dispositional factors for obedience

what is the dispositional factor of obedience

authoritarian personality

AO1 authoritarian personality

• Adorno et al. (1950) proposed the authoritarian personality as an explanation for why some people show higher obedience.

• They studied over 2000 white, middle-class Americans and developed the F-scale to measure authoritarian traits such as exaggerated respect for authority.

• People who scored high on the F-scale were found to be more obedient, showing strong respect and submissiveness toward authority figures.

• These individuals also showed fixed, rigid beliefs and strong stereotypes about other groups.

• Adorno argued the personality develops through harsh, strict parenting, including strict discipline, impossibly high standards, and conditional love.

• Because children cannot express resentment toward their parents, the hostility is displaced onto weaker groups (scapegoating), producing a personality that obeys authority but shows contempt for those seen as lower status.

evaluation points

1. Adorno's study is correlational (could be a third factor)

2. methodological issues (interviewer bias)

3. F-scale is flawed - only measures right wing tendencies

4. cannot be applied - nearly entire population of Germany behaved obediently (but couldn't have all had the same personality)

evaluation - Adorno’s study

P: a problem with Adorno’s study is he measured an impressive range of variables and found significant correlations between them

E: for instance they found that authoritarianism was strongly linked/ correlated with measures of prejudice against minority groups

E: However, no matter how a strong between two variables might be, it does not follow that one causes the other and there may be a third factor to blame

L: therefore, Aldorno could not claim that a harsh parenting style causes the development of an authoritarian personality, reducing validity

evaluation - methodological issues

P: a limitation is that it is based on a flawed methodology. Greenstein goes as far as to describe F-scale as a comedy of methodological errors

E: e.g. the scale has come into severe criticism as every single one of its items is worded in the same ‘direction’

E: this means it is possible to get a high score by just ticking the same line of boxes

L: therefore people who agree to items on F-scale are not necessarily authorisation but merely ‘acquiescers’

evaluation - F-scale is flawed and politically biased

P: A further limitation is that the authoritarian personality explanation is politically biased.

E: Christie and Jahoda (1954) argued that the F-scale only measures extreme right-wing ideology and ignores left-wing authoritarianism.

E: This means the theory cannot account for obedience across the whole political spectrum, reducing its validity as a general explanation.

L: Therefore, the authoritarian personality may reflect political bias rather than a neutral psychological account of obedience.

evaluation - not always applicable

P: A major limitation of the authoritarian personality explanation is that it cannot always be applied to real-world cases of obedience.

E: For example, large-scale obedience such as that seen in Nazi Germany involved millions of people who all obeyed, even though it is highly unlikely they all shared the same authoritarian personality type.

E: This shows that situational factors, such as social identity and group pressures, must play a more significant role than individual personality alone.

L: Therefore, the authoritarian personality provides only a partial explanation and cannot fully account for obedience across different contexts and populations.