dispositional explanations

• authoritarian personality 

  extreme respect for authority, looks down on lower social statuses, fixed stereotypical views about other groups

  originated from Freuds idea that adult personalities are determined by childhood experiences 
• Adorno created the f-scale, it measured authoritarian personality

  he studied 2000 middle class white Americans, and their unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups 

  he found that people with high authoritarian leanings (those who scored high on f-scale) identified with strong people and were generally contemptuous of the weak, they were conscious of status and showed extreme respect for those of higher status
• Adorno found a positive correlation between strict upbringing and authoritarian personality traits

  harsh and punitive upbringing, little love, much punishment caused 2 things

  fear of parents which leads to respect of authority

  hatred of parents which leads to hatred and angeR displaced onto others 
• A limitation is that authoritarianism can’t explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a countries population

  Improve or Germany, millions of individuals displayed, obedient behaviour despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities, it seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess an authoritarian personality

  An alternative view is that the majority of the German people identified with the anti-semitic Nazi state, a social identity theory approach

  adornos theory is a limited explanations
• A limitation is the political bias

  The F scale only measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology

  it doesn’t account for obedience across the whole political spectrum. Both extreme right-wing and left-wing and ideologies have a lot in common. They both emphasise the importance of a complete obedience to political authority.
• One strength is research support

  Milgram and elms interviewed a sample of people who participated in original obedience study and had been fully obedient

  the all completed the f scale, they scored significantly higher in comparison to a disobedient group

  However, when researchers analysed indicuidual subscarels of f-scale, they found participants had unusual characteristics for authoritarian personality, like they didn’t glorify fathers or experience significant punishment

  So authoritarian personality is unlikely to be useful in predicting obedience