Dispositional explanations of obedience Flashcards
What did Adorno suggest was the dispositional explanation of obedience?
Authoritarian personality
What is an authoritarian personality?
A personality type that’s especially obedient to authority figures.
They’re highly submissive to those of higher status and dismissive of those inferior to them
Give 3 features of an authoritarian personality.
-high respect for those above them in social hierarchy
-fixed cognitive style
-fixed stereotypes about peoples conventional beliefs
How did Adorno suggest we measure the Authoritarian personality?
Through the Facism scale
What does it mean if someone if fascist?
They are submissive to authority and accept violence is an acceptable way to achieve things
Describe Adornos procedure to measure the AP using the F scale
- 2000 middle-class white Americans completed a questionnaire on their unconscious attitudes toward racial groups
-The higher the score, the more authoritarian so Adorno thought the higher the score more likely to be obedient
How many factors of AP did the questions measure in Adornos procedure?
(give 2 examples)
9
-power and toughness (identification with power figures)
-authoritarian submission (high respect for authority)
Development of the AP
How did Adorno think people developed AP?
-Adorno thought people developed AP in childhood as a response to harsh parenting (physical punishment, high standards, conditional love)
What did Adorno suggest the experiences in harsh parenting lead to?
-These experiences create hostility in the child who then displaces those feelings onto the ‘weak’ (scapegoating)
as they cannot take it out on their parents due to fear of those above them in the social hierarchy
What does harsh parenting lead to?
-leads to hatred of those socially inferior through scapegoating
-The child of the parents learns these behaviors and attitudes, eventually identifying with them and thus the authoritarian personality is formed
Give a strength of the Authoritarian personality
Milgram and Elms study- supporting research
Milgrams research supports a dispositional explanation- supporting research
What was the procedure of Milgram and Elms’s study?
Took 20 participants who had previously gone up to 450 volts in milgram study (high obedience
took 20 participants who had refused to go 450 volts in a prior replication of the study (low obedience)
The participants completed Adorno’s F-scale questionnaire
What were the results of the Milgram and Elms study?
high-obedience participants scored higher on the F-scale than the low-obedience participants supporting Adornos findings
how did Milgram’s research support a dispositional explanation? Why is this a strength for the authoritarian personality?
because not all ppt went all the way to 450v
-this suggests the variation in obedience levels could be due to personality
-This is a strength as it supports Adornos AP this increases the reliability of Adornos research as the same findings have been found in another study
Give a limitation of the authoritarian personality
Authoritarian personality was a correlation
F scale has methodological errors
why is authoritarian personality being a correlation a limitation?
- While there may be a link between having an AP and being highly obedient, we cannot say for sure that it’s the AP that causing high levels of obedience
-bc there has not been a manipulation of the IV to measure the impact it has on the DV
-Because you can’t manipulate the variable of someone experiencing harsh parenting we can only say this is correlational, not causational
Explain how the F scale has methodological errors and why is this a limitation.
every question is worded in the same direction
-ppt could just tick one side of the page for each question and score highly authoritarian
-this can lead to acquiescence bias as ppt have the tendency to agree with everything
-would be better if the scale randomised the questions so ‘agree’ didn’t always lead in the same direction
-reduces useful ness as it may not be measuring what it intends to
