obedience: dispositional factors Flashcards
what is the main dispositional factor said to affect obedience?
having an authoritarian personality
what is an authoritarian personality?
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
what was Adorno’s procedure?
•he wanted to investigate 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 a scale to test this, this was called the potential for fascism scale (F-scale) which is still used to measure authoritarian personality
give one example of something asked on the F-scale
obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn
what were Adorno’s findings?
•people with authoritarian learnings (those who scores high on the F-scale)
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 ser ability to those of higher status
•Adorno also found that authoritarian people had a cognitive style where there was no overlap between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups
•there was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice
what are characteristics of an authoritarian personality?
•very obedient to authority, they have an extreme respect for it and submissiveness to it
•they show contempt for people of lower social status’
•they have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race and gender
•they are inflexible in their views
•everything is either right or wrong and are very uncomfortable with uncertainty
what is the origin of the authoritarian personality?
•he concluded that it formed in childhood as a result of harsh parenting
•this parenting style features strict discipline, an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards and a severe criticism of perceived failings
•conditional love
•this creates resentment and hostility in the child, yet these fears cannot be expressed towards the parent due to a fear of consequences
•these fears are displaced onto others who are perceived to be weaker, a process called scapegoating
a psychodynamic explanation
what does the F scale stand for?
potential for fascism scale
evaluation points for the dispositional explanation of obedience
strength: research support
limitation: a limited explanation
limitation: political bias
limitation: methodical problems
strength: research support
•Milgram interviews the most obedient
participants in his electric shock study and found a positive correlation between F-scale scores (AP) and levels of obedience, as those who scored the highest tended to be more obedient
•however this research is correlational and therefore a casual relationship cannot be established- we can’t conclude that AP causes people to be obedient.
•it may be another variable, for example low levels of education, which contribute to AP and obedience
•this limits the usefulness of the research in validating claims about AP and whether it effects obedience
limitation: a limited explanation
•finds it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population (like pre-war Germany)
•it is highly unlikely that everyone who obeyed orders from people like the Nazis possessed an authoritarian personality
•it it likely these could be explained by situational factors like uniform (legitimacy of authority)
•this is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is clear that an alternative explanation is much more realistic- that social identity theory explains obedience
•the majority of the German people identified with the anti-semitic Nazi state and scapegoated the ‘out group’ of Jews
limitation: political bias
•the F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology
•it is argued that this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality
•they point out that extreme left-wing and right-wing ideologies have much in common- including the emphasis of the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority
•this is a limitation as it is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that can account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum
limitation: methodological problems
•based on flawed methodology
•the self reporting ‘F-scale’ has all of its items worded in the same direction
•this means it may be vulnerable to acquiescence bias as it is possible to get a high score just by clicking the same line of boxes down the page
