Obedience: Dispositional Explanations

The authoritarian personality

- A type of personality that Adorno argued was especially susceptible to obeying people in authority. Such individuals are also thought to be submissive to those of higher status and dismissive of inferiors.

Aim

- Adorno et al (1950) wanted to understand the anti-Semitism of the Holocaust

- To investigate the causes of a high level of obedience in the personality of an individual

Procedure

- Investigated the causes of the obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle-class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups. Developed several scales to investigate this, including the potential for fascism scale (F-scale), which is still used to measure authoritarian personality

Findings

-People with authoritarian personalities (those who scored high on the F-scale and other measures) identify with 'strong people' and were generally contemptuous of the 'weak'. They were very conscious of their own and others' status, showing excessive respect, deference and servility to those of high status. Authoritarian people had a cognitive style where they had fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups. There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice

Authoritarian personality and obedience

- Adorno stated that people with an authoritarian personality have a tendency to be especially obedient to authority. They have an extreme respect for authority and submissiveness to it. They also show contempt for people they perceive as having inferior social status, and have highly conventional attitudes towards sex, race and gender

- People with an authoritarian personality are inflexible in their outlook; everything is either right or wrong and they were very uncomfortable with uncertainty

Origin of the authoritarian personality

- Adorno suggested the authoritarian personality formed in childhood, as a result of harsh parenting. He argued that these experiences of harsh parenting create resentment and hostility in the child, but the child cannot express these feelings directly against their parents because of a well-founded fear of reprisals, so the fears are displaced onto others who are perceived to be weaker

- This explains a central trait of obedience to higher authority, which is a dislike for people considered to be socially inferior or who belong to other social groups; psychodynamic explanation

Evaluation: Strengths

• Evidence from Milgram supporting it.

• Milgram and Elms (1966) interviewed a small sample of people who had participated in the original obedience studies and been fully obedient. They all completed the F-scale as part of this. These obedient participants scored higher on the overall F-scale than a comparison group of disobedient participants. The two groups were clearly quite different in terms of authoritarianism

• This finding supports Adorno et al's view that obedient people may well show similar characteristics to people who have an Authoritarian personality

• HOWEVER, the pps had a number of characteristics that were unusual for authoritarians such as not idolising their fathers. Authoritarian personality may not be an accurate prediction of obedience.

Evaluation: Weaknesses (1)

- Authoritarianism cannot explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country's population. E.g. in pre-war Germany, millions of people displayed obedient and anti-semitic behaviour. This was despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways. It seems unlikely that they could all possess an Authoritarian personality. An alternative view is that the majority of these people identified with the anti-semitic Nazi state, a social identity theory approach

- Therefore Adorno's theory is limited because an alternative explanation is more realistic

Evaluation: Weaknesses (2)

- The F-scale only measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology. Christie and Jahoda (1954) argued that the F-scale is a politically-biased interpretation of Authoritarian personality. They point out the reality of left-wing authoritarianism in the shape of Russian Bolshevism. In fact, extreme ring-wing and left-wing ideologies have a lot in common, e.g. they both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to political authority

- This means the theory is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that accounts for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum