Dispositional Factors Affecting Obedience Flashcards
What are all the dispositional factors affecting obedience?
Authoritarian personality
Empathy
Locus of control (Internal/ External)
What is Authoritarian Personality?
Who suggested it?
Describe his study.
Adorno argued that the key to understanding extreme obedience and racial prejudice lay in early childhood experiences when personality is formed. He argued people with an AUTHORITARIAN personality have a tendency to be extremely obedient.
Adorno studied over 2000 white, middle-class US students and interviewed them about their early childhood experiences. He found that authoritarian adults came from a family environment that was cold and unloving with a hostile atmosphere; parents insisted on achievement and self-discipline and a strategy of withdrawal of affection. Adorno found that PPS who had been brought up by strict parents grew up to be very obedient and respectful of authority.
Feelings of conflict towards parents who were physically abusive were often repressed or displaced into others; often a racial group or a group perceived as weak.
Adorno developed scaled of ethnocentrism, anti-demotion, fascia and F scale.
Describe the 3 definitions in authoritarianism.
Conventionalise- obedience & respect for authority are the most important virtues for children to follow. Young people should get over their rebellious thoughts and settle down.
Authoritarian Aggression- Sex crimes such as rape and attacks on children deserve more than imprisonment: they ought to be publicly whipped or worse.
Power- People can be divided into two distinct classes: the weak and strong.
Evaluate weaknesses of Authoritarianism.
Middendrop & Meloen 1990- found that less well-educated people are consistently more authoritarian than well-educated people. Milgram also found PPS with lower levels of education tended to be more obedient than those with high levels. This suggests that lack of education could be linked to both authoritarianism & obedience.
Chan 1985- Studying Ma-Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution in china in the 60s, interviewed refugees of the revolution and found them to have highly authoritarian personalities. However rather than family being the primary source of this authoritarian socialisation, the school took this role. Once the individual was removed from the environment that encouraged authoritarianism, the children’s authoritarian side of the refugee’s characters diminished considerably.
Evaluate the strengths of Authoritarianism.
Elms & Milgram 1966- carried out interviews with a sun sample of those PPS who had been involved in Milgrams obedience studies. They found those old who were fully obedient fully went to 450V compared to those who defined the experiment.
Dumbrun & Vatine- simulation
What is Locus of Control?
Who suggested it?
Concept developed by Rotter 1966.
LOC refers to an individuals perception of their personal control over events in their own life & their own behaviour. It is measures by using a scale that reflects a dimension of high internal locus of control to high external Locus of control.
What is a strong INTERNAL locus of control?
Associated with the belief that we can control events to an extent & that what happens to them is largely due to their own ability and effort. They are more likely to display independence in thought & behaviour and rely less in the opinions of others meaning they are better able to resist social influence.
What is a strong EXTERNAL locus of control?
Reflects a strong belief such as the influence of luck, fate, other people and that events are highly out of their control. Such individuals tend to approach events with a passive and fatalistic attitude than their internal counterparts, taking less personal responsibility for their actions and being less likely to display independent behaviour and more likely to accept the influence of others.
Describe the personality traits of an individual with a high internal locus of control.
active seekers of information, less likely to rely on the opinion of others making them less vulnerable to social influence.
More achievement orientated more likely to become leaders.
They are better resisted of coercion from others.
What is a strength of locus of control?
Oliner and Oliner 1988- interviewed two groups of non-Jewish people who lived through the holocaust in Nazi Germany, comparing 406 who protected and rescued Jews from the Nazis with the 126 in the sample who had not acted. They found the rescuers had scores demonstrating an internal locus of control and also scored higher on measures of social responsibility.
What is a weakness of locus of control?
Schurz 1985- instructed Austrian PPS to give painful doses of ultrasound to a female student. There was little difference in Locus of Control between those who obeyed and those who dissented, suggested LOC has little affect on obedience levels. However the potential confounding variable of the sec of the student receiving the ultrasound.
What is empathy?
Describe Burger.
Is seems plausible or reasonable to assume that people with high levels of empathy would be less likely to harm others when instructed to do so by a perceived authority figure.
Burger- found that although people who score high on empathy were more likely to protest against giving electric shocks, this did not translate into lower levels of obedience.
