L8: Dispositional Explanations Of Obedience Flashcards
What is a dispositional explanation for obedience?
This is when an individuals personality characteristics determine their behaviour, not situational influences.
Adorno (1950) argued that authoritarian personalities are more likely to obey authority figures. What are some personality traits they have that make them more obedient?
- servile towards people of higher status
- hostile towards people of lower status
- Preoccupied with power
- inflexible in their beliefs and power
- conformist and conventional (rule following)
- likely to categorise people as ‘us or ‘them’
- narrow-minded (dogmatic)
How did Adorno (1950) think that people with authoritarian personalities developed it?
Due to extremely rigid/strict parenting, usually involving physical punishment. The child has feelings of hostility towards the parents which is repressed and displaced onto weaker others who cannot fight back. They refuse to fight back to their parents because they fear them and act submissive. They are also submissive towards all their authority figures.
How did Adorno (1950) test the authoritarian personality?
He developed a questionnaire called the F(Fascism) scale. They rate how much they agree with statements such as ‘rules are meant to be follow, not to be changed’
Evaluation - Miller (1975) (positive)
He found that people who scored high on theF scale were more likely to obey an order to hold onto an electric wire while solving an arithmetic problem compared to people who scored low.
Evaluation- Altemeyer (1981) (positive)
He found that people were more likely to give themselves increasing levels of electric shocks when they got a question wrong on a test and these people happened to have scored high on the F scale.
Evaluation (situational factors)- negative
Milgram conducted a variation where obedience was 100% when mr Wallace made no noise, and obedience rate was 0% when two authority figures disagreed. This shows that situational factors may be more important than dispositional factors.
Evaluation- dispositional factors in society - negative
It cannot explain obedience in entire societies because authoritarian personalities are not common, far fewer than 65% of people have authoritarian personalities so it cannot be the only explanation for obedience found in Milgrams study
Evaluation- negative- Middendorp and Meleon (1990)
They found that a lack of education causes authoritarian personalities AND obedience, they found that less educated people are more likely to have an authoritarian personality and Milgram found that participants with lower levels of education are more likely to obey. This shows that it is the lack of education rather than the personality.
