Dispositional explanations for obedience

• A high level of obedience is pathological.


  Adorno wanted to understand the antisemitism of the Holocaust. They believed that unquestioning obedience is a psychological disorder, and tried to find its causes in the individual's personality.
• Authoritarian personality includes extreme respect for authority and contempt for 'inferiors'. 


  Adorno 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 (e.g. overly strict parenting).


  Authoritarian personality forms in childhood through harsh parenting: extremely strict discipline, expectation 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.
• 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 - scapegoating. This explains hatred of people seen as socially inferior, a psychodynamic explanation.
• Adorno's F-scale - procedure

  The study investigated unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups of more than 2000 middle-class white Americans.

  Several scales were developed, including the potential for fascism scale (F-scale). Examples from the F-scale:

  • Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues for children to learn.
  • There is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel great love, gratitude, and respect for his parents.
• Adorno's F-scale - findings

  Authoritarians 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.
• Adorno's F-scale - conclusions.

  Authoritarian people also had a cognitive style where there was no 'fuzziness' between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups.
• There is support for the link between authoritarian personality and obedience.


  Elms and Milgram interviewed fully obedient participants - all scored highly on the F-scale. However, this link is just correlational between measured variables. We cannot conclude from this that authoritarian personality causes obedience. A 'third factor' may be involved. Both obedience and authoritarian personality may be caused by a lower level of education (Hyman).
• The authoritarian personality explanation is limited.


  Millions of individuals in Germany displayed obedient and antisemitic behaviour - but didn't have the same personality. It seems unlikely the majority of Germany's population possessed an authoritarian personality. An alternative explanation is more realistic - the social identity theory. Most Germans identified with the Nazi state and adopted its views.
• Another limitation of Adorno's F-scale is that it is politically biased.


  Jahoda suggests the F-scale aims to measure tendency towards extreme right-wing ideology. But right and left-wing authoritarianism both insist on complete obedience to political authority. Adorno's theory is not a comprehensive explanation of obedience to authority because it doesn't explain obedience to left-wing authoritarianism, i.e. it is politically biased.