dispositional explanations of obedience

• Dispositional explanations are an explanation of behaviour highlighting the importance of personality (disposition)
• Adorno's research -

  Procedure:

  • Studied over 2000 middle-class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups.
  • Developed a fascism scale (F-scale) to measure the relationships between a persons personality type and prejudice beliefs.

  Findings:

  • Those who scored highly on the F-scale identified with the ‘strong’ and were contemptuous of the ‘weak’.
  • They are very conscious of theirs and other social status and were especially obedient to authority.
  • Positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice
• Adorno argued an authoritarian personality was especially susceptible to obeying authority and are dismissive of ‘inferiors’.
• Origins of an authoritarian personality

  • Harsh parenting with strict discipline, an expectation of loyalty and high standards.
  • Adorno argued the child resents the parents and displaces these feelings onto those they perceive as weaker (scapegoating).
• weakness -

  In pre-war Germany, millions of people displayed obedient, racist and anti-Semitic behaviour, despite the fact that they must have differed in personality types.

  Alternative explanations are more likely to explain obedience in this case, such as social identity, limiting the dispositional explanation.
• weakness -

  Whilst Adorno found many significant correlations between authoritarianism and obedience, however this does not show that one causes the other.

  Adorno can not state that harsh parenting causes and authoritarian personality, purely that there is a relationship
• strength -

  Milgram and Elms (1966) conducted interviews with a sample of fully obedient pps from Milgrams study and found they all sored highly on the F-scale

  There is evidence that there is a link between personality and obedience levels, however this is merely a correlation.