dispositional explanation for obedience - Authoritarian Personality Flashcards
disposition
A person’s inherent qualities of mind and character.
view on obedience
The dispositional explanation takes a different view, rather than the environment or circumstances being predictors or cues for obedience it states that certain personality traits are associated with higher levels of obedience.
This is what led Milgram to his original hypothesis that ‘Germans are different”. He thought that German people have personality traits that made them more obedient than those of other nationalities.
research
A researcher investigated the causes of the obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle-class, white Americans. He tried to measure their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups. He developed several scales to measure this, one of which was known as fascism (F scale); this is still used to measure the authoritarian personality.
The F scale questionnaire has 30 questions that assess nine personality dimensions. For example, “obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn” and “there is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel a great love, gratitude and respect for his parents”.
results
Results found that those who were measured as having an authoritarian personality were generally thought of as ‘strong’ people, they held the ‘weak’ in contempt, were conscious of their own and other’s status, showing excessive respect and obedience to those of a higher status.
The researcher said that this personality type was shaped by a person’s upbringing. He suggested that certain ways of parenting created adults who were unable to express their emotions. These methods were very rigid and hierarchical.
evaluation - research on Nazi war criminals
A researcher found that 16 Nazi war criminals scored highly on the F scale personality dimensions, but crucially, not on all nine. However it had been predicted that they would score highly on all nine. This therefore provides little support.
evaluation - Milgram
A researcher used fully obedient participants from Milgram’s research and gave them the F scale questionnaire. He found a strong positive correlation between the Authoritarian personality and increased levels of obedience (those who went to 450V). However, this is just a correlation and cannot establish cause and effect.
evaluation - thought processes
A researcher found that the authoritarian personality is motivated by thought processes which underpin a desire to reduce fears and anxieties that social change brings. Therefore strict obedience helps to prevent disruptive social change.
evaluation - group obedience
The dispositional explanation cannot explain why entire societies or groups of people are obedient.
