Social influence: explanations for obedience Flashcards
(17 cards)
What are two types of explanations for obedience?
-situational
-dispositional
What are the 2 types of situational explanation?
-legitimacy of authority
-agentic state
What is legitimacy of authority?
-when people obey when an authority is higher on a social hierarchy (supported by institutional framework)
What supports this type of situational explanation (legitamacy of authority)
-milgrams variations:
.location: when the experiment was in an office instead of Yale obedience dropped from 65% to 48%
.uniform: when the experimenter didn’t wear a lab coat obedience dropped to 20%
What research doesn’t support this type of situational explanation (legitamcy of authority)
-it ignores dispositional factors
-milgrim: only saw 65% obedience (ignores why 35% didn’t obey)
What is agentic state?
-when people obey because they don’t feel responsible for their actions (act as an agent)
-may feel moral strain
What research supports agentic state?
-milgrim variations:
.proximity of authority: when given orders over the phone obedience was only 20%
.proximity of victim: when teacher makes the learner touch the shock plate obedience drops to 30%
What research doesn’t support agentic state?
-many of milgrams participants remained disobeyed
What is a type of dispositional explanations?
-authoritarian personality
who researched into the authoritarian personality?
.adorno et al
What is authoritarian personality?
-some people have a personality that makes them more likely to obey (more likely to have rigid conservative political views)
what are the characterises of a authoritarian personality?
.hostile
.ethnocentric
.rigid in their thoughts
.obedient to people above them
.intolerant to people beneath them
.conservative
HEROIC
what did Adorno say the authoritarian personality type comes from?
.as a result of a strict and rigid upbringing personality originates from harsh, strict and rigid
what did Adorno do into research authoritarian personality?
.investigated 2000 Middle class American’s unconscious views to other racial groups on the F-scale
what did Adorno find?
.authoritarians (high on scale) identified as strong and were contempt of the weak, and had fixed stereotypes about categories of people
What research supports authoritarian personality?
-explains individual differences in obediences: milgram found only 65% obedience so there must be individual differences
What research doesn’t support authoritarian personality?
-situational variables may be more important -presence of obedient vs disobedient allies made obedience flucutate between 10% and 92.5% regardless of disposition (natural tendency)
