Discuss the Dispositional Explanations of Obedience

• Theodore Adorno and his colleagues wanted to understand the anti-Semitism of the holocaust. Their research led them to draw very different conclusions from Milgram’s. Unlike Milgram who argued that we are all capable of extreme obedience, Adorno argued that high levels of obedient behaviour were dispositional, due to a set of internal traits. He called this personality trait the Authoritarian Personality.
• Adorno et al. believed that people with an Authoritarian personality show an extreme respect and submissiveness to authority. Additionally, such people with this personality type view society as ‘weaker’ than it once was, so believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as being devoted to your country and family. Both of these characteristics make people with an Authoritarian Personality more likely to obey orders from a source of authority.
• People with Authoritarian Personality also display contempt for those of inferior social status, they are particularly hostile towards them. This is fueled by their inflexible outlook on the world, everything is either right or wrong and they are very uncomfortable by uncertainty. Due to this outlook, they believe people who for example belong to a different ethnic group are responsible for the ills of society and have fixed stereotypes about them.
• These groups of people are a convenient target for authoritarians who are likely to obey orders from authority figures even when such orders are destructive like for instance when Germany was ruled by the Nazis. Adorno suggested that people with an authoritarian personality had their obedient personalities shaped in childhood by harsh parenting, this typically features extremely strict discipline, impossibly high standards and severe criticism of perceived failings.
•  Adorno et al. argued that these childhood experiences create resentment and hostility in a child. As the child can’t express these feelings directly against their parents because they fear punishment, their fears are displaced onto others who they perceive to be weaker. This explains the hatred towards people considered to be socially inferior, a central feature of obedience to higher authority
•  Adorno et al. in 1950 studied more than 2000 middle class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups. The researchers developed several measurement scales, one of which was the potential for Fascism scale ( the F-scale). An example of a question that would be in the F-scale was ‘ obedience and authority are the most important virtues for children to learn.’
• People who scored highly on the F-scale identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the weak. They were very conscious of status and showed extreme respect to those of a higher status- these traits are the basis of obedience. Adorno et al. also found that authoritarian people had a certain cognitive style in which they had fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups. Adorno et al. found a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice. 
• One strength is evidence from Milgram supporting the Authoritarian personality. Elms and MIlgram in 1966 interviewed a small sample of people who had participated in the original obedience studies and had been fully obedient. They all completed the F-scale as part of the interview. These 20 obedient participants scored significantly higher than a comparison group of 20 obedient participants. This finding supports Adorno et al.’s view that obedient people may possess similar characteristics to people who have an authoritarian personality.
• However, when the 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. For example, Milgram’s obedient participants generally did not experience unusual levels of punishment in childhood and did not glorify their fathers. This signifies that the link between obedience and authoritarianism is complex. Overall, the obedient participants were unlike authoritarians in so many ways that authoritarianism is unlikely to be a useful predictor of obedience. 
• One limitation is that authoritarianism can’t explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population. For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals displayed obedient and anti-semitic behaviour despite the fact they would’ve differed in their personality in all sorts of ways.  It therefore seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess an Authoritarian Personality.
• An alternative view is that the majority of the German people identified with the anti-semitic Nazi state and scapegoated the jews, a social identity approach. Due to this Adorno’s theory is limited because an alternative explanation is much more realistic.
• Another limitation is that the F-scale only measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right wing ideology. Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda in 1954 argued that the f-scale is a politically based interpretation of Authoritarian Personality. They point out the reality of left-wing authoritarianism in the shape of Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism.
• Both extreme right wing and extreme left wing ideologies emphasise the importance of complete obedience to political authority. This means that Adorno’s theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that accounts for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.