dispositional explanation for obedience Flashcards
Define the dispositional explanation.
The perception of behaviour as caused by the internal characteristics of an individual.
Define the authoritarian personality.
A personality type characterised by a belief in absolute obedience, submission to authority and domination of minorities. This is a psychodynamic explanation of obedience.
Describe the authoritarian personality.
Adorno et al argued that people with an AP show an extreme respect for and submissiveness to authority. They are individuals who follow orders without question, whatever the consequences. They admire and respect powerful authority figures, they believe everything is right or wrong and dislike uncertainty. They show contempt towards those they believe are less important due to a lower social status, and are not accepting of people from other backgrounds (e.g. ethnic groups).
Outline the origin of the authoritarian personality.
People with very strict upbringings and critical and harsh parents were more likely to develop an AP.
Adorno believed that this was due to the fact that the individual couldn’t express hostility toward their strict and critical parents.
As a consequence, the person would project their hostility toward targets that couldn’t harm them.
Outline the procedure of Adorno et al (1950)’s research (authoritarian personality).
Studied more than 2000 American men and their unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic group. The researchers developed the F-scale. This scale was used to measure the authoritarian personality. An example of an item from the F-scale is ‘Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues for a child to learn’.
Outline the findings of Adorno et al (1950)’s research (authoritarian personality).
People with authoritarian learnings (scored high on the F-scale) identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous for the ‘weak’. They were conscious of their own and others’ status, and showed extreme respect to those of higher status - these traits are the basis of obedience. Also found these people had fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other people. Found a strong, positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.
Evaluate the research of Adorno et al (1950).
The questionnaire is very easily manipulated and is subject to social desirability bias. It is likely that people will second guess the questions and change their answers from being entirely truthful to avoid being classed as authoritarian.
This limits the validity of the findings and limits the support the research can provide the theory.
Discuss prejudice as evaluation for AP.
The AP can explain individual prejudice. Adorno found a strong, positive correlation between ptps scores on the F-scale and their scores on other measures intended to measure antisemitism and ethnocentrism.
However, authoritarianism cannot explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population. For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of people showed ant-semitic behaviour despite likely differing personalities in many different ways. They were very unlikely to all possess an authoritarian personality. An alternate view is that the majority of the German people identified with the antisemitic Nazi state, a social identity approach.
Therefore, Adornos theory is limited because alternative explanations are more realistic and applicable to real-life.
Discuss research evidence as evaluation for AP.
Elms and Milgram (1966) interviewed a small sample of people who had participated in the original obedience studies and been fully obedient. They all completed the F-scale as part of the interview. These 20 obedient ptps scored significantly higher on the F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient ptps. The two groups were clearly very different in terms of authoritarianism. Supports Adorno et al’s view that obedient people may show similar characteristics to people with an AP.
However, when researchers analysed the individual subscales of the F-scale, they found obedient ptps had a lot of characteristics that were unusual of authoritarians. For example, obedient ptps did not glorify their fathers or show hostile attitudes towards their mothers, unlike authoritarians.
This suggests that the link between obedience and authoritarianism is more complex than the original theory suggests. Suggests authoritarianism is unlikely to be a good predictor of obedience.
