Dispositional Factors for Obedience (Authoritarian)

Question 1

What is the dispositional explanation for obedience

Answer 1

Dispositional explanations claim explanations of behaviour are heavily influenced by individuals personality traits

Question 2

Who proposed the dispositional explanation of obedience and what was it?

Answer 2

Adorno (1950) - Authoritarian Personality

Question 3

What are some traits of the authoritarian personality?

Answer 3

• servile towards people of perceived higher status
• hostile towards people of lower status
• pre-occupied with power
• inflexible in their beliefs and powers

Question 4

Why did Adorno believe people developed an authoritarian personality?

Answer 4

• due to receiving extremely harsh discipline from their parents, usually involving physical violence
• This creates feelings of hostility which are displaced onto weaker others who cannot fight back and are therefore safe. They cannot take out their anger on their parents because they fear them
• Instead they repress their anger and act in a submissive way towards them. They then extend this submissive behaviour to all authority figures

Question 5

How did Adorno measure if people had an authoritarian personality?

Answer 5

• An F Scale
• Participants asked to rate how much they agree with statements
• ‘obedience and respect for authority are important virtues kids should learn’

Question 6

Strength - Miller

Answer 6

people who scored high on F scale were more likely to obey order to hold onto some electric wiring while working on an arithmetic problem compared to people who scored low on the F scale

Question 7

Strength - Altemeyer

Answer 7

ordered pp’s to give themselves increasing levels of electric shocks when they made a mistake on a learning task, correlation between those who shocked themselves and high F scale scores

Question 8

Weakness - situational variables

Answer 8

Milgram conducted several variations which showed different results, obedience 100%, however obedience was 0% when two authority figures disagreed with each other

Question 9

Weakness - Lack of education causes authoritarian personality and obedience

Answer 9

• Midderndorp and Meleon (1990) found that less educated people have an authoritarian personality
• Milgram found that less educated people were more obedient