dispositional explanations

• Dispositional explanation = internal explanation i.e personality factors/individual reasons why someone obeys. - authoritarian personality
• authoritarian personality means a person is more susceptible to obeying authority figures and show extreme respect for them. - measured using the F-scale
• adornos research into authoritarian personality: 2000 middle class whit Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards ethnic groups - measured using F-scale. found those who scored high on the F-scale were extremely conscious of status and had extreme respect to those with high status
• individuals tend to develop an an Authoritarian personality due to experiencing overly strict/critical parenting and conditional love in childhood. Adorno argues that these childhood experiences cause resentment which the child cannot directly express to their parents, so their fears are displaced onto those who they view as weaker, which explains the hatred to socially inferior groups
• research support for authoritarian personality- Elms & Milgram interviewed a small sample of people that participated in the original shock study who were fully obedient. these participants scored higher on the F-scale than a sample of disobedient participants - showing that obedient people may show features of authoritarianism. HOWEVER, they also found that a lot of obedient participants had qualities that were unusual for Authoritarians - may not be a valid explanation
• one limitation with the authoritarian personality is that it can't explain all cases of obedience - for example, Nazi Germany, many germans obeyed the nazis in WW2 but it is extremely unlikely that they all had an authoritarian personality/experienced strict parenting. suggests obedience may be better explained in different ways - perhaps situationally - Germans obeyed out of fear of what nazis would do or because they were in the agent state