Obedience: Dispositional explanations (The Authoritarian Personality)

Question 1

Key terms:

Answer 1

Dispositional explanation = 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.
Authoritarian personality = A type of personality that Adorno argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in authority. Such individuals also thought to be submissive to those of higher status on this message of interiors.

Question 2

Like Milgram, Adorno and his colleagues wanted to understand the anti-Semitism of the Holocaust. Their research led them to draw very different conclusions than Milgram had. On the basis of their research, they came to believe that a high level of obedience is basically a psychological disorder, and try to locate the causes of it in the personality of the individual. The study:

Answer 2

Procedure
Adorno et al. (1950) investigated the causes of the obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle-class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups. They developed several scales to investigate this, including the potential for fascism scale (F-scale) which is still used to measure authoritarian personality. Some examples of items from the F scale are: ‘obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn’, ‘there is hardly anything lower than the person who does not feel a great love, gratitude and respect for his parents’, ‘nobody ever learned anything really important except through suffering’, and ‘homosexuals are hardly better than criminals and ought to be severely punished’.

Findings
Probably the most interesting discovery from this study was that people with authoritarian learnings (i.e. those who scored high on the F-scale and other measures) identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’. They were very conscious of their own and others’ status, showing excessive respect, deference and servility to those of higher status. Adorno et al. also found that authoritarian people had a cognitive style were 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.

Authoritarian characteristics
Adorno concluded that people with an on authoritarian personality have a tendency to be a 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. They view society as ‘going to the dogs’ and therefore believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of country, religion and family. People with an authoritarian personality are flexible in their outlook – for them there are no grey areas. Everything is either right or wrong and they are very on comfortable with uncertainty.

Origin of the authoritarian personality
Adorno et al. also sought to identify the origin of the authoritarian personality type. They concluded that it 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 also characterised by conditional love – that is, the parents’ love and affection for their child depends entirely on how he/she behaves. Adorno argued that these experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, but the child cannot express these feelings directly against the parents because of a well-founded fear of reprisals. So the fears are displaced onto others who are perceived to be weaker, in a process known as scapegoating. This explains the central trait to obedience to high authority, which is a dislike (or even hatred) for people considered to be socially inferior or who belong to other social groups. This is a psychodynamic explanation.

Question 3

Evaluation of authoritarian personality

Answer 3

• Milgram and his assistant 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. However, this link is merely a correlation between two measured variables. This makes it impossible to draw the conclusion that authoritarian personality causes obedience on the basis of this result. It may be that a ’third factor’ is involved. Perhaps both obedience and authoritarian personality are associated with a lower level of education, for instance, and are not directly linked with each other at all (Hyman & Sheatsley 1954).
• Any explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of the country’s population. For example, in prewar Germany, millions of individuals or 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 possess an authoritarian personality. This is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is clear that an alternative explanation is much more realistic – that social identity explains obedience. The majority of the German people identified with the anti-Semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the ‘outgroup’ of Jews.
• The F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology. Christie and Jahoda (1954) argued that this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality. They point out the reality of left-wing authoritarianism in the shape, for example, of Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism. In fact, extreme right-wing and left-wing ideologies have much in common – not the least of which is that they both emphasise the importance of complete 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.