Dispositional Explanations

Question 1

Dispositional explanation

Answer 1

Any explanation of behaviour that highlighted the importance of the individuals personality.

Question 2

Authoritarian personality

Answer 2

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 higher status and dismissive of inferiors.

Question 3

Explain Adorno et al procedure

Answer 3

Adorno et al. Investigated the causes of the obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle class white Americand and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups.

Question 4

…they developer several scales to investigate this, including the potential for X scale which is still used to measure authoritarian personality. What is the word X in this context?

Answer 4

Fascism (or F)

Question 5

Findings of Adorno et al’s study

Answer 5

People with authoritarian learnings identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’. They were very conscious of their own and others’ status, showing excessive respect to those of higher status.

Also found that authoritarian people had a cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups. There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.

Question 6

Authoritarian characteristics

Answer 6

Tendency to be especially obedient to authority l and show them extreme respect and submissiveness. They also show contempt for people they perceive as having inferior social status, and have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race and gender.

Question 7

What do people with an authoritarian personality view society as?

Answer 7

‘Going to the dogs’ and therefore believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of country, religion, family. They’re inflexible in their outlook- for them there are no ‘grey areas’. Everything Is either right or wrong and they sre very uncomfortable with uncertainty.

Question 8

Origin of authoritarian personality

Answer 8

Formed in childhood as a rest of harsh parenting featuring extreme strict discipline, an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossible high standards and severe criticism of perceived failings. It is also characterised by conditonal love.

Question 9

How does the origin of the authoritarian personality impact the child

Answer 9

These experiences create resentment and.hostility in the child, but the child cannot Express these feelings directly against their parents because of a well founded fear of reprisals. So the fears are displaced onto others who are perceived as weaker, in a process known as scapegoating.

Question 10

AO3-Research support

Answer 10

Milgram and his assistant Elms comducted interviews with a small sample of fully obedient participants, who scored highly on the F scale, believing there must be a link between obedience and authority personality. However, this link is merely a correlation between two measured variables. This makes it impossible to draw the conclusion that authoritarian persoanlity causes obedience on the basis of this result. It may be that a ‘third factor’ is involved.

Question 11

AO3-Limited explanation

Answer 11

Any explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population. For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals displaced obedient, racist and anti-Semitic behaviour. This was despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways. Its extremely unlikely that they could all posses and authoritarian personality. This a limitation of Adornos theory bc its clear that an alt expansion is much more realistic-that social identity explains obedience

Question 12

AO3- methodological problems

Answer 12

based on flawed methodology. Greenstein goes as far as to describe the F-scale as ‘a comedy of methodological errors’. For example, the scale has come in for severe criticism bc every one of its items is worded in the same ‘direction’. This means that it’s possible to get a high score for authoritarianism just by ticking the same line of boxes down one page. This is a result of acquiescence bias.