Obedience : Dispositional explaination

Question 1

What is the authoritarian personality ?

Answer 1

a personality that is disposed to favor obedience to authority and intolerance of outgroups and those lower in status

Question 2

what does the authoritarian personality have to do with obedience?

Answer 2

• things are either right or wrong, no grey area
• show contempt for those of inferior social status
• inflexible view of the world
• uncomfortable with uncertainty
• think that people who are ‘other’ are responsible for the ills of the world
• ‘other’ people are a convenient target for authoritarians who are likely to obey orders from authority figures even when such orders are destructive

Question 3

What are the origins of the authoritarian personality?

Answer 3

• Adorno believed that this personality type formed in childhood as a result of harsh parenting.
• Parents give conditional love and do not allow children to express feelings such as anger towards them.
• They end up displacing these feelings onto minorities whom they feel there is something wrong with.
• This is known as scapegoating.

Question 4

What was Adorno’s procedure?

Answer 4

• studied more than 2000 middle class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups
• developed several measures including the potential-for-fascism-scale (F-scale)

Question 5

What are some examples of what is asked on the f-scale?

Answer 5

• ‘obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues for children to learn’
• ‘there is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel great love, gratitude and respect for his parents’

Question 6

what are Adorno’s findings ?

Answer 6

• those with authoritarian learnings (those who scored high on the f-scale and other measures) identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’
• conscious of status (own and others)
• showed extreme respect, deference and servility to those of higher status
• found that they had a certain cognitive style
• no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people
• found a strong correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice

Question 7

Evaluation - what does research support do for dispositional explanation? (+COUNTER)

Answer 7

• Milgram and Elms interviewed a small sample of people who had participated in the original obedience studies and been fully obedient
• all completed the f scale and other measures
• found that they scored higher on the overall f-scale than comparison of 20 disobedient participants
• this finding shows support
  COUNTER
• analysed individual sub-scales and found that obedient ppts had a number of characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians
• generally did not glorify fathers, did not have particularly hostile attitudes towards mothers and did not experience unusual levels of punishment in childhood
• this means that the link between authoritarianism and obedience is much more complex

Question 8

Evaluation - what does a limited explanation do to dispositional explanations?

Answer 8

• cannot explain obedient behaviour in majority of a country’s population
• e.g. pre war Germany millions of people displayed anti-Semitic behaviour. All despite the fact they must have differed in personalities in all sorts of ways
• unlikely they could all possess an authoritarian personality
• could be social identity theory, where Germans identified with the anti-semitic nazi state
• therefore Adorno’s theory is limited because an alternative explanation is much more realistic