Obedience: Dispositional explanations

Question 1

Why were dispositional explanations of obedience first proposed?

Answer 1

Dispositional explanations of obedience were first proposed because not all psychologists accept that obedience can be fully explained by factors within the situation or the social structure. They reason that there must be at least some role of the personality or ‘disposition’ of the individual.

Question 2

How can Milgram’s findings be used to support the view that the disposition of an individual must play a role in obedience?

Answer 2

Not all of Milgram’s participants fully obeyed, and some actively rebelled, despite them experiencing identical situational and social pressures. This suggests that there must be at least some role of the personality or disposition of the individual.

Question 3

What is a dispositional explanation?

Answer 3

Any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individual’s personality (i.e. their disposition). Such explanations are often contrasted with situational explanations.

Question 4

Who conducted research into dispositional explanations of obedience?

Answer 4

Theodor Adorno and his colleagues conducted research into dispositional explanations of obedience.

Question 5

Name the dispositional explanation of obedience that was investigated by Adorno?

Answer 5

The authoritarian personality

Question 6

What is an authoritarian personality?

Answer 6

A type of personality 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 7

What initially triggered Adorno to conduct his research?

Answer 7

Like Milgram, Adorno and his colleagues wanted to understand the anti-Semitism of the Holocaust.

Question 8

How did Milgram and Adorno’s conclusions compare?

Answer 8

Adorno’s research led him to draw very different conclusions than Milgram had. On the basis of his research, he came to believe that a high level of obedience was basically a psychological disorder, and tried to locate the causes of it in the personality of an individual.

Question 9

In what year did Adorno conduct his research?

Answer 9

Adorno conducted his research in 1950

Question 10

What was Adorno’s aim?

Answer 10

Adorno aimed to investigate the causes of the obedient personality by staying people’s unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups.

Question 11

What was Adorno’s sample?

Answer 11

More than 2000 middle-class, white Americans made up Milgram’s sample.

Question 12

How did Adorno and his colleagues investigate people’s unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups?

Answer 12

Adorno and his colleagues developed several scales to investigate this, including the potential for fascism scale (‘F scale’) which is still used to measure the authoritarian personality. Participants had to rate their agreement with each item on a six-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree).

Question 13

List three examples of items found on the potential for fascism scale (‘F-scale’).

Answer 13

-‘Homosexuals are hardly better than criminals and ought
to be severely punished’.

-‘Every person should have complete faith in some
supernatural power whose decision he obeys without
question’.

-‘Obedience and respect for authority are the most
important virtues children should learn’.

Question 14

What were Adorno’s findings?

Answer 14

• People with authoritarian leanings (i.e. those who scored
  highly on the ‘F-scale’) identified with ‘strong’ people
  and were generally contemptuous of the weak.
• People who scored highly on the ‘F-scale’ were very
  conscious of their own and others’ status, showing
  excessive respect to those of a higher status.
• Authoritarian people had a cognitive style where there
  was no fuzziness between categories of people, with
  fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups.
• There was a strong positive correlation between
  authoritarianism and prejudice.

Question 15

What did Adorno conclude from his findings?

Answer 15

Adorno concluded that people with an authoritarian personality have a tendency to be especially obedient to authority. They have an extreme respect for authority and submissiveness to it. They also show contempt for people they perceive as having inferior social status, and have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race and gender.

Question 16

People with an authoritarian personality are thought to view society as ‘going to the dogs’. What did Adorno mean by this?

Answer 16

This means that people with an authoritarian personality type believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of country, religion and family.

Question 17

Adorno claimed that there are no ‘grey areas’ for people with an authoritarian personality type. What did he mean by this?

Answer 17

People with an authoritarian personality are inflexible in their outlook. Everything is either right or wrong and they are very uncomfortable with uncertainty.

Question 18

Adorno also sought to identify the origin of the authoritarian personality type. According to Adorno, where does this personality type stem from?

Answer 18

Adorno concluded that the authoritarian personality type is formed in childhood, as a result of harsh parenting. Typically, the parenting style identified by Adorno features extremely strict discipline, an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards, and severe criticism of perceived failings. It is additionally characterised by conditional love (i.e. the parent’s love and affection for their child depends entirely on how he or she behaved).

Question 19

Why is harsh parenting likely to result in a child adopting an authoritarian personality?

Answer 19

Adorno argued that harsh parenting creates resentment and hostility in the child. The child is unable to express these feelings directly against their parents because of a well-founded fear of reprisals. Therefore, the fears are displaced onto others who are perceived to be weaker, in a process known as scapegoating.

Question 20

What is scapegoating?

Answer 20

Scapegoating refers to when fears are displaced onto others who are perceived to be weaker.

Question 21

Evaluation point: ‘One limitation of Adorno’s theory is its inability to establish cause and effect’. Write a paragraph outlining this AO3 point.

Answer 21

One limitation of Adorno’s theory is its inability to establish cause and effect. For example, Adorno and his colleagues measured a range of variables and found many significant correlations between them. For instance, they found that authoritarianism was strongly correlated with measures of prejudice against minority groups. However, no matter how strong a correlation between two variables might be, it does not follow that one causes the other. This therefore acts as a weakness of Adorno’s theory because it causes one to question his conclusion that a harsh parenting style directly causes the development of an authoritarian personality. The inability to establish cause and effect between two variables causes Milgram’s study to lack internal validity. Additionally, Milgram’s explanation of obedience can be criticised for being environmentally reductionist in nature because he suggested that the one cause of an authoritarian personality is a harsh and punitive upbringing. Despite this having a relatively strong evidence base, other factors are also likely to contribute to the possession of this personality type. For a more holistic theory to be established, perhaps biological factors should also be considered (e.g. does one have a biological predisposition to the authoritarian personality type).

Question 22

Evaluation point: ‘One limitation of Adorno’s theory derives from his use of the ‘F-scale’, which is politically bias in nature’. Write a paragraph outlining this AO3 point.

Answer 22

One limitation of Adorno’s theory derives from his use of the ‘F-scale’, which is politically bias in nature. In 1954, Christie and Jahoda argued that the F-scale is a politically bias interpretation of authoritarian personality because the scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology. This therefore acts as 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. In this light, the ‘F-scale’ fails to act as a representative measure of all participant’s viewpoints, resulting in Adorno’s findings lacking in generalisability. This evidence also suggests that Adorno’s findings are invalid in nature because if none of the statements are representative of a person’s viewpoint, the participant is likely to chose any response, thus resulting in the imposition problem. This causes one to question the extent to which we can rely on Adorno’s study to inform our understanding of obedience.

Question 23

Evaluation point: ‘One weakness of Adorno’s explanation of obedience is its inability to account for all human behaviour’. Write a paragraph outlining this AO3 point.

Answer 23

One weakness of Adorno’s explanation of obedience is its inability to account for all human behaviour. For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals all displayed obedient, racist 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 process an authoritarian personality. This is therefore a weakness of Adorno’s theory because the evidence points to the idea that his explanation of obedience is limited. As a result, a nomothetic law cannot be produced because Adorno explains obedience in terms of individual personality, making it difficult for him to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population (his explanation remains idiographic). As a result, one cannot rely on his theory to inform their understanding of obedience amongst large groups of people. In this light, Adorno’s theory has limited real-life application and external validity because it can only be used to explain individual cases of obedience.