obedience: dispositional explanation (authoritarian personality) Flashcards
what did theodor adorno and his colleagues research
- the anti-semitism of the holocaust
- their research led them to draw very different conclusions from milgram’s
- they believed that a high level of obedience was a psychological disorder (ie. pathological)
what is a dispositional explanation
any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individuals’ personality. such explanations are often contrasted with situational explanations
what did adorno et al. argued about people with authoritarian personality (AP)?
- show an extreme respect for (and submissiveness to) authority
- view society as ‘weaker’ than it once was, so believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of country and family
- both of these characteristics make people with an AP more likely to obey orders from a source of authority
how do people with AP treat those of inferior social status?
- show contempt for those of inferior social status
- this is fuelled by their inflexible outlook of the world; there are no ‘grey areas’
- everything is either right or wrong and they are very uncomfortable with uncertainty
how do people with AP treat people who are ‘other’?
- they are responsible for the ills of society
- ‘other’ people are a convenient target for authoritarians who are likely to obey orders form authority figure even when such orders are destructive (as in nazi germany)
eg. belong to a different ethnic group
how did adorno et al. believe AP originated
- childhood, mostly as a result of harsh parenting
- this parenting style typically features extremely strict discipline, an expectation of impossibly high standards and severe criticism of perceived failings
- parents give conditional love
> love and affection for their child depends entirely on how they behave (‘i will love you if…’)
how did adorno et al. believe these childhood experiences affect the child?
- they create resentment and hostility in a child
- the child cannot express these feelings directly against their parents because they fear punishment
- their fears are displaced onto others who they percieve to be weaker, in a process known as scapegoating
what is the psychodynamic explanation for AP?
those with AP hate people they consider to be socially inferior or who belong to another social groups which is a central feature of obedience to a higher authority
who did adorno et al. (1950) study?
more than 2000 middle-class, white americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups
describe the procedure of adorno et al.’s (1950) research
- researchers developed several measurement scales including the F-scale
- this scale is used to measure AP
what are examples of items from the F-scale?
- 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 love, gratitude and respect for his parents
- the businessman and manufacturer are much more important to society than the artist and the professor
- science has its place, but there are many important things that can never be understood by the human mind
- every person should have complete faith in some supernatural power whose decisions he obeys without question
- nobody has ever learned anything really important except through suffering
- homosexuals are hardly better than criminals and ought to be punished
what were the findings from adorno et al.’s research?
- people with authoritarian leanings (ie. those who scored highly on the F-scale and other measures) identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’
- very conscious of status (their own and others’)
- showed extreme respect, deference and servility to those of higher status, which are basic traits of obedience
what did adorno et al. find about cognitive style, stereotypes and prejudice?
- authoritarian people had a certain cognitive style (way of perceiving others)
- there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people
- had fixed and distinct stereotypes about other groups
- strong correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice
evaluation: research support (elms and milgram 1966)
- a few ps who were in the original obedience studies and had been fully obedient all completed the F-scale
-these 20 obedient ps scored significantly higher on F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient ps - 2 groups were clearly different in terms of authoritarianism
- supports adorno et al.’s view that obedient people show similar characteristics to people who have an AP
evaluation: not research support
- when the researchers analysed the individual subscales of the F-scale, they found that the obedient pps had a number of characteristics that were unusual for the authoritarians
- eg. unlike authoritarians, milgram’s obedient pps generally did not glorify their fathers, did not experience unusual levels of punishment in childhood and did not have hostile attitudes towards their mothers
- this means that the link between obedience and authoritarianism is complex
- the obedient pps were unlike authoritarians in so many ways that authoritarianism is unlikely to be a useful predictor of obedience
evaluation: authoritarianism cannot explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population
- in pre-war germany, millions of individuals displayed obedience and anti-semitic behaviour
- this was despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways
- it seems extremely unlikely that they could all have AP
- an alternative view is that the majority of the german people identified with the anti-semitic nazi state, and scapegoated the ‘outgroup’ of jews (a social identity theory approach)
- adorno’s theory is limited because an alternative explanation is much more realistic
evaluation: only measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology (christie and jahoda 1954)
- argued that the F-scale is a politically-biased interpretation of AP
- they point out that the reality of left-wing authoritarianism in the shape of russian bolshevism or chinese maoism
- extreme right and left-wing ideologies have a lot in common
- eg. both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to political authority
- this means adorno’s theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that accounts for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum
evaluation: flawed evidence (greenstein 1969)
- calls the F-scale ‘a comedy of methodological errors’ because it is a seriously flawed scale
- eg. it is possible to get a high score just by selecting ‘agree’ answers
- this means that anyone with this response bias is assessed as having an AP
