Obedience: Dispositional explanations Flashcards
1
Q
The authoritarian personality
A
- Adorno and his colleagues wanted to understand the antisemitism of the Holocaust. Their research led them to draw very different conclusions than Milgram had. On the basis of their research they came to believe that a high level of obedience was basically a psychological disorder, and tried to locate the causes of it in the personality of an individual.
2
Q
Procedure
A
- Adorno investigated the causes of the obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards racial groups. They developed several scales to investigate this, including the potential for fascism scale (F-scale) which is still used to measure authoritarian personality.
3
Q
Procedure pt.2
A
- Two examples of items from the f-scale are: ‘Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn’ and, ‘There is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel a great love, gratitude and respect for his parents’.
4
Q
Findings
A
- Probably the most interesting discovery from this study was that people with authoritarian leanings (i.e. those who scored high on the F-scale and other measures) identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’. They were very conscious of their own and others’ status, showing excessive respect, deference and servility to those of a higher status.
5
Q
Findings pt.2
A
Adorno also found that authoritarian people had a cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups. There was a strong, positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.
6
Q
Authoritarian characteristics
A
Adorno concluded that people with an authoritarian personality have a tendency to be specially obedient to authority. They have an extreme respect for authority and submissiveness to it. They also show contempt for people they perceive as having inferior social status, and have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race and gender.
- They view society as ‘going to the dogs’ and therefore believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of country, religion and family. People with an authoritarian personality are inflexible in their outlook- for them there are no ‘grey areas’. Everything is either right or wrong and they are very uncomfortable with uncertainty.
7
Q
Origin of the authoritarian personality
A
- Adorno also sought to identify the origin of the authoritarian personality type. They concluded that it formed in childhood, as a result of harsh parenting. Typically, the parenting style identified by Adorno features extremely strict discipline, an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high standards, and severe criticism of perceived failings. It is also characterised by conditional love- that is, the parents’ love and affection for their child depends entirely on how he or she behaves.
8
Q
Origin of the authoritarian personality pt.2
A
- Adorno argued that these experiences create resentment and hostility in the child, but the child cannot express these feelings directly against their parents because of a well-founded fear of reprisals. So the fears are displaced onto others who are perceived to be weaker, in a process known as scapegoating.
- This explains the central trait of obedience to higher authority, which is a dislike (and even hatred) for people considered to be socially inferior or who belong to other social groups (this is a psychodynamic explanation).
9
Q
Evaluation- research support
A
- Milgram and his assistant Alan Elms conducted interviews with a small sample of fully obedient participants, who scored highly on the F-scale, believing that there might be a link between obedience and authoritarian personality.
10
Q
Evaluation- research support pt.2
A
- However, this link is merely a correlation between two measured variables. This makes it impossible to draw the conclusion that authoritarian personality causes obedience on the basis of this result. It may be that a ‘third factor’ is involved. Perhaps both obedience and authoritarian personality are associated with a lower level of education, for instance, and are not directly linked with each other at all.
11
Q
Evaluation- Limited explanation
A
- Any explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population. For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals all displayed obedient, racist and anti-Semitic behaviour. This was despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways. It seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess an authoritarian personality.
12
Q
Evaluation- limited explanation pt.2
A
- This is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is clear that an alternative explanation is much more realistic- that social identity explains obedience. The majority of the German people identified with the anti- Semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the ‘outgroup’ of Jews.
13
Q
Evaluation- political bias
A
- The F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology. Christie and Jahoda argued that this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality. They point out the reality of left-wing authoritarianism in the shape, for example, of Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism. In fact, extreme right-wing and left-wing ideologies have much in common- no the least of which is that they both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority.
14
Q
Evaluation- political bias pt.2
A
- This is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that can account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.
