Social Influence L9

Question 1

Obedience definition

Answer 1

A type of social influence that causes a person to act in response to a direct order from a figure of authority

Question 2

What is a dispositional (personality) explanation of obedience?

Answer 2

Authoritarian personality

Question 3

Who investigated the authoritarian personality?

Answer 3

Adorno (1950)

Question 4

What 7 traits do individuals with authoritarian personalities have that makes them more likely to obey authority figures?

Answer 4

1. Servile towards people of perceived high status
2. Hostile towards people of lower status (they look down on people of lower status)
3. Preoccupied with power
4. Inflexible in their beliefs and values (they believe only their beliefs are correct)
5. Conformist and conventional (e.g: rule-following & traditional)
6. Likely to categorise people as ‘us’ (people of same status) or ‘them’ (people of lower status)
7. Dogmatic (intolerant of ambiguity)

Question 5

Why did people develop authoritarian personalities? (suggested by Adorno)

Answer 5

• People developed these personalities due to receiving extremely harsh discipline from their parents during their upbringing , usually involving physical punishment
• This creates feelings of hostility which are directed towards weaker people who cannot fight back
• They cannot take out their anger on their parents because they fear them, so instead they act in a submissive way towards them
• They extend this submissive behaviour to all authority figures

Question 6

What is the name of the questionnaire developed by Adorno (1950) to measure authoritarian personalities?

Answer 6

F (Fascism) Scale

Question 7

Explain how the F (Fascism) scale was used

Answer 7

• Participants were asked to rate how much they agree with statements such as ‘obedience and respect for authority are important virtues children should learn’ and ‘rules are there to follow, not to be changed’
• They had to rate their agreement with each item on a 6-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree)
• Adorno tested more than 2000 middle-class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups
• He found that there was a relationship between authoritarian personality and scoring high on the F scale

Question 8

What is a strength of the authoritarian personality?

Answer 8

1. It has research support to show a link between being obedient to authority and having an authoritarian personality (measured through the F-scale)
   - Elms & Milgram (1966) carried out a follow-up study using participants who had previously taken part in one of Milgram’s experiments 2 months before
   - They selected 20 obedient participants and 20 disobedient participants
   - Each participant completed a F scale and a MMPI scale (personality test)
   - Participants were also asked a series of open-ended questions about their relationship with their parents and their attitude to the experimenter & the learner during the previous experiment
   - There was little difference between the obedient and disobedient participants with the MMPI scale (personality test)
   - However there were higher levels of authoritarian traits among the obedient participants (they scored high on the F scale)
   - Obedient participants reported they were less close to their fathers and described them in negative terms
   - Therefore, there is definitely a link between the F scale and obedience (the higher you score, the more obedient you are)
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   - Another study to show research support was carried out by Miller (1975), who found that individuals who scored high on the F scale were more likely to obey an order to hold some electric wiring whilst completing a test
   - This shows that you will obey authority even if it causes you to harm yourself, suggesting it must be due to your personality

• This was also shown by Altemeyer (1981) who asked participants to shock themselves if they made a mistake on a learning task
• Those who scored high on the F scale questionnaire were more likely to shock themselves
• This shows a link between authoritarian personality and obedience

Question 9

What are 2 weaknesses of authoritarian personality?

Answer 9

1. Limited explanation
   - It does not explain why the majority of the population in a country such as Germany are very obedient but not all Germans possess an authoritarian personality
   - An alternative to this explanation is the Social Identity Theory which explains obedience whereby the German people identified with the anti-Semitic (hostile against Jews) Nazi state
   - Therefore, the Social Identity Theory is a more relevant explanation of obedience than the authoritarian personality
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2. Methodological problems
   - It is based on flawed methodology
   - For example, Adorno introduced the F-scale questionnaire to measure the obedient personality but it has many problems
   - Each item on the questionnaire is worded in the same direction meaning it’s fairly easy to get a high score on the authoritarian personality
   - They are all closed-questions, meaning there is no room for explanation
   - Also, although Adorno interviewed his participants about their childhood experiences, he already knew their score on the questionnaire, meaning he would have shown interviewer bias
   - This questions the validity of the authoritarian personality as an explanation of obedience