Obedience : dispositional explanations

Question 1

What are dispositional explanations ?

Answer 1

Any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individuals personality.

Question 2

Authoritarian personality :

Answer 2

A type of personality that Adorno argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in authority. Those individuals thought to be submissive to those of higher status and dismissive of inferiors

Question 3

What did Adorno and his colleagues find out about the holocaust ?

Answer 3

They wanted to understand the anti-semitism of the holocaust. Their research led them to draw very different conclusions than milgram had.
-They came to believe that a high level of obedience was basically a psychological disorder.

Question 4

Procedure ; AP

Answer 4

Adorno et al . investigated the causes of obedience personality in a study.
More than
-2000 middle class
-White americans
Unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups.

Question 5

What was done to investigate causes of obedient personality ?

Answer 5

They developed several scales to investigate this, Fascism scale, which is still used to measure AP

Question 6

Examples of F scale :

Answer 6

‘obedience and respect for authority are important virtues’

Question 7

Findings of the study :

Answer 7

Those who score highest on F-scale are identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’
They were conscious of their own and others status. showing respect to those of a higher status

Question 8

What else did adorno find ?

Answer 8

Authoritarian people had a cognitive style where there was no ‘ fuzziness’ between categories of people with a fixed and distinctive stereotype

Question 9

Authoritarian characteristics :

Answer 9

People with this personality have the tendency to be especially obedient to authority