social influence: dispositional explanations of obedience Flashcards
What does Adorno’s perspective emphasize regarding obedience?
Dispositional factors related to personality > certain psychological traits predispose individuals to obey authority.
What is an authoritarian personality?
A personality type characterized by obedience to authority
List some characteristics of an authoritarian personality.
- Respected and identified with ‘strong’ people
- Disliked ‘weak’ people
- hyperaware of their own and others’ status > only submissive to ‘stronger’ individuals
- Held fixed and stereotypical views
- Black and white thinking
- Prejudice
These traits contribute to their high level of obedience.
What does Adorno argue about the origins of an authoritarian personality?
Develops during childhood due to harsh parenting
(psychodynamic explanation)
What parenting features did Adorno identify as contributing to an authoritarian personality?
- Extremely strict and harsh parenting
- Expectation of absolute loyalty
- Impossibly high standards
- Severe criticism of perceived failings
- Conditional love
How does harsh parenting affect a child’s feelings?
- Creates resentment and hostility
- children can’t express this due to fear of punishment
- they displace these feelings onto ‘weaker’ individuals
What is scapegoating in the context of authoritarian personality development?
Displacing resentment onto others considered weaker > this can lead to hatred towards socially inferior groups
Fill in the blank: People with an authoritarian personality are very aware of their own and others’ _______.
status > this awareness influences their submissive behavior towards stronger individuals
True or False: Individuals with an authoritarian personality tend to have flexible views about people.
False > They exhibit fixed and stereotypical views, leading to rigid thinking.
AO3: limited explanation
This theory offers a limited explanation > This theory suggests having an authoritarian personality suggests you will display high levels of obedience.
This is a weakness because you will be unable to explain obedience in the majority of a countries population. For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals all displayed obedient,racist and anti-Semitic behaviour. This is despite the fact that they had different personalities. It seems unlikely that they all possessed an authoritarianpersonality.
WEAKNESS of the theory as it is clear that there must be an alternative explanation that is more realistic, such as the social identify theory.
AO3: correlation not causation
A weakness of this theory is that it does not show causation
Adorno found that there is a strong correlation between an authoritarian personality and obedience
WEAKNESS as this only shows that there is a relationship between the two variables. It does not suggest that having an authoritarian personality causes you to be obedient. There may be another third variable affecting obedience. So this theory is incomplete.
AO3: flawed methodology
it is based on flawed methodology.
Every one of the items on the F-scale is worded in the same direction. This means that it is possible to get a high score for an authoritarian personality just by ticking the same line of boxes
down one side of the page. So such participants are not necessarily authoritarian and the scale is just measuring the tendency to agree to everything.
WEAKNESS as this means the use of a F-scale and Adorno’s study does not accurately support the theory.
AO3: research to support
research evidence from Milgram supporting the Authoritarian personality > Milgram interviewed a small sample of people who participated in his original study and had been fully obedient. They all completed the F-scale
Those 20 obedient participants scored significantly higher on the overall F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient participants
STRENGTH as this supports Adorno’s view that obedient people may show similar characteristics to people who have an authoritarian personality
COUNTER: However the obedient participants had a number of characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians such as glorify their father and hostile attitudes towards their mothers. This means the obedient participants were unlike authoritarians and that authoritarianism is unlikely to be a useful predictor of obedience
