Lesson 9 - Dispositional Explanations for Obedience Flashcards
What is the dispositional explanation of obedience ?
The authoritarian personality.
What does dispositional explanations mean ?
Dispositional explanations of behaviour claim that individual’s personality characteristics determine their behaviour.
What is the authoritarian personality ?
The authoritarian personality is more likely to obey authority than other personality types.
What are the traits of the authoritarian personality?
Servile towards people of a higher status
Host like towards people of a lower status
Preoccupied with power
Inflexible in their beliefs and values
Conformist and conventional
Likely to categorise people as ‘us’ or ‘them’
Dogmatic (intolerant of ambiguity)
Why do people develop the authoritarian personality ?
People develop this personality due to strict parenting, usually involving physical punishment. This creates feelings of hostility which are displaced on others. They don’t 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 extend this submissive behaviour to all other authority figures.
What is the F scale ?
It is a questionnaire developed by Adorno to measure authoritarian personalities. Participants are asked to rate how much they agree with statements and at the end they are giving a score.
What are the strengths of the authoritarian personality ?
Miller 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.
Altemeyer 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.
What are the weaknesses of the authoritarian personality ?
Situational variables may be more important than dispositional ones. Milgram (1974) has received many different results through the different experiments. Obedience was 100% when Mr Wallace made no noise but was 0% when two of the authority figures were arguing whether the teacher should continue.
It is possible that rather than an authoritarian personality causing obedience it could be a lack of education that causes both obedience and an authoritarian personality. It was found that less educated people are more likely to have an authoritarian personality and people with lower levels of education are more obedient.
Dispositional factors cannot explain obedience in entire societies because authoritarian personalities aren’t common. 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 study.
