Obedience: Dispositional explanations

Specification:Dispositional explanation for obedience: the authoritarian

personality

Situational vs. Dispositional Factors affecting obedience

SITUATIONAL – explanations that focus on the influences that stem from the environment: situational variables cause behaviour.

DISPOSITIONAL - explanation of individual behaviour caused by internal characteristics: a persons personality or disposition cause them to behave in the way they do.

KEYWORDS

According to authoritarian personality theory obedient people are the result of a harsh

upbringing. They obey because, unconsciously, they are scared of their parents.

Dispositional explanations

Although Milgram did not believe that there was an ‘obedient personality’ - there is literature which supports the idea of an

AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY(ADORNO 1950)

Characterised by: • Respect for people of a high

status• Preoccupation with power• Blind respect for authority

Usually associated with harsh parenting or a military background

Personality?

• Adorno (1950) was interested in investigating why Nazi soldiers were so willing to persecute and kill members of minority groups, such as Jews during WW II; could it be blamed on a personality trait?

• He claimed a particular personality type is more likely to obey an authority

• A high level of obedience is basically a psychological disorder

The ‘F’ scale

Complete the ‘F scale’ sheet and

answer the questions at the

bottom of the sheet

Procedure

• Adorno et al. (1950) investigated the causes of an obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle-class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups.

• They developed an ‘F’ scale to measure the relationship between a person's personality type and prejudiced beliefs

F = Fascist……someone who believes in a totalitarian state rule by a supreme leader (dictator) who controls everything possible and treats people harshly

Findings

• Those who had scored highly on the ‘F’ scale identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’.

• They were very conscious of their own and others’ status

• High scorers had a particular cognitive style: there were no ‘grey areas’ between categories of people They had fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups There was a strong positive correlation between

authoritarianism and prejudice

The authoritarian personality

• The identification of a particular personality type, the Authoritarian Personality, provided a possible explanation for why some people require very little pressure in order to obey

Authoritarian Personality: a distinct personality pattern characterised by strict adherence to conventional values and a belief in absolute

obedience or submission to authority

Origin of the authoritarian personality

Fear ofparents

Excessively respectful of

authority figures

Hate and anger displaced onto

others

Hatred ofparents

Harsh and punitive

upbringing;little love,

much punishment

Based on Sigmund Freud’s idea that the adult personality is determined by

childhood experiences

Evaluation

Research support• Milgram and his assistant Alan Elms (1966) conducted a follow-up

study using participants who had taken part in Milgram’s original study

• They found that those who were fully obedient and went all the way to 450 volts scored higher on tests of authoritarianism and lower on scales of social responsibility than those who defied the experimenter

• These findings support Adorno’s claims although only a correlation could be determined.

Evaluation Limited explanation • Any explanation of obedience in terms of

individual personality will find it hard it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population

↓• In pre-war Germany, millions of individuals all

displayed obedient, racist and anti-Semitic behaviour – they cannot all have had the same personality!

Evaluation Political bias• The ‘F’ scale measures the tendency towards an

extreme right-wing ideology.• However, in reality left-wing authoritarianism (e.g.

Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism) also emphasises the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority

• Therefore, Adorno’s theory is limited as it cannot account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum

Evaluation Sample: all male and the research was carried out in America,

so can the results be generalised? Does not explain why people are prejudiced towards some

groups and not others Not all prejudiced people had a harsh upbringing (and vice

versa) The attitude ‘statements’ in the scale are very limited (e.g.

closed questions) Adorno only found that there was a relationship (correlation)

between personality type and prejudice – this cannot show cause and effect