Social Influence: Lesson 8 - Dispositional Explanations Of Obedience

Question 1

What are dispositional explanations of obedience?

Answer 1

An idea proposed by Adorno

- which claims that individuals’ personality characteristics determine their behaviour

Question 2

What is an authoritarian personality?

Answer 2

A type of personality which is more likely to obey authority figures

Question 3

What are the characteristics of an authoritarian personality?

Answer 3

• servile towards people of a perceived status
• hostile towards people of a lower status (scapegoating)
• preoccupied with power
• inflexible in their beliefs and values
• conformist and conventional
• likely to categorise people as ‘us’ or ‘them’
• dogmatic (intolerant of ambiguity)

Question 4

Why do people develop authoritarian personalities?

Answer 4

Adorno believe that this happened because people received extremely strict/rigid parenting, usually involving physical punishment

• this creates feelings of hostility which are displaced onto weaker others who cannot fight back
• they cannot take their anger out on parents because they are scared of them, so they repress their anger and act in a submissive way towards them
• this submissive behaviour is the extended to all authority figures

Question 5

How can authoritarian personalities be measured?

Answer 5

F (Fascism scale)

Question 6

Evaluation of Authoritarian Personality (Miller) (+)

Answer 6

• miller found that people who scored high on the F scale were more likely to obey an order to hold onto some electric wiring while working on an arithmetic problem, compared to people who scored low on the F scale

Question 7

Evaluation of Authoritarian Personality (Altemeyer) (+)

Answer 7

Altemeyer ordered participants to give themselves an electric shock when they made a mistake on a learning task
There was a significant correlation between those willing to shock themselves and high scores on the F scale

Question 8

Evaluation of Authoritarian Personality (Milgram and situational factors ) (-)

Answer 8

• situational factors may be more important than dispositional ones
• obedience was 100% when Mr Wallace made no noise (no requests to leave or screams
• obedience was 0% when there were two authority figures who disagreed with each other

Question 9

Evaluation of authoritarian personalities (obedience in societies) (-)

Answer 9

• dispositional factors cannot explain obedience in entire societies, because authoritarian personalities are not common
• far fewer than 65% of people have authors personalities so it cannot be used as the only explanation for obedience found in the original milgram (1963) study

Question 10

Evaluation of authoritarian personalities (cause and effect of authoritarian personality) (-)

Answer 10

• authoritarian personality may not cause obedience, but rather a lack of education may cause an authoritarian personality and obedience
• middendorp and Meleon found that less educated people are more likely to have an authoritarian personality
• milgram found that participants with lower levels of education were more obedient