Dispositional Explanation AO3

• -It can’t explain obedient behaviour in the majority of the country’s population. In Pre-War Germany, millions of individuals displayed obedient, racist and anti-semitic behaviour. It seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess an AP. An alternative view is that the majority of German people identified with an anti-semitic Nazi-state, and scapegoated the out group of Jews, a social identity theory approach. Therefore Adorno’s theory is limited; an alternate explanation is much more realistic.
• -The F-scale only measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right wing ideology. Christie and Jahoda argued the f-scale is a politically based interpretation of the AP. Extreme left wing and right wing ideologies both emphasise the complete importance of complete obedience to political authority.
• +Evidence from Milgram supports the AP. Elms and Milgram interviewed a small sample of people who had participated in the original obedience studies and were fully obedient. They all completed the F-scale and these participants scored significantly higher on the overall F-scale in companson to a group of 20 disobedient participants. These findings support Adorno's view that obedient people may show similar characteristics to people who have an AP.
• -When the researchers analysed the individual sub-scales on the F-scale, they found that the obedient participants had a number of characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians. Milgram's obedient participants generally didn’t glorify their fathers, didn't experience unusual levels of punishment in childhood and didn't have particularly hostile attitudes towards their mothers. This means that the link between obedience and authoritarianism is complex; the obedient participants were unlike authoritarians so much do that its unlikely to be a useful predictor of

  obedience.