dispositional explanation for obedience

• Who suggested the authoritarian personality?


  Adorno wanted to understand antisemitism in the Holocaust. He argued that high levels of obedient behaviour were dispositional, due to a set of internal traits, a personality type he called the Authoritarian personality.
• Dispositional factors


  Individual rather than situational aspects that influence one's behaviour.
• The Authoritarian personality


  Associated with higher levels of obedience.

  Adorno suggested people with an authoritarian personality had their obedient personalities shaped early in life by strict authoritarian parenting with harsh physical punishments.
• Traits in authoritarian personality

  • High respect for people with higher social status (leading to obedience).
  • Hostile to people they see as having low status.
  • Fixed stereotypes about groups of people.
  • Conformists with conventional beliefs and behaviours.
  • Views on morality are dogmatic, having very clear ideas about right or wrong.
• F-Scale


  Adorno (1950s) studied the authoritarian personality with a questionnaire called the F-scale (fascism scale). People who scored highly had fixed stereotypes, identified with 'strong' people, disliked 'weak' people and were inflexible with ideas of right and wrong.
• Questions on the F-scale

  Measured nine factors, including:

  Authoritarian submission - an uncritical attitude towards authorities.

  Power and 'toughness' - Preoccupation with dominance-submission, and identification with power figures.
• Adorno's findings

  High F-scale scores linked with identification with the 'strong' and contempt for the 'weak'.Adorno et al found that authoritarian people had a cognitive style where there was no 'fuzziness' between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups.There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.
• + Research support


  E - Milgram and Ems (1966) found that 20 obedient Ps (from their study) scored highly on the F-scale suggesting they have authoritarian personalities.

  E - This suggests that the F-scale is a reliable way to support that an authoritarian personality causes obedience.

  L - However, it is simply a correlational link and is impossible to draw the conclusion that authoritarian personality causes obedience.
• / Limited explanation


  E - For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals all displayed obedient, racist and anti-semitic behaviour. This was despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways.

  E - This suggests that an explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality is hard to generalise to the wider population.

  L - Therefore, the Authoritarian personality explanation lacks population validity.
• / Political bias


  E - F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology. Christie and Jahoda argued that this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality. Left-wing authoritarianism isn't taken into account.

  E - It is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that can account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.

  L - Therefore, the authoritarian personality explanation is not generalisable to all political backgrounds and lacks population validity.
• / Methodological problems


  E - F-scale involves leading statements/questions. Every item of the F-scale is worded in the same 'direction'. This means it is possible to get a high score for authoritarianism just by ticking the same line of boxes.

  E - This suggests that people who agree with the items on the F-scale are not necessarily authoritarian and the scale is just measuring the tendency to agree to everything.

  L - Therefore, the F-scale might not be a valid way of measuring authoritarian personality.