Social influence - dispositional explanation Flashcards
Dispositional explanation
Any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individual’s personality
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 are also thought to be submissive to those of higher status and dismissive of inferiors
Procedure of the authoritarian personality study
Investigated attitudes towards other ethnic groups of more than 2000 middle class white americans
Several scales were developed, including F-scale (rated on a scale 1 to 6 where 6 = agree strongly)
Conclusion of the authoritarian personality study
Authoritarians (who scored high on the F-scale and other measures) identified with ‘strong’ people and were contemptuous of the ‘weak’
They were conscious of their own and others status, showing excessive respect and deference to those of higher status
Authoritarian people also had cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people, fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups
Authoritarian personality forms in childhood
Through harsh parenting - extremely strict discipline, expectation of absolute loyalty , impossibly high standards and severe criticism
It is also characterised by conditional love - parents love depends entirely on how their child behaves
Hostility is displaced onto social inferiors
These experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, cannot express these feelings directly against their parents -they fear reprisals
Feelings displaced onto other who are weaker - scapegoating (psychodamic explanation)
One strength of dispositional explanation on obedience
Research support
EVALUATION: Research support
Elms and Milgram conducted interviews with 20 fully obedient participants from Milgram’s original studies
They scored significantly higher on the F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient participants
This suggests that obedient people may share many of the characteristics of people with an authoritarian personality
COUNTERPOINT FOR THE RESEARCH SUPPORT OF DISPOSITIONAL EXPLANATIONS
Subscales of the F-scale showed that obedient participants had characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians. e.g they did not experience high levels of punishment in childhood
Suggests a complex link and means that authoritarianism is not a useful predictor of obedience
What are four limitations
Reductionism
Determinism
Link between personality type and obedience is only correlational not causational
Authoritarianism cannot explain a whole country’s behaviour
EVALUATION: Reductionism
P - A weakness of the authoritarian personality as an explanation of obedience is that it can be considered as reductionist
E - This is because the explanation oversimplifies the complex behaviour of obedience down to one factor, which is personality. In fact there may be other factors, which contributes to an individual being obedient to authority figures, such as the legitimacy of the authority figure, the location, proximity and so on
E - This is a weakness as it means that our understanding of having an authoritarian personality and how it causes an individual to become obedient is incomplete
L - Therefore, reducing the validity of the dispositional explanation of obedience
EVALUATION: Determinism
P - A weakness of the authoritarian personality as an explanation of obedience is that it can be considered as deterministic
E - This is because it assumes that all obedient behaviour of an individual is down to strict upbringing and does not take into account other mediating factors that may affect obedience such as free will. People who are brought up with a strict upbringing do not always grow up to be obedient and instead rebel against authority figures
E - This is a weakness as the theory is too narrow and does not consider that there are other mediating factors, which contributes to the obedience of an individual
L - Thus, decreasing the validity of the explanation
EVALUATION: Correlation not causational
The link between the personality type and obedience is only correlational and not causational, which means there could be other factors causing the obedience. Research suggests that less educated people are more likely to have an authoritarian personality than well educated people.
Alternatively some research suggests that when education level is controlled, the more obedient participants still show higher levels of authoritarianism which implies that the authoritarian personality is a better explanation for obedience than education level.
EVALUATION: Authoritarianism can’t explain a whole country’s behaviour
Millions of individuals in Germany displayed obedient and anti semantic behaviour but can’t al have had the same personality
It seems unlikely the majority of Germany’s population had authoritarian personality. A more likely explanation is hat Germans identified with the Nazi state
Therefore social identity theory may be a better explanation
