Dispositional Explanation for Obedience: Authoritarian Personality (AQA AS Psychology)

Authoritarian personality

• A dispositional explanation of obedience is 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

•  Adorno proposed the concept of the authoritarian personality as an explanation of dispositional obedience

  • Adorno's theory 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

• Adorno (1950) devised 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 

• After analysing the results, Adorno concluded 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’, e.g.

    • 'conscientious objectors should be despised'

  • 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

• Adorno suggested that the authoritarian personality forms during childhood as a result of having overbearing, dictatorial parents who 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 which is based on conditions, for example:

    • ‘I’ll love you as long as you do exactly what I say and are the son/daughter that I want you to be’

• Adorno thought that the child 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 participants scored higher on the F-scale than the low-obedience participants

  • The high-obedience participants also reported that they did not feel close to their father 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

Strengths

• 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

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

• 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

Limitations

• 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

• 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