Obedience: Dispositional Explanation

Question 1

What does the topic Obedience: dispositional explanations consist of?

Answer 1

• The Authoritarian personality

Question 2

How does someone with an Authoritarian personality feel about obedience and those they believe to be inferior to themselves?

Answer 2

• Adorno argued those with AP have extreme respect for authority and obedience to it, contempt for inferiors

Question 3

What is the Origin of an AP?

Answer 3

• Harsh parenting and conditional love leads to hostility that cannot be expressed and so causes scapegoating

Question 4

What, who and how did Adorno research prejudice?

Answer 4

• studied 2000 middle-class Americans by using the F-scale
• Those who scored high on the F-scale were likely to have an AP
• AP has a positive correlation with prejudice
• An example of a question asked on the F-scale is ‘Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues a child can learn’

Question 5

How is the AP a limited explanation of obedience?

Answer 5

• It is highly unlikely the entirety of the German population in WW2 has an Authoritarian personality, suggesting there are other factors e.g fear that are more influential on obedience than AP. Alternative explanations to AP are much more realistic

Question 6

What is a political limitation of AP?

Answer 6

• Only measure extremist right-wing ideologies and ignore their impact of extreme left-wing ideologies on obedience, so the AP does account for disobedience across the whole political scale

Question 7

What research supports AP?

Answer 7

• Milagram interviewed 20 people who were fully obedient in the original study and they scored significantly higher on the F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient pps