Dispositional explanations for obedience

• Dispositional explanation


  Focuses on the individual's own personal characteristics or traits rather than aspects of the situation
• Authoritarian personality


  • A personality type especially susceptible to obeying people in authority
  • Hostile to people of inferior status but obedient to people of higher status
  • Rigid in their beliefs and opinions
  • belief we need strong leaders to enforce traditional values
• Adorno (1950) aim - to test if certain personality types make people more obedient.
• Adorno (1950) procedure

  ·       2000 middle-class Americans were first tested using the Facism scale

  ·       Respondents were asked their strength of agreement or disagreement with statements so that researchers could determine their attituds towards religious and ethnic minorities, their views on politics and economics, and their moral values.

  ·       The highest scoring participants were then interviewed in more depth to investigate factors that give rise to the authoritarian personality.
• Findings:

  ·       People with authoritarian personality types had no fuzziness between categories of people, with fixed, stereotypical views about other groups of people.

  ·       Highest scoring on the facism scale identified with strong peole and disliked the weak. They were very conscious of their own and others’ status, showing excessive respect to those of higher status.

  ·       Strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.
• Conclusion:

  People with an authoritarian personality have a tendency to be especially obedient to authority as they believe we need strong leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of country, religion and family.
• STRENGTHS OF RESEARCH INTO THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY:

  ·       Supporting evidence for the authoritarian personality from Elms & Milgram (1966) finding 20 obedient participants were questioned using the fascism scale, the obedient participants scored higher on authoritarianism and also reported viewing the experimenter as more admirable and the learner less so. This supports the findings of Adorno that the authoritarian personality makes us more likely to obey.
• WEAKNESSES OF RESEARCH INTO THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY:

  ·       Cannot account for situational factors that have been shown to influence obedience. Many studies, for example, Milgram, have shown that by altering the situation, different levels of obedience occur. This is a problem as it suggests social situations can influence obedience, regardless of personality types.
• a weakness of research into the authoritarian personality is Research cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between authoritarian personality type and obedience meaning we cannot say this personality type causes obedience. This is a problem as these results may be misleading.