Obedience : dispositional explanations

• The authoritarian personality

  Adorno believed that unquestioning obedience is a psychological disorder, and tried to find its causes in the individual's personality. Adorno concluded that people with an authoritarian personality are especially obedient to authority. They have exaggerated respect for authority and are submissive to it and express contempt for people of an inferior social status. Authoritarians tend to follow orders and view 'other' groups as responsible fr society's ills.
• The authoritarian personality history

  Authoritarian personality forms in childhood through harsh parenting like 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 the child behaves).

  These experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, but they cannot express these feelings directly against their parents as they fear reprisals. So the feelings are displaced onto others who are weaker (scapegoating). This is a psychodynamic explanation.
• Adorno's authoritarian personality study procedure

  This study studied unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups of more than 2000 middle class white Americans. Several scales were developed, including the potential-for-fascism scale (f-scale). Two examples from the F-scale is obedience and respect for authority are most important virtues for children to learn and there is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel great love, gratitude and respect for his parents.
• Adorno's authoritarian personality study 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. Authoritarian people also have a cognitive style where there was no 'fuzziness' between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups.
• Evaluation

  One strength is evidence that authoritarians are obedient. Milgram interviewed 20 fully obedient participants from his original study. They scored high on the F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient participants. This suggests that obedient people may share many of the characteristics of people with an authoritarian personality.
• Evaluation

  One limitation is authoritarianism can't explain a whole country's behaviour. Millions of individuals in Germany displayed obedient and anti-semitic behaviour but they can't all have the same personality. It seems unlikely the majority of Germany's population had an authoritarian personality. A more likely explanation is that Germans identified with the Nazi state. Therefore social identity theory may be a better explanation.
• Evaluation

  One limitation is there is flawed evidence. The F-scale has been used in many research studies that have led to an explanation of obedience based on the authoritarian personality. However, the F-scale is flawed as people who tend to agree to the statements are scored as authoritarian(response bias). Therefore, explanations of obedience based on research with the F-scale may not be valid.