Explanations For Obedience (Dispositional Factors)

Question 1

What are dispositional factors?

Answer 1

Unique characteristics that influence an individual’s behaviour & actions.

Question 2

What is authoritarian personality?

Answer 2

A personality type that is susceptible to obeying authority figures.

Question 3

What was the method of Adorno et al (1950)?

Answer 3

2,000 white middle-class Americans completed the F-Scale (30 question questionnaire).

Question 4

What were the results of Adorno et al (1950)?

Answer 4

Authoritarian personality:
-Conscious of their own social status (respected ‘superiors’).
-Fixed stereotypes on certain groups.
-Strong correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.
-Self-identified as ‘strong’, looked down on the ‘weak’.

Question 5

What are characteristics of authoritarian personality?

Answer 5

-Obedient: especially to authority.
-Stubborn: inflexible.
-Contempt: towards people of ‘lower social status’.

Question 6

Who devised the psychodynamic explanation (to explain the origins of characteristics of authoritarian personality)?

Answer 6

Adorno.

Question 7

What is the psychodynamic explanation of authoritarian personality?

Answer 7

1. Personality develops in childhood.
2. Conditional love, over-disciplined.
3. Creates resentment which can’t be expressed to parents.
4. They displace these feelings towards the ‘weak’/‘lower social status’.

Question 8

What are evaluation points for authoritarian personality?

Answer 8

-Political bias- F-Scale measures tendency towards right-wing ideologies, ignoring left-wing ideologies (e.g. Bolshevism).
-Correlation not causation- extraneous variables can play a role (e.g. radicalisation).
-Low ecological validity- can’t explain real life examples of mass obedience (e.g. unlikely that the whole German population in the 1930’s had authoritarian personalities).