obedience: dispositional factors

• Adorno et al. concluded that people with an authoritarian personality are especially obedient to authority figures. They have exaggerated respect fro authority and submissiveness to it and they express contempt for people of inferior social status. This personality is formed in childhood through harsh parenting. These experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, but they cannot express these feelings directly against their parents because they fear reprisals
• Adorno et al. study on authoritarian personality procedure: The study investigated unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic group of more than 2000 middle-class white Americans. Several scales were developed, including the potential-for-fascism scale (F-scale). Scale was 1-6 where 6 was strongly agrees. Example question were ‘obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues for children to learn’
• Adorno et al. study on authoritarian personality findings: Authoritarians (those who scored high on F-scale) identified with ‘strong’ people and were contemptuous of the ‘weak’. They were conscious of their own and others status, showing excessive respect and deference to those of higher status. Authoritarian people also had a cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups
• One strength of authoritarian personality is evidence that authoritarians are obedient. Elms and Milgram interviewed 20 fully obedient participants from Milgram’s original obedience studies. They scored significantly higher on the F-scale than a comparison group if 20 disobedient participants. This suggests that obedient people may share many of the characteristics of people with an Authoritarian personality
• One limitation is that the F-scale is politically biased. Christie and Jahoda 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
• One limitation of dispositional explanation is that it doesn’t take into account situational factors. For example, uniform, location and proximity