Dispositional Explanations for obedience

Question 1

What do dispositional explanations of behaviour claim?

Answer 1

Dispositional explanations of behaviour claim that an individuals personality characteristics determine their behaviour, not situational influences in the environment.

Question 2

What did Adorno Argue?

Answer 2

He argued that authoritarian personalities are more likely to obey authority figures. Authoritarian personalities have a collection of traits which make them more obedient

Question 3

What are the traits of an authoritarian personality?

Answer 3

• Servile to those of perceived higher status
• Hostile towards those of lower status
• Preoccupied with power
• inflexible with their beliefs and values
• conformist and conventional (rule following)
• likely to categorise people as us or them
• dogmatic

Question 4

What did Adorno believe for these personalities to develop?

Answer 4

He believed these personalities developed due to strict and rigid parenting, usually involving punishment, creating feelings of hostility which are displaced onto weaker others who cannot fight back and therefore safe. They can’t take their anger out on their parents as they fear them, so instead they repress their anger and act in a submissive way towards them. They extend this submissive behaviour to all authority figures.

Question 5

What did Adorno develop to measure authoritarian personalities?

Answer 5

Adorno developed a questionnaire to measure authoritarian personalities, called the F scale where participants are asked to rate how much they agree with statements such as obedience for authority are important virtues that children should learn and rules are there to follow, not to be broken.

Question 6

Strengths Authoritarian

Answer 6

+ Miller found that people who scored high on F scale were more likely to obey an order to hold onto electric wiring whilst working on an arithmetic problem compared to those who scored lower on the F scale.

+ Altemeyer ordered participants to give themselves increasing voltages of shocks every time they made a mistake on a learning task. Significant correlation between those willing to shock themselves more and high scores on the F Scale.

Question 7

Weakness Authoritarian

Answer 7

• situational variables may be more important than dispositional as milgram conducted many variations of his original experiment managing to get obedience to 100% and all the way to 0%. Obedience was 100% when mr Wallace made no noise throughout and obedience was 0% when there were two authority figures who disagrees with each other (one wanted to stop and one wanted to continue)
• dispositional explanations can’t explain obedience in entire societies as authoritarian personalities are not common. Far fewer than 65% of people have authoritarian personalities so it can’t be the only explanation for the level of obedience found in the original milgram study
• It’s possible that rather than an authoritarian personality causing obedience, it is a lack of education that causes authoritarian personality and obedience. Middendorp and melodeon found that less educated people were more likely to have an authoritarian personality and milgram also found that those with lower levels of education were more likely to be obedient