Obedience - Dispositional explanations

Question 1

What is an authoritarian personality?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

What was the aim of the study?

Answer 2

Adorno et al (1950):

• Interested in the causes of obedient personality and one’s unconscious attitudes to other racial groups.

Question 3

Who were the participants?

Answer 3

• 200 Middle White Americans

Question 4

What was the procedure?

Answer 4

• Adorno developed several scales to investigate unconscious attitudes towards racial groups. One which was the f scale (potential for facism scale) this is still used to measure authoritarian personality.

Question 5

What were the findings?

Answer 5

• Those who scored high on the F scale and other measures identified as ‘strong’ people and were scornful of the ‘weak’.
• They were conscious of their own status and that of others
• They showed excessive respect and submission to those of higher status.
• They had fixed and distinct stereotypes about other groups (positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice).

Question 6

What are authoritarian characteristics?

Answer 6

• Obedient, respectful and submissive to authority.
• Scornful to those who are ‘inferior’
• Highly conventional attitudes towards race, sex and gender.
• Believe in strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values i.e. love for your country, religion and family
• Everything is either right or wrong, no grey areas.
• They are uncomfortable with uncertainty

Question 7

What is the origin of an authoritarian personality?

Answer 7

• Adorno suggested that the authoritarian personality type forms in childhood due to harsh parenting.
• This includes; strict parenting, absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards, severe criticism of perceived failings and conditional love to child - dependent on how the child behaves.
• Adorno suggested that when a child becomes resentful towards their parents, they displace their frustration onto others whom they deem weaker - scapegoating.

Question 8

(AO3) What is a strength of this explanation?

Answer 8

Research support:

• Milgram and Elms (1966) - conducted interviews with a small sample of fully obedient participants, who scored highly on the F-scale, believing that there might be a link between obedience and authoritarian personality.

Counter-argument:

• The link is merely a correlation between two measured variables. This makes it impossible to conclude that authoritarian personality causes obedience based on this result. It may be that a ‘third factor’ is involved.
• Hyman and Sheatsley (1954) - Both obedience and authoritarian personality may be associated with a lower level of education and are not directly linked with each other at all.

Question 9

(AO3) What is a weakness of this explanation?
(1)

Answer 9

Limited explanation:

• Any explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population.
• In pre-war Germany, millions of individuals all displayed obedient, racist and anti-semitic behaviour. It is extremely unlikely that all of these people possess an authoritarian personality. This is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is clear that an alternative explanation is much more realistic (social identity explains obedience).
• Goldhagen (1996) - argued that the majority of the Germa people identified with the anti-semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the ‘outgroup’ of Jews.

Question 10

(AO3) What is a weakness of this explanation?
(2)

Answer 10

Political bias:

• The F-scale measures extreme right-wing ideology.
• Christie and Jahoda (1954) - argued this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality. Left-wing authoritarianism exists i.e. Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism. Extreme right and left-wing ideologies have a lot in common emphasising the importance of obedience to legitimate political authority.
• This is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that can account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.