dispositional explanation of obedience

• Adorno wanted to understand antisemitism in WW2. Unlike Milgram, who suggests we are all capable of extreme obedience in the right situation, Adorno argued that high levels of obedient behaviour were dispositional, due to a set of internal traits, a personality type he called the Authoritarian Personality.
• Adorno suggested people with an authoritarian personality had their obedient personalities shaped early in life by strict authoritarian parenting with harsh physical punishments. Linking these ideas to Freud, Adorno suggested that the anger they felt towards their parent was displaced onto others.
• Authoritarian personality

  • High respect for people with higher social status(leading to obedience)
  • hostile to people they see as having low status
  • fixed stereotypes about groups of people
  • conformists with conventional beliefs and behaviours
  • views on morality are dogmatic, having very clear ideas about right or wrong
• • The identification of a specific personality type – the Authoritarian Personality – provided a possible explanation for why some individuals require very little pressure in order to obey.
  • The California F scale (the ‘F’ stood for ‘Fascist’) was used by Adorno et al. (1950) to measure the different components that made up the Authoritarian Personality.
  • The F scale contained statements such as ‘Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn’ and ‘Rules are there for people to follow, not change’
• Agreeing with such items was indicative of an Authoritarian Personality. Individuals with this type of personality were rigid thinkers who obeyed authority, saw the world as black and white, and enforced strict adherence to social rules and hierarchies. Adorno et al. (1950) also found that people who scored higher on the F scale tended to have been raised by parents who used an authoritarian parenting style (including the use of physical punishment).

  Growing up within a particular social system means that people assume that this system is the expected norm.
• Therefore, if children happen to grow up in a particularly authoritarian family, with a strong emphasis on obedience, then they acquire these same authoritarian attitudes themselves through a process of learning and imitation.
• Questions on the F Scale measured nine factors, including Authoritarian Submission and Power and Toughness:preoccupation with dominance-submission, and identification with power figures
• Robert Altemeyer (1981) refined the concept of the Authoritarian Personality by identifying a cluster of three of the original personality variables that he referred to as right-wing authoritarianism (RWA).
• According to Altemeyer, high-RWA people possess three important personality characteristics that predispose them to obedience:

  1. Conventionalism – an adherence to conventional norms and values
  2. Authoritarian aggression – aggressive feelings toward people who violate these norms
  3. Authoritarian submission – uncritical submission to legitimate authority
• • Altemeyer tested the relationship between RWA and obedience in an experiment where participants were ordered to give themselves increasing levels of shock when they made mistakes on a learning task.
  • There was a significant correlation between RWA scores and the levels of shocks that participants were willing to give themselves.
• One of the major debates surrounding Milgram’s study of obedience was whether participant’s behaviour emerged only under specific situational conditions or whether it was dispositional, i.e. the result of a particular personality pattern.
• Elms & Milgram Study

  • This was a follow-up study using participants who had previously taken part in one of Milgram’s experiments two months before
  • They selected 20 ‘obedient’ participants (those who had continued to the final shock level) and 20 ‘defiant’ participants (those who had refused to continue at some point in the experiment)
• Elms & Milgram Study continued

  • Each participant completed the MMPI scale (which measures a range of personality variables) and the F scale to specifically measure their levels of authoritarianism
  • Participants were also asked a series of open-ended questions, including questions about their relationship with their parents during childhood and their attitude toward the ‘experimenter’ (the authority figure) and the ‘learner’ during their participation in Milgram’s original study
• Elms & Milgram Findings

  • The researchers found very little difference between obedient and defiant participants on MMPI variables
  • However, they did find higher levels of authoritarianism among those participants classified as obedient, compared with those classified as defiant
  • They also found significant differences between obedient and defiant participants that were consistent with the Authoritarian Personality. For example, obedient participants reported being less close to their fathers in childhood, and were more likely to describe them in distinctly more negative terms
• Elms and Milgram findings continued

  • Obedient participants saw the authority figure in Milgram’s study as more admirable, and the learner as much less so but this was not the case among the defiant participants
  • These findings suggest to Elms and Milgram that the obedient group was higher on the trait of ‘authoritarianism’