Dispositional Explanation for Obedience Flashcards
Dispositional Explanation
Any explanation for behavior that highlights the importance of the individual’s personality.
What did Adorno aim to understand?
The anti-Semitism behind the Holocaust.
What did Adorno conclude that obedience was?
A psychological disorder, as it could be located in the personality of the individual.
Fascism
When a lust for power or money is combined with an intense intolerance towards those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions, or nations as to be ruthless in using deceit and violence to attain an ends.
Adorno et al. (1950) - Aim
To understand what leads people to develop an authoritarian personality.
Adorno et al. (1950) - Procedure
Studied over 2000 white, middle-class, American families. Used several rating scales, including the F-scale, and interviews to find unconscious attitudes towards ethnic and religious minorities, political views, and moral standards.
Adorno et al. (1950) - Findings
People with authoritarian traits identified with ‘strong’ people, and were contemptuous of the ‘weak’, were very conscious of status, showed excessive respect and servility to those of a higher status, had a cognitive style with distinctive stereotypes of other groups.
Adorno et al. (1950) - Conclusion
There was a strong positive correlation between prejudice and authoritarianism.
Authoritarian Personality
A type of personality that Adorno argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in authority. Such individuals are also thought to be submissive to those of a higher status and dismissive of inferiors.
Characteristics of the Authoritarian Personality
Highly obedient, dismissive if anyone below them, very conservative views of race, sex, and gender, have a distinctive cognitive style, think society is ‘going to the dogs’, believe we need strong, powerful leaders to promote traditional values such as love of country, religion, and family.
What is the origin of the Authoritarian Personality?
Adorno concluded that it is formed in childhood, as a result of harsh parenting.
Features of a harsh parenting style.
Strict discipline, expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards, severe criticisms of perceived failings, conditional love.
Scapegoating
When a child cannot express their feelings to their parents (for fear of punishment) and instead displace their fears onto weaker individuals.
What two results can come of a harsh parenting style?
Fear of parents, or hatred of parents.
What does a fear of parents lead to?
Being excessively respectful of authority figures.
What does a hatred of parents lead to?
Hate and anger being displaced onto others.
Strengths of the Dispositional Explanation
- Supporting evidence from Elms and Milgram (1966) - asked 20 obedient and 20 disobedient participants to complete personality questionnaires, including the F-scale. The obedient participants scored higher on the F-scale, interviews also found that they were not very close with their fathers during childhood, and they seemed to admire the experimenter in Milgram’s experiment.
- Could be applied to real-life situations (such as the Holocaust) to attempt to explain certain behaviours.
Limitations of the Dispositional Explanation
- Contradictory evidence from Middendorp and Meleon (1990) - found that less educated individuals are more likely to display authoritarian characteristics. This may show that levels of education is a more influential variable in obedience.
- The social-psychological explanation argues that high rates of obedience are a result of authority figures over others. Blass and Schmitt (2001) provides evidence for this opposing theory.
- Limited usefulness, as the explanation is related to individual personality, not large populations.
- Limited usefulness as correlation is not causation - Adorno’s research gathered correlational findings. Therefore, we cannot establish cause and effect, or say that there were no other factors involved.
- Adorno’s F-scale only measured from an extremely right-wing point-of-view.
- Christie and Jahoda (1954) argued that this is a politically biased interpretation of the authoritarian personality.