Dispositional explanation

• Dispositional explanation

  Any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of an individual’s personality
• Authoritarian personality

  = type of personality that Adorno argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in authority

  • individuals are thought to be submissive to those of higher status and dismissive to inferiors
• Authoritarian personality and obedience

  = showed extreme respect for authority

  • view society as weaker than it once was
  • need strong powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of country and family
  • also show contempt for those of inferior social status
  • inflexible outlooks on the world- everything is either right or wrong, uncomfortable with uncertainty
  • therefore others are responsible for ills of society, they are a convenient target
• Origins of authoritarian personality

  = Adorno believes it forms in childhood, mostly as a result of harsh parenting:

  • strict discipline, expectation of absolute loyalty, high standards and severe criticism of failings
  • parents give conditional love
  • these childhood experiences create resentment and hostility in a child- but they can’t express these feelings due to fear of punishment.
  • so fears are displaced onto others who they perceive to be weaker, explains hated towards others who are considered to be socially inferior = psychodynamic explanation
• Adorno research

  = studies middle class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups

  • f-scale
  • findings: people with authoritarian leanings identified with strong people and were generally contemptuous of the weak, very conscious of status, showed extreme respect to those with a higher status
  • authoritarian people had a certain cognitive style in which there was no fuzziness between categories of people, had fixed stereotypes about other groups
  • found a strong correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice
• Evaluation- research support

  Strength= evidence from Milgram supporting authoritarian personality

  • interviewed a small sample who had participated in original study and had been fully obedient
  • all completed f-scale= all scored higher on scale than those who disobeyed
  • supports Adorno view that obedient people may well show similar characteristics to people who have an Authoritarian personality
• Evaluation- counterpoint

  = when researchers analysed the individual subscales of the F-scale, they found that the obedient participants had a number of characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians.

  • didn‘t glorify their fathers, didn’t experience unusual levels of punishment in childhood.
  • this means the link between obedience and authoritarianism is complex, unlikely predictor of obedience
• Evaluation- limited explanation

  = can’t explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a countrys population

  • eg: In Germany, millions displayed obedient, racist and antisemitism. Despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities
  • so extremely unlikely they could all possess an Authoritarian personality
  • an alternative explanation= majority of population identified with antisemitic Nazi state and scapegoated the Jewish population = social identity theory
• Evaluation- political bias

  = F-scale only measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right wing ideology

  • Christie and Jahoda argued the F-scale is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality
  • right wing and left wing ideologies have a lot in common eg: both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to political authority
  • so Adornos theory isn’t a comprehensive dispositional explanation that accounts for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum