Dispositional Factors affecting obedience

What are dispositional factors?

individual characteristics that influence behaviour and actions in a person

What study investigated how dispositional factors affect obedience?

Adorno et al (1950)

What was the aim of Adorno et al (1950)?

They wanted to understand the events of the Holocaust

What did Adorno et al (1950) conclude?

They concluded that people with an authoritarian personality have a tendency to be especially obedient to authority

They have extreme respect for authority and are highly submissive to it

What scale is used to measure personality?

F-Scale

Who do people with authoritarian people have contempt for?

They have contempt for people they class as inferior and they have conventional attitudes to sex, race and gender

Are authoritarian people flexible or inflexible?

They are inflexible as they believe everything is either right or wrong, with no grey area

What is having an authoritarian personality a consequence of?

It is believed to be a consequence of harsh parenting, where strict discipline, impossibly high standards and severe criticism of perceived failures are the norm

How does an authoritarian behaviour arise?

The authoritarian behaviour arises as the child displaces the resentment and hostility they feel towards their parent on to a 'safer' 'weaker' person

How does Adorno et al. being a correlational study lower validity?

- the obvious flaw of this study is that it's a correlational study

- a correlation doesn't infer causality therefore, in this study, obedient behaviour isn't necessarily the result of an authoritarian personality or vice versa

- there may be a third factor which explains the link between an authoritarian personality and obedience

- it undermines the validity of the explanation as assumptions about authoritarianism causing obedience may be inaccurate

How does issues in the method of Adorno et al. reduce internal validity?

- a limitation of this explanation is that it's based on flawed methodology

- Adorno interviewed his pps about their childhood, but the researchers already knew the pps test scores, and so knew who was or wasn't authoritarian

- this lead to interviewer bias, reducing the internal validity of the study

How is the F-Scale flawed?

- another issue with the F-Scale is that it measures the tendency towards a right wing ideology

- however, extreme left wing ideology is equally as dangerous and also relies on total obedience to be effective

- someone answering this questionnaire with such left wing tendencies would appear to have no authoritarian personality despite being highly obedient

- this is a problem as it doesn't explain obedience across the political spectrum

How does Adorno et al's findings having limited application act as a weakness for the theory?

- there is limited application of this theory as it can't explain cases where entire populations demonstrated obedient behaviour

- for example, millions of individuals displayed obedient, anti-semitic and racism in pre-war Germany

- it's highly unlikely that an entire nation had the same personality types, so there may have been another cause

- perhaps another explanation would be more appropriate in cases of widespread obedience