Obedience: Dispositional Explanations

Question 1

Authoritarian personality

Answer 1

Adorno at al. Unquestioning obedience is pathological.

Extreme respect to authority, contempt for inferiors, conventional attitudes.

Originates in childhood through strict parenting and conditional love.

Child’s hostility to parents displaced onto weaker others, called scapegoating.

Question 2

What’s scapegoating

Answer 2

Child’s hostility to parents is displaced into weaker others.

Question 3

Key study: Adorno et al.

Answer 3

Procedure - F scale measured authoritarianism of 2000 Americans.

Findings- high scorers showed deference to people of higher value.

Question 4

Deference

Answer 4

Polite submission and respect.

Question 5

Research support

Answer 5

Links obedience and authoritarianism (Elms and Milgram)

Interviewed fully obedient Participants who all scored highly on the F scale

Question 6

Limited explanation

Answer 6

Many Germans anti-Semitic but not same personality. Unlikely that all had authoritarian personality

Social identity theory is more likely.

Question 7

Political bias

Answer 7

F scale can’t explain left-wing authoritarianism (Christie and Jahoda)

Question 8

Methodology

Answer 8

F scale flawed so theory lacks validity (Greenstein)

Question 9

Correlation research

Answer 9

Measures many variables but no cause and effect

No matter how strong a correlation between two variables is, it does not mean that one causes the other.