Obedience: dispositional explanation

• Dispositional explanation

  Explanations of behaviours such as obedience emphasise them being caused by an individual's own personal characteristics rather than situational influences within the environment
• Authoritarian Personality

  A person who holds rigid beliefs, is intolerant of ambiguity, submissive to authority and hostile to those of lower status or members of an out-group
• F Scale

  Also known as the 'California F scale' or the 'Fascism scale, the F scale was developed in California in 1947 by Ardono as a measure of authoritarian traits or tendencies
• Right Wing Authoritarianism

  A cluster of personality variables (conventionalism, authority submission and authoritarian aggression) that are associated with a 'right-wing' attitude to life
• Characteristics of the authoritarian personality

  • Extreme respect for authority and submissiveness to it
  • Contempt for people seen as having inferior social status
  • Highly conventional attitudes to sex, race and gender
  • Inflexibility- there are no grey areas
• Examples of statements from the F-scale

  • Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn
  • Rules are there for people to follow, not change
• Origins of the authoritarian personality

  Resulted from harsh parenting in childhood featuring strict discipline, an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards and severe criticism of perceived failings
• Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)

  A cluster of three personality variables: conventionalism, authoritarian aggression, and authoritarian submission
• Elms and Milgram found that obedient participants in Milgram's experiment scored higher on the F scale compared to disobedient participants
• Elms and Milgram also found that obedient participants were less close to their fathers during childhood and admired the experimenter, which was the opposite for disobedient participants
• Ardono et al (Aim)

  Investigate if there is a relationship between a person’s personality type and prejudice beliefs.
• Procedure

  Adorno et al. studied 2000+ middle-class, white Americans to understand obedient personality traits and racial attitudes. They created the F-scale to measure authoritarian traits.
• Findings

  The study showed that authoritarian individuals admired 'strong' people, looked down on the 'weak', were status-conscious, and had clear stereotypes about different groups, linking authoritarianism with prejudice.
• Research support

  Milgram and Elms found that obedient participants scored higher on the F-scale than disobedient ones, supporting the link between obedience and traits of the Authoritarian Personality, as proposed by Adorno et al.
• Counterpoint

  Obedient participants differed from authoritarians in many ways, suggesting that authoritarianism is not a reliable predictor of obedience.
• Limited explanation

  Authoritarianism can't explain widespread obedience, like in pre-war Germany where millions displayed anti-Semitic behavior. Social identity theory suggests people identified with the Nazi state, challenging Adorno's theory.
• Flawed evidence

  The F-scale is criticised by Greenstein for methodological errors, leading to inaccurate assessments due to the possibility of obtaining high scores by selecting "agree" answers.