Obedience : Dispositional Explanation Flashcards
What is the authoritarian personality ?
High obedience is pathological - Adorno et al believed that unquestioning obedience is a psychological disorder , and tried to find its causes in the individuals personality.
Extreme respect for authority and contempt for ‘inferiors’ - Adorno et al concluded that people with an Authoritarian Personality are especially obedient to authority. They :
• have exaggerated respect for authority and submissiveness to it
• Express contempt for people of inferior social status
Authoritarians tend to follow orders and view ‘other’ group as responsible for society’s ills.
Originates in childhood (e.g. overly strict parents) - Authoritarian Personality forms in childhood through harsh parenting - extremely strict discipline , expectation of absolute loyalty , impossibly high standards and severe criticism.
It is also characterised by conditional love - parent’s love depends entirely on how their child behaves.
Hostility is displaced onto social inferiors - These experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, but they cannot express these feelings directly against their parents because they fear reprisals.
So the feelings are displaced onto others who are weaker - this is scapegoating. This is a psychodynamic explanation.
What research procedures did Adorno perform ?
Procedure :
Several scales were developed , including the potential-for-facism scale (F-scale). Examples from the F-scale (rated on a scale 1 to 6 where 6 +agree strongly):
• Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtu for children to learn
• There is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel great , love , gratitude and respect for his parents.
What findings did Adorno find ?
Findings :
Authoritarians (who scored high on the F-scale and other measures) identified with ‘strong’ people and were contemptuous of the ‘weak’
They were conscious of their own and other’s status , showing excessive respect and deference to those of higher status
Authoritarian people also had a cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people , with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups.
What is one strength of the dispositional explanation as a way to explain obedience ?
P - One strength is evidence that authoritarians are obedient
E - Elms and Milgram interviewed 20 fully obedient participants from Milgram’s original obedience studies. They scored significantly higher on the F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient participants
E - This suggests that obedient people may share many of the characteristics of people with an authoritarian personality.
What is one limitation to the dispositional explanation for obedience ?
P - One limitation is authoritarianism can’t explain a whole county’s behaviour
E - Millions of individuals in Germany displayed obedient and anti-Semitic behaviour - but can’t all have had the same personality. It seems unlikely the majority of Germany’s population had an authoritarian personality. A more likely explanation is that Germans identified with the Nazi state.
E - Therefore social identity theory may be a better explanation
What is one limitation of the dispositional explanation explaining obedience ?
P - One limitation is that the f-scale is potentially biased.
E - Christie and Jahoda suggest the F-scale aims to measure tendency towards extreme right-wing ideology. But right wing and left-wing authoritarianism both insist on complete obedience to political authority.
E - herefore Adorno’s theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation as it doesn’t explain obedience to left-wing authoritarianism , I.e. it is political biased.
What is another limitation of the dispositional explanation for explaining obedience ?
P - One limitation is that there is flawed evidence
E - he F-scale has been used in many research studies. However , the F-scale is flawed (Greenstein) , e.g. people who tend to agree to the statements (response bias) are scored as authoritarian
E - Therefore , explanations of obedience based on research with the F-scale may not be valid.
