Obedience : dispositional explanations

• Authoritarian personality

  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 int he individuals personality. 
• Authoritarian personality :

  Authoritarian personality includes extreme respect for authority and contempt for ‘inferiors’. 

  Adorno et al concluded that people with an authoritarian personality are 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 
• Authoritarian personality :

  originates in childhood :

  Authoritarian personality forms in childhood through harsh parenting, extremely strict discipline, expectations 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. 
• Authoritarian personality

  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. 
• AO3 support for dispositional factors

  Elms and Milgram

  Procedure :

  • 20 ‘deviant’ (refused to continue at some point of study) 20 ‘obedient‘ (gave shocks to the full voltage level) participants from Milgrams study told to complete MMPI scale and F scale.
  • Participants asked open ended questions, including questions about their relationship with their parents during childhood, and their attitudes towards the experimenter and the learner.
• AO3 support for dispositional factors

  Elms and Milgram

  Findings :

  • • Little difference between obedient and deviant participants on MMPI variables 
  • • Higher levels of authoritarianism among participants classified as obedient compared with those classified as defiant. 
  • • Obedient participants reported being less close to their fathers during childhood, and were more likely to describe them in negative terms, also viewed the authority figure in Milgrams study as admirable and the learner less so. This was not the case with deviant participants. 
• KEY STUDY : Adorno et al (1950) : The authoritarian personality 

  PROCEDURE : 

  • • The study investigated unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups of more than 2000 middle class white Americans 
  • • Examples from the F scale : ‘Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtue for children to learn’. ‘There is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel great love, gratitude and respect for his parents’.
• KEY STUDY : Adorno et al (1950) : The authoritarian personality 

  Findings / conclusions 

  • • 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.
• Limitation AO3

  • • Millions of individuals in Germany displayed obedient and anti - Semitic behaviour - but didnt have the same personality. It seems unlikely that the majority of Germanys population possessed an authoritarian personality. An alternative explanation is more realistic -the social identity theory. Most Germans identified with the anti - Semitic Nazi state and adopted its views. 
• limitation AO3

  F - scale is politically biased. 

  • • Christie and Jahoda suggest that f - scale aims to measure tendency towards extreme right - wing ideology. But right wing and left wing authoritarianism such as Chinese Maoism both insist on complete obedience to political authority. Adorno theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation of obedience to authority because it doesnt explain obedience to left wing authoritarianism , so it is politically biased.
• Strength AO3

  evidence for the authoritarianism / obedience link.(pt1)

  • • Although several studies have found that authoritarian participants are more obedient, there has been a good deal of suspicion about whether these participants really believed they were giving electric shocks. 
• Strength AO3

  research evidence for the authoritarian / obedience link (pt2)

  • • Dambrun and Vatine overcame this problem by using an ‘immersive virtual environment’ where an actor taking the role of the learner was filmed, recorded and displayed on a computer screen. Participants were aware this was fake. Despite this, participants still tended to respond as if the situation was real, and there was a clear and significant correlation between participants RWA scores and the maximum voltage shock administered to the victim.
• Strength AO3

  research evidence for the authoritarian / obedience link (pt3)

  Participants with higher levels of RWA were the ones who obeyed the most, confirming link between authoritarian and obedience