Evaluation of Dispositional Explanations of Obedience

Research support

• Strength - evidence from Milgram along with Alan Elms (Milgram and Elms 1966)

• They interviewed a sample of people from the original obedience studies who were fully obedient and they all completed the F-scale

• All of them scored higher on the F-scale than a comparison group of 20 disobedient participants

• Two groups were clearly different in terms of authoritarianism

• This supports Adorno et al’s view that obedient people may show similar characteristics to people with an Authoritarian personality

Counterpoint to research support

• However when researchers examined individual F-scale results, they found that obedient participants had characteristics that would be unusual for authoritarians

• For example unlike authoritarians, Milgram’s participants generally didn’t glorify their fathers or experience unusual levels of punishment as a child

• Means that the link between obedience and authoritarian personality is complex - the obedient participants and authoritarian personality were different in many ways meaning this is unlikely a useful predictor of obedience

Limited explanation

• Limitation - authoritarianism cannot explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population

• Such as in pre-war Germany millions of individuals displayed obedient and anti-Sematic behaviour

• This was despite the fact they must have differed in personality - and it would be unlikely they all had the Authoritarian personality

• Alternative view could be that the majority of Germany identified with the anti-sematic Nazi state and scapegoated the Jews - social identity theory approach

• Therefore Adorno’s theory is limited due to more realistic alternative explanations

Political bias

• Limitation - 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 the authoritarian personality

• In reality left-wing and right-wing extremist ideologies have a lot in common - both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to political authority

• Means that Adorno’s theory is not an explanation for obedience that accounts for the whole political spectrum