Dispositional Explanation of Obedience

Dispositional explanation meaning

• Any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individual’s personality (i.e their disposition)

• The opposite of situational explanations

Authoritarian personality (AP)

• A type of personality that Adorno argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in authority

• Such individuals are thought to be submissive to those of higher status and dismissive of inferiors

Authoritarian personality and obedience

• People with Authoritarian Personalities show contempt for those of inferior social status

• Fuelled by their inflexible outlook on the world - everything is either right or wrong

• People with this personality see society as ‘weaker’ than it once was - believe we need strong powerful leaders to enforce traditional values

• These make them more likely to obey orders from an authority source

Origins of the authoritarian personality

• Adorno believed the Authoritarian personality type forms in childhood as a result of harsh parenting

• I.e strict discipline and impossibly high standards

• Parents that give conditional love (love based on how their child behaves)

• Adorno et al argued that this creates resentment and hostility in a child - and cannot express feelings with their parents out of fear of punishment

• So their fears are displaced onto others who they perceive to be weaker (called scapegoating)

• This explains the hatred towards people considered to be socially inferior or who belong to other social groups - a central feature of obedience to higher authority

• This is a psychodynamic explanation

Adorno et al (1950)

• Originally wanted to understand the anti-Semitism of the Holocaust

• Research led to a different conclusion to Milgram’s

• Believed that a high level of obedience was a psychological disorder - and that the causes of the disorder lies in their personality rather than in the situation

Adorno et al’s procedure

• Studied more than 2000 middle-class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups

• Developed the potential-for-fascism scale (F-scale) used to measure authoritarian personality (still used today)

• Examples of items on the scale are ‘obedience and respect for authority are highly important to teach children’ and ‘there is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel great love, gratitude and respect for his parents’

Adorno et al’s findings

• People with authoritarian leanings (scored high on the F-scale) identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’, and were conscious of their status, and showed traits of obedience (extreme respect, deference and servility of those of higher status)

• Also found that authoritarian people had a cognitive style in which there was no ‘fuzziness’ between types of people (black and white thinking)

• Adorno also found a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice