Part 6: Dispositional explanations for obedience - AP

• Authoritarian Personality: A distinct personality pattern characterised by strict adherence to conventional values and a belief in absolute obedience, submission to authority, suppressing own beliefs. E.g. ideology of Fascism. Measured using the F-scale. This requires participants to rate the extent of their own agreement to certain statements using a Likert-style scale.
• Dispositional: Explanation of behaviours such as obedience emphasise they are caused by individual's own personality traits rather than situational influences within environment.
• ...This term was coined by Theodore Adorno. Such individuals have a ‘fixed’ cognitive style, where they do not challenge stereotypes due to their tendency to adopt absolutist/‘black and white’ thinking. This accordance with stereotypes prevents any grey areas emerging from uncertainty.
• Adorno believed in the psychodynamic theory, that a person’s personality traits and attitudes as an adult stemmed from childhood influences such as that of one’s parents. Found that child would displace their anger with their parents onto seemingly ‘inferior’ others, through the process of scapegoating. More likely to target those who seem weak and unable to defend themselves, such as minority groups. This is known as reaction formation.
• (+)Elms and Milgram - Interviewed small sample who were in orginal obedience studies and had fully obeyed. All complete F-scale, and other measures. These 20 scored significantly higher on the overall F-scale than a comparison of 20 disobedient. Both were clearly quite different in terms of authoritarianism. Findings support Adorno's view that people may well show similar characteristics strengthening validity of dispositional explanation of obedience.
• (-)Participants did not have some traits associated with AP - Limitation as when researchers analysed individual subscales of F-scale, found that number of characteristics were unusual for authoritarians. Generally, in Milgram there was no glorification of fathers, no hostility towards mothers, or harsh punishment in childhood. Suggests link between obedience and authoritarianism is complex, thus unlikely to be useful predictor of obedience, questioning validity.
• (-)The Authoritarian Personality may be oversimplistic, according to Christie and Jahoda - The F-scale technically measures the likeness between an individual to Fascism, but left-wing authoritarianism is also present, such as Bolshevism, and has been ignored by the current theory. Since there are more similarities between the two ends of these spectrums than differences, most notably a large emphasis on utmost respect for legitimate authority, this suggests that Fascist-like views can be found across the whole spectrum, which the Authoritarian Personality does not account for...
• ...Moreover, explanation only considers individual's personality, ignoring alternatives such as Milgram's situational explanations Milgram would claim that if the authority figures wearing a unfirm and close in proximity then individuals more likely to obey.
• (-)Education - Middendorp et al (1990) found that less educated people are consistently more authoritarian then well-educated, Milgram found the outcome. Limitation as education may have greater influence on obedience, thus AP explanation may not be entirely valid.
• (-)Low ecological validity- Cannot explain many real-life examples of mass obedience. For example, it is very unlikely that the whole German population during Nazi occupation had an Authoritarian Personality, but rather many shared the same struggles in life and displaced their fear about the future onto a perceived ‘inferior’ group of people, through the process of scapegoating. This means that such a theory is a limited explanation for some examples of obedience.
• (-)Serious methodological issues associated with the F-scale, as suggested by Greenstein (1969) - This scale is particularly susceptible to acquiescence bias, which describes the phenomenon of respondents always responding in the same way using the scales provided, regardless of the content shown in the scales. Therefore, this suggests that the findings produced by the F-scale may be lacking in validity and reliability.