Authoritarian Personality (Dispositional Explanation to Obedience)

Dispositional Explanation

Any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individual’s personality

Authoritarian Personality

A personality pattern characterised by strict adherence to conventional values & a belief in absolute obedience or submission to authority

• Are usually dismissive of inferiors

Who investigated the authoritarian personality

Adorno (et al) 1950

What did Adorno et al believe about the authoritarian personality?

• Forms in childhood

• Result of harsh parenting 

  • Created resentment & hostility

  • These fears & feelings are displaced onto others who are perceived to be weaker (scapegoating)

Adorno PROCEDURE 

• Studied over 2000 middle-class, white Americans & their unconscious attitudes towards other ethnic groups

• Developed several measurement scales, including F-Scale 

Adorno Findings

People who scored high on F-Scale identified w. ‘strong’ people

• They were v. conscious of status & showed respect to those of higher status than them

• Had certain cognitive style that was v. ‘black & white’

  • Had fixed & distinctive stereotypes about other groups

• Found strong, positive correlation between authoritarian and prejudice 

DIS1: Education may determine authoritarianism & obedience

P: Research (e.g. M&M, 1990), has generally found that less-educated people are consistently more authoritarian than the well educated

Ev: Milgram also found that the participants w. lower levels of education tended to be more obedient than those w. higher levels of education

Ex: Suggests that lack of education could actually be responsible for both authoritarianism & obedience.

L: As a result, any apparent casual relationship between authoritarianism & obedience may be more illusory than real

DIS2: Social context more important

P: M accepted there may be a dispositional basis to obedience & disobedience (correlational), but he didn’t believe the evidence for this was particularly strong

Ev: M showed that variations in the social context of the study (e.g. proximity of victim, location, presence of disobedient peers) were the primary cause of differences in participants’ levels of obedience, not variations in personality

Ex: He believed that the specific social situation participants found themselves in caused them to obey or resist regardless of their personalities.

L: Relying on an explanation of obedience based purely on authoritarianism lacks the flexibility to account for these variations ( Milgram, 1974)

AD1: Research support

Ev: Elms & Milgram (1966) did a follow-up on participants from M’s orig. study, w. 20 ‘obedient’ & 20 ‘defiant’ participants. They did scale tests, and answered questions about their childhood & attitudes to experimenter in orig, study

Ex: Found obedient people were more authoritarian, less close to their father, & more admirable of researcher than defiant pps were.

L: Supports the idea that people with authoritarian personality are more obedient than those w.out, increasing validity of explanation

DIS3: Possibility of response bias

P: Elms & M used Adorno’s F scale to determine levels of authoritarian personality

Ex: It is possible the pps answering the F scale were suffering from response bias or social desirability bias.

Ev: For example, pps may appear more authoritarian cos they believe their answers are the socially ‘correct’ & consequently they are incorrectly classified as authoritarian when they aren’t

L: This reduces validity