Lesson 8 Dispositional explanations of obedience

Question 1

Authoritarian personality

Answer 1

Adorno (1950) proposed a dispositional explanation of obedience. Dispositional explanations of behaviour claim that individuals’ personality characteristics determine their behaviour, not situational influences in the environment.

Question 2

Characteristics of authoritarian personality

Answer 2

Adorno argued that authoritarian personalities are more likely to obey authority figures. Authoritarian personalities have a collection of traits which make them more obedient. These include;

1. servile towards people of perceived higher status,
2. hostile towards people of lower status (scapegoating),
3. preoccupied with power,
4. inflexible in their beliefs and values,
5. conformist and conventional (e.g. rule following),
6. likely to categorise people as ‘us’ or ‘them’,
7. dogmatic (intolerant of ambiguity).

Question 3

How do you develop an authoritarian personality

Answer 3

Adorno (1950) thought that people developed these personalities due to receiving extremely strict/rigid parenting, usually involving physical punishment. 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, so instead they repress their anger and act in a submissive way towards them. They then extend this submissive behaviour to all authority figures.

Adorno (1950) developed a questionnaire to measure authoritarian personalities called the F (Fascism) scale. Participants are asked to rate how much they agree with statements such as ‘obedience and respect for authority are important virtues children should learn’ and ‘rules are there to follow, not to be changed’.

Question 4

Miller (1975)

Answer 4

+ Miller (1975) found that people who scored high on the F Scale were more likely to obey an order to hold onto some electric wiring while working on an arithmetic problem, compared to people who scored low on the F Scale

Question 5

Altemeyer (1981)

Answer 5

+ Altemeyer (1981) ordered participants to give themselves increasing levels of electric shocks when they made a mistake on a learning task. There was a significant correlation between those willing to shock themselves and high scores on the F Scale.

Question 6

How do situational explanations prove authoritarian personality wrong

Answer 6

Situational variables may be more important than dispositional ones. Milgram (1974) has conducted several variations of his original experiments with vastly different results. Obedience was 100% when Mr Wallace made no noise (e.g. no screams or requests to leave). However, the obedience rate was 0% when there were two authority figures who disagreed with each other (one wanted the teacher to continue, the other wanted them to stop).

Question 7

Disadvantage of authoritarian personality

Answer 7

Dispositional explanations 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 the level of obedience found in the original Milgram (1963) study.

Question 8

Middendorp and Meleon (1990)

Answer 8

It is possible that rather than authoritarian personality causing obedience, a lack of education causes an authoritarian personality AND obedience. Middendorp and Meleon (1990) have found that less educated people are more likely to have an authoritarian personality and Milgram (1974) found that participants with lower levels of education were more obedient