knew the hypothesis of the study.
• What is another advantage of the authoritarian personality research?

  • Adorno and his colleagues measured an impressive range of variables and found many significant correlations between them.
  • For example, they found that authoritarianism was strongly correlated with measures of prejudice against minority groups.
• What is the counterpoint to correlation being an advantage the authoritarian person explaining obedience?

  • However, no matter how strong a correlation between two variables might be, it does not follow that one causes the other.
  • Therefore, Adorno could not claim that a harsh parenting style caused the development of an authoritarian personality.