Dispositional Explanation for Obedience: Authoritarian Personality 4

What is a dispositional explanation of obedience ?

-One which is based on the characteristics of an individual, e.g.

• Some people are more likely to be obedient than others due to their personality traits

What did Adorno propose ?

• Proposed the concept of the authoritarian personality as an explanation of dispositional obedience

What does Adorno theory claim?

• Claims that personality develops as a result of childhood experiences

  • The theory takes the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate

  • Nurture includes any external influence on personality/behaviour, e.g. upbringing, learning, environment

What did Adorno (1950) devise?

• a questionnaire known as the F-scale to-measure the authoritarian personality

  • ‘F’ on the scale denotes a rating of fascism

  • Examples of statements on the F-scale include

    • 'Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn'

    • 'Young people sometimes get rebellious ideas, but as they grow up they ought to get over them and settle down'

    • Fixed responses on the scale ranged from 'Disagree strongly' to 'Agree strongly'

  • More than 2,000 middle-class white Americans completed the scale

    • Note that the sample demographic did not represent all racial and ethnic groups in the USA at the time

  • The scale was designed to reveal attitudes towards other racial groups 

What did Adorno conclude after analysing the results?

that people with an authoritarian personality exhibit the following traits:

• They are more obedient than other people

• They respect social hierarchies and authority figures

• They are ‘black and white’ in their opinions and see the world in a rigid, inflexible way, e.g.

  • ‘men should be real men and not show emotion’

• They are disdainful of anyone who shows ‘weakness,’

• They look down on those whom they consider to be ‘beneath’ them in the social hierarchy, e.g., people who are mentally ill, homeless, of a different race/ethnicity/culture

• They may feel resentment or anger towards authority figures (including their parents) but they direct these negative feelings to other, lower-status people, e.g.

  • someone who has a tyrannical boss may come home and shout at their partner because they cannot stand up for themselves at work

What did Adorno suggest on how the authoritarian personality forms ?

• forms during childhood as a result of having overbearing, dictatorial parentswho do not allow or encourage free will, expression or freedom of choice in their children

• The parents of an authoritarian personality are likely to:

  • exert strong discipline at home

  • have high expectations of their children

  • exercise a version of love that is based on conditions

• Adorno thought that the children of such parents learns these behaviours and attitudes, eventually identifying with them and thus the authoritarian personality is formed

Elms & milgram (1966)

• Replicated Milgram’s (1963) original obedience study

• They took 20 participants who had previously gone up to 450 volts in a prior replication of the study (i.e., these participants showed high obedience)

• They took 20 participants who had refused to go 450 volts in a prior replication of the study (i.e., these participants showed low obedience)

• The participants completed questionnaires, one of which was Adorno's F-scale

  • Some of the questionnaires included open questions which asked about their relationship with their parents and with the experimenter when they took part in Milgram's study

• The findings showed that the high-obedience participantsscored higher on the F-scale than the low-obedience participants

• The high-obedience participants also reported that they did not feel close to their fathers when they were growing up

  • these participants also reported feelings of admiration for the experimenter when they took part in Milgram's study

• Thus, there appears to be a relationship between childhood experience, authoritarian personality and high obedience

Evaluation of dispositional explanations of obedience STRENGTH 1

• Adorno’s F-scale questionnaire is replicable

  • It uses standardised questions

    • All participants answer the same questions, which can be used repeatedly with other samples, thus generating robust quantitative data

    • A large sample size and quantitative data means that the scale can be tested for reliability, e.g., using the test-retest method

Evaluation of dispositional explanations of obedience STRENGTH 2

• Elms & Milgram (1966) adds a different slant to Milgram's conclusion that obedience is the result of situational factors

  • Acknowledging the role of dispositional factors in obedience adds another dimension to Milgram's research

  • This observation helps to address any gaps in his original conclusions

Evaluation of dispositional explanations of obedience LIMITATION 1

• Using a questionnaire to obtain data is not 100% valid

  • People may lie, possibly because they can (i.e., no one will know, plus it's a low-stakes task which doesn't, ultimately, matter to them)

  • People may misremember details, particularly if the events happened many years ago

  • People may be prone to social desirability bias, providing responses which show them in their 'best light,' i.e., their ideal self

Evaluation of dispositional explanations of obedience LIMITATION 2

• The theory is overly simplistic as not everyone who shows high levels of obedience has an authoritarian personality

  • An over-simplistic theory is both reductionist and deterministic

    • the theory reduces a complex variable (personality) to a score on a scale

    • the theory determines that if you possess specific personality traits, then you will be obedient, regardless of the situation