Dispositional explanation

• AO1 - psychological disorder

  Adorno et al believed that high levels of obedience is a psychological disorder and believed the cause of this is due to the individuals personality.
• AO1 - exaggerated respect

  • Adorno et al argued that people with Authoritarian personality (AP) have exaggerated respect for authority and submissiveness to it.
  • They view society as ‘weaker’ than it once was, so believe we need strong, powerful leaders to enforce traditional values.
• AO1 - forms in childhood

  • AP forms in childhood through harsh parenting – extremely strict discipline, expectations of complete loyalty, impossibly high standards, and severe criticisms.
  • Also if parents give conditional love – love and affection depends on how their child behaves.
• AO1 - resentment and hostility

  • These childhood experiences create resentment and hostility in a child, but they can’t express these feelings directly against their parents as they fear punishment.
  • So their feelings are displaced onto others who are weaker - this is scapegoating.
  • This is a psychodynamic explanation.
• AO1 - procedure

  • Adorno et al studied more than 2000 middle class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups.
  • Several scales were developed, e.g. the F-scale.
• AO1 - findings

  • Adorno et al found that authoritarians (scored high on the F-scale), identified with ‘strong’ people and were disrespectful of the ‘weak’.
  • They were conscious of their own and others’ status, showing excessive respect to those of higher status.
  • Authoritarians also had a cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people, and had fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups.
• AO3 - ✔️evidence that authoritarians are obedient


  • Elms and Milgram interviewed 20 fully obedient participants from Milgram‘s original study.
  • They scored significantly higher on the F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient participants.
  • Suggest that obedient people may share many other characteristics with AP people.
• AO3 - counterpoint; evidence that authoritarians are obedient

  • Subscales of the F-scale showed that obedient participants had characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians.
  • E.g. they didn’t experience high levels of punishment childhood.
  • Means that the link between obedience and authoritarianism is complex.
  • The obedient participants were unlike authoritariasn in so many ways that authoritarianism is unlikely to be a useful predictor of obedience.
• AO3 - ✖️authoritarianism can’t explain a whole country’s behaviour


  • In pre-war Germany, millions of individuals displayed obedient behaviour.
  • This was despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways.
  • It seems unlikely the majority of Germany’s population had an AP.
  • A more likely explanation is that Germans identified with the Nazi state.
  • Therefore, social identity theory may be a better explanation.
• AO3 - ✖️the F-scale is politically biased


  • Researchers suggest the F-scale aims to measure tendency towards extreme right-wing ideology.
  • But right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism 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.