Social Influence L9 - Dispositional Factors For Obedience - The Authoritarian Personality

Question 1

What’s obedience

Answer 1

• obedience refers to a type of social influence that causes a person to act in response to a direct order from a figure with perceived authority
• This implies that the person carrying out the order is being made to do something that they otherwise would not have done

Question 2

Who proposed dispositional explanation for obedience

Answer 2

Adorno (1950)

Question 3

What does dispositional explanation claim?

Answer 3

• that individuals’ personality characteristics determine their behaviour, not situational influences in the environment

Question 4

What did Adorno argue?

Answer 4

• that authoritarian personalities are more likely to obey authority figures
• authoritarian personalities have a collection of traits which make them more obedient
• he thought that 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 others who cannot fight back and are therefore safe
• they cannot take out their anger on their parents because they fear them, so instead they act in a submissive way towards them
• they then extend this submissive behaviour to all authority figures

Question 5

Traits that mean someone is more likely to be obedient

Answer 5

• servile towards people of perceived higher status,
• hostile towards people of lower status,
• preoccupied with power,
• inflexible in their beliefs and values,
• conformist and conventional (e.g. rule following),
• likely to categorise people as ‘us’ or ‘them’,
• dogmatic (intolerant of ambiguity)

Question 6

What’s fascism?

Answer 6

A government system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasising an agressive nationalism and often racism

Question 7

How did Adorno measure the authoritarian personality

Answer 7

• using a scale he developed the F (fascism) scale
• Participants are 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’
• Adorno tested more than 2000, middle-class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups and found that there was a relationship between authoritarian personality and scoring high on the F scale

Question 8

Evaluation of the dispositional explanation

Answer 8

Strengths
Research support - Elms & Milgram (1966)
Research support - Miller (1975) & Altemeyer (1981)
weaknesses
Limited explanation
Methodological problems
Temporal validity

Question 9

Research support - Elms and Milgram (1966)

Answer 9

• there is research support for a link between being obedient to authority and having an authoritarian personality (measured through the F scale)
• e.g. Elms and Milgram (1966) carried out a follow up study using participants who had previously taken part in one of Milgram’s experiments two months before
• They selected 20 obedient participants who had continued to deliver electric shocks all the way up to 450 volts, and 20 disobedient participants, who had refused to shock all the way up to 450 volts
• Each participant completed a MMPI scale, which measures several personality traits, and an F scale
• Participants were also asked a series of open-ended question about their relationship with their parents and their attitude to the experimenter and the learner during the previous experiment
• There was little difference between the obedient and disobedient participants in terms of the MMPI scale
• However, there were higher levels of authoritarian traits among the obedient participants – in other words they scored high on the F scale
• Obedient participants were more likely to report being less close to their fathers, and to describe them in negative terms
• They were also more likely to perceive the experimenter (the authority figure) as admirable
• This study shows that the authoritarian personality is a strong dispositional explanation of obedience to authority and provides good research support in that there is definitely a link between the F scale and obedience.

Question 10

Research support - Miller (1975) & Altemeyer (1981)

Answer 10

• Another study to support the authoritarian personality was carried out by Miller (1975) who found individuals who scored high on F scale were more likely to obey an order to hold some electric wiring whilst completing a test
• This study shows that you will obey authority even if harming yourself suggesting that this must be due to your personality
• This was also shown by Altemeyer (1981) who asked participants to shock themselves if they made mistake on a learning task
• The findings of this study also showed that those who scored high on the F scale questionnaire were more likely to shock themselves again showing a link between authoritarian personality and obedience

Question 11

Limited explanation

Answer 11

• By saying that the reason why we obey authority is due to our authoritarian personality is a very limited explanation since it does not explain why the majority of the population in a country such as Germany are very obedient but not all Germans can possess an authoritarian personality
• An alternative to this explanation is the Social Identity Theory which explains obedience whereby the Germans people identified with the anti-Semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the ‘outgroup’ of Jews
• In other words, the Social Identity Theory is a more relevant explanation of obedience than the authoritarian personality

Question 12

Methodological problems

Answer 12

• A limitation of the authoritarian personality explanation is that it is based on flawed methodology e.g. Adorno introduced the F- scale questionnaire to measure the obedient personality
• There are many problems with the questionnaire itself
• For example, each item on the questionnaire is worded in the same direction meaning it is fairly easy to get a high score on the authoritarian personality
• Moreover, the questions are all closed meaning there is no room for explanation
• Furthermore although Adorno did interview his participants about their childhood experiences, he already knew their score on the questionnaire meaning that he would have showed interviewer bias

Question 13

F-Scale lacks temporal validity

Answer 13

• questions aren’t relevant to society today
  E.g. homosexuals are hardly better then criminals and ought to be severely punished