Obedience: Dispositional Explanation Flashcards
What is a dispositional explanation?
- Any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individuals personality
e.g.
some people are more likely to be obedient than others due to their personality traits
What is an authoritarian personality?
- A type of personality that Adorno argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in authority.
Such individuals are also thought to be submissive to those of a higher status & dismissive of inferiors
What concept did Adorno promote?
Authoritarian personality:
- People show an extreme respect for authority
- Such people view society as ‘weaker’ than it once was, so believe we need strong & powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of a country & family
- Both these characterisitcs make people w an Authoritarian personality more likely to obey orders from a source of authority
- Also show contempt for those of inferior social status- fuelled by an inflexible outlook on the world
- For them everything is either black or white- no grey areas
How does Adorno’s theory link to issues & debates?
- Adorno’s theory claims that personality develops as a result of childhood experiences
- The theory takes the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate
nurture includes any external influence on personality/behaviour, e.g. upbringing, learning, environment
How did Adorno argue an Authoritarian personality was formed?
- Believed authoritarian personality type forms in childhood- mostly as a result of harsh parenting
- Parenting style typically features extremely strict discipline, expectation of absoloute loyalty & impossibly high standards & severe criticisms of percieved failings
- Parents give conditional love - (I will love you if..)
- A- argued that these childhood experiences create resentment & hostility in a child- but they cannot repress these feelings against the parent due to fear of punishment
- So their fears are displaced onto others who appear to be weaker in a process called scapegoating
What was the procedure for Adorno et al’s research?
- Adorno, studied more than 2000 middle-class white Americans & their unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups
- Researchers developed several measurement scales, including the potential for fascism scale (F-scale)
- This scale is used to measure Authoritarian personality
2 e.gs of items from F-scale are: Obedience & respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn’
‘Young people sometimes get rebellious ideas, but as they grow up they ought to get over them and settle down’
fixed responses on the scale ranged from ‘Disagree strongly’ to ‘Agree strongly’
What were Adorno et al’s findings?
- People w authoritarian learnings (i.e those who scored higher on the F-scale) identified w ‘strong people’ & were generally contemptious of the ‘weak’
- They were very conscious of status- their own & others & showed extreme respect to those of a higher status
- Also found that authoritarian people had a certain cognitive style (way of percieivng people) in which there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people (i.e black & white thinking)
- They had fixed & distinctive stereotypes about other groups
- A found a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism & prejudice
Give one strength of the Authoritarian personality.
- Evidence from Milgram supporting Authoritarian personality
- Elms & Milgram 1966, Interviewed a small sample of people who had participated in the original obedience studies & had been fully obedient
- They all completed the F-scale as part of the interview
- These 20 obedient ppts scored significantly higher on the F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient ppts
- The two groups were clearly quite different in terms of authoritarianism
These findings support Adorno et al’s view that obedient people may well show similar characteristics to people who have an authoritarian personality
Give another strength of the authoritarian personality.
- Adorno’s F-scale questionnaire is replicable
- It uses standardised questions
- All participants answer the same questions which can be used repeatedly with other samples thus generating robust quantitative data
- Large sample size & quantitative data means that the scale can be tested for reliability e.g. using the test-retest method
Give one limitation of the authoritarian personality.
- Authoritarianism cannot explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population
- For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals displayed obedient & antisematic behaviour
- This was despite the fact that they must have differed personalities in all sorts of ways
- It seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess an authoritarian personality
- An alternative view is that the majority of the German people identified with the ant-sematic Nazi state & scape goated the ‘outgroup’ of jews, a social identity theory approach.
Therefore Adorno’s theory is limited because an alternative explanation is much more realistic.
