Dispositional Explanations of Obedience Flashcards
What is a dispositional explanation?
It claims that individuals personality characteristics determine their behaviour, not situational influences in the environment.
What are the traits authoritarian figures are likely to have which make them obedient?
- servile toward people of perceived higher status
- hostile towards people of lower status
- preoccupied with power
- inflexible in their beliefs and values
- conformist and conventional ( e.g. Rule following )
- likely to categorise people as ‘us’ and ‘them’
- dogmatic ( intolerant of ambiguity )
What was did Adorno think was the reason for authoritarian personalities?
He thought it was because they received extremely harsh discipline from their parents during their upbringing, usually involving physical punishment.
This created feelings of hostility which are directed towards weaker individuals who cannot fight back and are therefore safe.
They cannot take their anger out on their parents because they fear them, so instead they act in a submissive way toward them. They then extend thus behaviour to all figures of authority.
What is the F scale?
The questionnaire Adorno developed to measure authoritarian personalities. The F stands for Fascism.
They were asked to rate how much they agree with certain statements.
What did Elms and Milgram do?
They selected 20 obedient participants and 20 disobedient participants from Milgram’s original experiment, 2 months later.
Each completed a MMPI scale, which measures personality traits, and the F scale. They were also asked a series of open ended questions about their relationship with their parents and their attitude towards the experimenter and learner.
What were the trends Elms and Milgram found?
- little difference between the two on the MMPI scale
- higher levels of authoritarian traits among the obedient participants
- obedient participants were more likely to report that they had a difficult relationship with their father
- they were also more likely to perceive the experimenter ( authority figure ) as admirable
What are the positives to the authoritarian personality theory?
- miller found that people who scored high on the F Scale were more likely to obey an order to hold onto some electric wiring while working on an arithmetic problem, compared to people who scored low on the F Scale
- Altmeyer ordered participants to give themselves increasing levels of electric shocks when they made a mistake on a learning task. There was a significant correlation between those willing to shock themselves and high scores on the F Scale
What are the negatives to the authoritarian personality theory?
- situational factors may be more important than dispositional ones. Milgram has conducted several variations of his experiment with very different results. Obedience was 100% when Mr Wallace made no noise, and 92% when another teacher was the one to press the buttons. It was 10% when two other teachers refused to carry on with the experiment, and 0% when there were two experimenters who disagreed ( one wanted to continue, the other wanted to stop)
- these personalities are not common, far fewer than 65% of people have it, so it cannot be the only explanation for the level of obedience found in the Milgram experiment.
- Elms and Milgram found important differences between the characteristics of an authoritarian personality and the characteristics of an obedient participant. For instance, many of the fully obedient participants reported having a very good relationship with their parents.
- it is possible that rather than authoritarian personality causing obedience, a lack of education causes an authoritarian personality and obedience. Middendorp and Meleon have found that less educated people are more likely to have an authoritarian personality and Milgram found that participants with lower levels of education were more obedient.
