dispositional explanations: obedience

• Adorno believed that obedience was the result of the individual rather than the situation. This is a dispositional explanation
• The authoritarian personality is a type of personality that is argued to make people susceptible to obeying authority
• It has been suggested authoritarian personality traits develop from strict parenting
• The authoritarian traits include respect for higher authority, obedient to those deemed a higher status and hostile to those deemed a lower status
• Adorno had 2000 middle class white Americans measured their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups
• Adorno developed the F-scale which is used to measure authoritarian personality
• People who scored high on F-scale identified with ‘strong people’. They were very conscious of their own and other’s status
• Milgram and Elms (1966) conducted interviews with a small sample of fully obedient participants from their obedience study, who also scored highly on the F-scale, suggesting a link between obedience and authoritarian personality
•  It is hard to use the authoritarian personality to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population
• The F scale has come in for severe criticism because every one of its items is worded in the same ‘direction’. This means it is possible to get a high score just by ticking the same line of boxes down one side of the page
• people who agree with the items may not be authoritarian but ‘acquiescers’ and the F-scale is just measuring the tendency to agree to everything