Obedience: Dispositional Explanation

• Dispositional explanation


  Any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individual's personality. Such explanations are often contrasted with situational explanations
• Authoritarian Personality (AP)


  A type of personality that Adorno argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in authority. Such individuals are also thought to be submissive to those of higher status and dismissive of inferiors
• Adorno et al.'s research (procedure)

  • studied 2000 middle-class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups.
  • developed several measurement scales including the potential-for-fascism scale (F-scale)
• Adorno et al.'s research (findings)

  • People with authoritarian leanings identified with 'strong' people and were generally contemptuous of the 'weak'
  • The 'strong' were conscious of status and showed extreme respect
  • found that authoritarian people had a certain cognitive style in which there was no 'fuzziness' between categories of people.
  • Found a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice
• Evaluation of the authoritarian personality (supporting evidence)

  Strength

  • Evidence from Milgram supported the authoritarian personality
  • Milgram interviewed a small sample from the original study who were fully obedient. All completed the F-scale as part of the interview (obedient scored higher ong F-scale then disobedient)
• Evaluation of the authoritarian personality (limited explanation)

  Limitation

  • The authoritarianism cannot explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country's population
  • for example pre-war germany millions of people displayed obedient and anti-semitic behaviour. An alternative view is that the majority of the German people identified with the anti_semitic Nazi state and scapegoated the 'outgroup', a social identity theory approach
  • Adorno's theory is limited because an alternative explanation is much more realistic
• Evaluation of the authoritarian personality (Political bias)

  Limitation

  • The F-scale only measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology
  • Christie and Jahoda argue that the F-scale is a politically biased interpretation of Authoritarian personality
  • This means that Adorno's theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that accounts for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum