Obedience: Dispositional explanations Flashcards
What is a dispositional explanation for obedience?
Dispositional explanations are explanations of behaviour that highlight the importance of the individual’s personality
What did Adorno suggest about people who had authoritarian personalities?
Adorno suggested that people with an authoritarian personality had their obedient personalities shaped early in life by strict authoritarian parenting with harsh physical punishments.
Who was the psychologist who established the dispositional explanation for obedience?
Adorno
What did Adorno argue about the explanations for obedience?
Adorno argued that high levels of obedient behaviour were dispositional, due to a set of internal traits, a personality type he called the authoritarian personality
What are the traits of a person with an authoritarian personality type?
1) They had high respect for people with higher social status (leading to obedience)
2) Hostile to people they see as having a lower status
3) Fixed stereotypes about groups of people
4) Conformists with conventional beliefs and behaviours
5) Views on morality are dogmatic, having very clear ideas about right or wrong (no grey areas)
What did Adorno do to study the Authoritarian Personality?
Adorno studied the Authoritarian Personality with a questionnaire called the F-scale (fascism scale). People who scored highly had fixed stereotypes - identifying with “strong” people, disliking “weak” people and having inflexible ideas about right or wrong
What are two of the nine factors that were measured on the F-scale?
Authoritarian submission: an uncritical attitude towards authorities
Power and “Toughness”: preoccupation with dominance-submission and identification with power figures
What is a strength of the dispositional explanation for obedience? (Elms and Milgram)
Elms and Milgram had twenty obedient males who had given the highest levels of shocks in previous Milgram studies and twenty defiant males who had refused take the F-scale. The obedient males scored significantly higher on the F-scale, suggesting they had authoritarian personalities; they also tended to dehumanize or hold more negative attitudes towards the learner and see the experimenter as someone knowledgeable and trustworthy
What is a limitation of the dispositional explanations for obedience? (correlational studies + links)
Adorno’s theory of a link between an abusive childhood, the development of an authoritarian personality and obedience can only be studied using correlation. However, alternate situational explanations of obedience, such as the agentic state and legitimacy of authority, are backed up by significant experimental research. Research done by Milgram and others has shown the majority of people have the capacity to be highly obedient.
What is a strength of the dispositional explanation for obedience? (resistance to authority figures - willingness)
In Milgram’s study, 35% resisted the authority figure; this cannot be explained by situational factors alone, as each participant had the exact same experience. However, Adorno’s theory acknowledges that the willingness to obey an authority figure can vary from person to person, offering an explanation for why there are extreme variations in Milgram’s participants.
What is a limitation of the dispositional explanations for obedience? (acquiescence bias + artificial inflation)
The F-scale has been criticised as a measurement of an authoritarian personality; one reason being acquiescence bias; people tend to agree to questions. Additionally, the F-scale was written in a way that agreeing to all questions would artificially inflate their score on the authoritarian scale leading to inaccurate measurement. Furthermore, Adorno was a left-wing thinker and people argued questions were based against the right-wing political view.
