Obedience: Dispositional explanations

• what is the explanation associated with this topic?

  the authoritarian personality
• who is the pain psychologist associated with the authoritarian personality?

  adorno et al.
• a high level of obedience is pathological

  adorno et al. wanted to understand the anti-semitism of the holocaust. they believed that unquestioning obedience is a psychological disorder, and tried to find its causes in the individual's personality.
• personality traits of those with an authoritarian personality

  typically especially obedient to authority. they:

  • have exaggerated respect for authority and submissiveness to it.
  • express contempt for people of inferior social status.
  • have conventional attitudes towards race and gender.
• when does the authoritarian personality form?

  forms in childhood through harsh parenting: extremely strict discipline, expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards and severe criticism. it is also characterised by conditional love- parents' love depends entirely on how their child behaves.
• hostility towards/fear of parents is displaced onto those who are socially inferior

  these experiences create resentment and hostility in the child but they cannot express these feelings directly against their parents because they fear reprisals.

  so the feelings are displaced onto others who are seen as weaker- this is scapegoating. this explains hatred of people seen as socially inferior, a psychodynamic explanation.
• aim of adorno et al.'s study into the authoritarian personality

  the study investigated unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups of more than 2000 middle-class white Americans.
• procedure of adorno et al.'s study into the authoritarian personality

  several scales were developed, including the potential for facism scale (F-scale). examples:

  • 'obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues for children to learn'
  • 'there is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel great love, gratitude and respect for his parents'
• findings of adorno et al.'s study

  authoritarians (who scored high on the F-scale and other measures) 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.
• support for the authoritarian personality: support for the link between authoritarian personality and obedience

  elms and milligram interviewed fully obedient participants- all scored highly on the F-scale. however, this link is just a correlation between measured variables. we cannot conclude from this that authoritarian personality causes obedience. a 'third factor' may be involved. both obedience and authoritarian personality may be caused by a lower level of education (Hyman and sheatsley)
• limitation of the F-scale: 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 (e.g. Chinese maoism) both insist on complete obedience to political authority. Adorno's theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation of obedience to authority because it doesn't explain obedience to left-wing authoritarianism, i.e. it is politically biased.
• limitation: the explanation is based on a flawed methodology


  greenstein suggests the F-scale is 'a comedy of methodological errors', for example items are worded in the same 'direction', so the scale just measures the tendency to agree to everything. also, researchers knew the participants' test scores when they interviewed them. so they knew who had authoritarian personalities. they also knew the study's hypothesis, which makes biased results likely. this suggests that the data collected is meaningless and the concept of authoritarian personality lacks validity.
• limitation: authoritarian explanation is limited

  millions of individuals in germany displayed obedience and anti-semitic behaviour- but didn't have the same personality. it seems unlikely the majority of Germany's population possessed an authoritarian personality. an alternative explanation is more realistic- social identity theory. most germans identified with the anti-semitic nazi state and adopted its views