Factors Affecting Obedience: Personality And Gender Flashcards
What is personality?
Characteristics that form an individual’s distinctive character.
What is Authoritarian personality?
Adorno (1950) explained that high levels of obedience relates to authoritarian personality.
Adorno believed that a harsh style of parenting leads children to develop personality traits such as toughness, destructiveness, which he termed ‘Authoritarian’.
An authoritarian personality is typically submissive to authority but harsh to those seen as subordinate to themselves.
Supportive evidence for authoritarianism.
Elms and Milgram (1966)
They found that when comparing 20 fully obedient participants in Milgram’s studies against 20 disobedient participants, the obedient participants had a significantly high authoritarian personality scores on the F-Scale as compared to the disobedient participants.
This demonstrates that obedience levels can be linked to personality factors
What is Internal locus of control?
where individuals are responsible for their own actions + are less influenced by others.
What is External locus of control?
individuals believe their behaviour is beyond their control, they take less responsibility for their actions + more likely to be influenced by others.
Which type of locus of control will be more resistant to obedience?
Those with an internal locus of control are able to resist obedience because they believe they are in control.
Supporting Research
Oliner & Oliner (1998) interviewed non-Jewish survivors of WWII and compared those who had resisted orders and protected Jewish people from the Nazi’s, in comparison to those who had not. Oliner and Oliner found that the 406 ‘rescuers’, who had resisted orders, were more likely to have a high internal locus of control, in comparison to the 126 people who had simply followed orders.
These results appear to support the idea that a high internal locus of control makes individuals less likely to follow orders.
Although there are many other factors that may have caused individuals to follow orders in WWII and it is difficult to conclude that locus of control is the only factor.
Weakness of Personality Factors
Schurz (1985) in a task similar to Milgram’s original study, Austrian participants were instructed to give painful doses of ultrasound to a female student.
Those participants who were fully obedient did not differ significantly from those participants who resisted in terms of their scores on a questionnaire measuring locus of control.
This suggests that….
Personality may have little impact on obedience.
Strength of Gender differences in obedience
Gilligan and Attanucci’s research on moral dilemmas found that men and women differed in terms of their concerns. Men were more preoccupied with fairness, whereas women were more concerned about care (avoiding harm and exploitation, prioritising relationships rather than rules and principles).
This suggest that these differences in concerns could mean that women will be less obedience in tasks that require harming others
Weakness of Gender differences in obedience
Burger (2009) showed no significant difference in obedience between men and women. (EXAMPLE OF FINDING). This suggests that gender may not be an influential factor in determining obedience levels.
