Obedience: dispositional explanation

• ao1: adorno ET al (1950) the authoritarian personality - PROCEDURE

  • The study investigated unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups of more than 2000 middle-class white Americans.
  • Several scales were developed, including the potential-for-fascism scale (F-scale). Examples from the F-scale (rated on scale 1 to 6 where 6 = agree strongly):
  • 'Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues for children to learn.'
  • 'There is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel great love, gratitude and respect for his parents.'
• ao1: Adorno et al (1950) the authoritarian personalit- FINDINGS

  • Authoritarians (who scored high on the F-scale and other measures) identified with 'strong' people and were contemptuous of the 'weak'.
  • They were conscious of their own and others' status, showing excessive respect and deference to those of higher status.
  • Authoritarian people also had a cognitive style where there was no 'fuzziness' between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes (prejudices) about other groups.
• ao1: AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

  HIGH OBEDIENCE IS PATHOLOGICAL:

  • Adorno et al. (1950) believed that unquestioning obedience is a psychological disorder, and tried to find its causes in the individual's personality
• ao1: AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

  EXTREME RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY AND CONTEMPT FOR ‘INFERIORS’:

  • Adorno et al. concluded that people with an Authoritarian Personality are especially obedient to authority. They:
  • Have exaggerated respect for authority and submissiveness to it.
  • Express contempt for people of inferior social status Authoritarians tend to follow orders and view 'other' groups as responsible for society's ills
• ao1: the authoritarian personality

  Originates in childhood (e.g. overly strict parenting):

  • Authoritarian Personality forms in childhood through harsh parenting - extremely strict discipline, expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards, and severe criticism.
  • It is also characterised by conditional love - parents' love depends entirely on how their child behaves
• ao1: authoritarian personality

  Hostility is displaced onto social inferiors:

  • These experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, but they cannot express these feelings directly against their parents because they fear reprisals.
  • So the feelings are displaced onto others who are weaker - this is scapegoating. This is a psychodynamic explanation.
• ao3: One strength is evidence that authoritarians are obedient.

  • Elms and Milgram (1966) interviewed 20 fully obedient participants from Milgram's original abedience studies.
  • They scored significantly higher on the F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient participants.
  • This suggests that abedient people may share many of the characteristics of people with an Authoritarian Personality.
• ao3: COUNTERPOINT TO EVIDENCE THAT AUTHORITARIANS ARE OBEDIENT

  • However, subscales of the F-scale showed that obedient participants had characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians. For example they did not experience high levels of punishment in childhood.
  • This suggests a complex link and means that authoritarianism is not a useful predictor of obedience.
• ao3: One limitation is authoritarianism can't explain a whole country's behaviour.

  • Millions of individuals in Germany displayed obedient and anti- Semitic behaviour - but can't all have had the same personality.
  • It seems unlikely the majority of Germany's population had an Authoritarian Personality. A more likely explanation is that Germans identified with the Nazi state.
  • Therefore social identity theory (the view that our behaviour and attitudes are strongly influenced by those of the groups we identify with) may be a better explanation.
• ao3: One limitation is that the F-scale is politically biased.

  • Christie and Jahoda (1954) suggest the F-scale aims to measure tendency towards extreme right-wing ideology
  • But right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism (e.g. Chinese Maoism) both insist on complete obedience to political authority
  • Therefore Adorno's theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation as it doesn't explain obedience to left-wing authoritarianism, i.e. it is politically biased