Obedience - Dispositional explanations PDF

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in depth notes on the subtopics for independent reading for the dd102 module...

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Obedience - Dispositional explanations

The authoritarian personality Like Milgram, Theodor Adorno and his colleagues wanted to understand the anti- Semitism of the Holocaust. Their research led them to draw very different conclusions than Milgram had. On the basis of their research they came to believe that a high level of obedience was basically a psychological disorder, and tried to locate the causes of it in the personality of the individual. Procedure Adorno et al. (1950) 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. They developed several scales to investigate this, including the potential for fascism scale (F-scale) which is still used to measure authoritarian personality. Two examples of items from the F-scale are: ‘Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn’, and ‘There is hardly anything lower than a person who does not feel a great love, gratitude and respect for his parents’. Other examples are given on the facing page. Findings Probably the most interesting discovery from this study was that people with authoritarian leanings (i.e. those who scored high on the F-scale and other measures) identified 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 higher status. Adorno et al. also found that authoritarian people had a cognitive style where there was no ‘fuzziness’ between categories of people, with fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups. There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice. Authoritarian characteristics Adorno concluded 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. They view society as ‘going to the dogs’ and therefore believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of country, religion and family. People with an authoritarian personality are inflexible in their outlook – for them there are no ‘grey areas’. Everything is either right or wrong and they are very uncomfortable with uncertainty. Origin of the authoritarian personality Adorno et al. also sought to identify the origin of the authoritarian personality type. They concluded that it formed in childhood, as a result of harsh parenting. Typically, the parenting style identified by Adorno features extremely strict discipline, an expectation of absolute loyalty, impossibly high

standards, and severe criticism of perceived failings. It is also characterised by conditional love – that is, the parents’ love and affection for their child depends entirely on how he or she behaves. Adorno argued that these experiences 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 well known as scapegoating. This explains a central trait of obedience to have dislike (and even hatred) for people considered to be socially inferior or who belong to other social groups. This is a psychodynamic explanation.

Not all psychologists accept that obedience can be fully explained by factors within the situation or the social structure. They reason that there must be at least some role for the personality or disposition of the individual. After all, not all of Milgram’s participants fully obeyed, and some actively rebelled, despite them experiencing identical situational and social pressures. There are several dispositional explanations of obedience, but the most influential concerns the authoritarian personality.

Key terms Dispositional explanation – Any explanation of behaviour that highlights the importance of the individual’s personality (i.e. their disposition). Such explanations are often contrasted with situational explanations. 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.

Workplace bully Leon works in the Head Office of a big national company. His boss has a reputation as a bully because he is always shouting at people and telling them what to do in no uncertain terms. The floor Leon works on is open-plan so his boss can easily see what everyone is doing. Leon has noticed that his boss is always sucking up to the senior managers at every opportunity. Question Explain the behaviour of Leon’s boss in terms of (i) situational variables; (ii) social-psychological factors; (iii) dispositional factors.

Concepts: Caleb’s granddad Caleb’s granddad is the old-fashioned type. As far as he’s concerned, there are good Zombies and there are bad Zombies and that’s all there is to it. He thinks the youth of today are a bunch of wasters and what they all need is a spell in the Zombie Army. He longs for the days when we had strong leaders who knew how to get things done. Caleb has also noticed that his granddad talks with

a lot of respect about his old bosses from work: ‘They don’t make them like that anymore – you’d do anything for them.’ Caleb often wonders why his granddad thinks like this. Question From what you know about obedience, how would you explain to Caleb why his granddad has these attitudes?

Evaluation Research support Milgram and his assistant Alan Elms (1966) conducted interviews with a small sample of fully obedient participants, who scored highly on the F-scale, believing that there might be a link between obedience and authoritarian personality. However, this link is merely a correlation between two measured variables. This makes it impossible to draw the conclusion that authoritarian personality causes obedience on the basis of this result. It may be that a ‘third factor’ is involved. Perhaps both obedience and authoritarian personality are associated with a lower level of education, for instance, and are not directly linked with each other at all (Hyman and Sheatsley 1954). Limited explanation Any explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population. For example, in pre-war Germany, millions of individuals all displayed obedient, racist and anti- Semitic behaviour. This was despite the fact that they must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways. It seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess an authoritarian personality. This is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is clear that an alternative explanation is much more realistic – that social identity explains obedience. The majority of the German people identified with the anti-Semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the ‘outgroup’ of Jews. Political bias The F-scale measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology. Christie and Jahoda (1954) argued that this is a politically biased interpretation of authoritarian personality. They point out the reality of left-wing authoritarianism in the shape, for example, of Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism. In fact, extreme right-wing and left-wing ideologies have much in common – not the least of which is that they both emphasise the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority. This is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is not a comprehensive dispositional explanation that can account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.

Evaluation eXtra Methodological problems

A limitation of the authoritarian personality explanation is that it is based on a flawed methodology. Greenstein (1969) goes as far as to describe the F-scale as ‘a comedy of methodological errors’. For example, the scale has come in for severe criticism because every one of its items is worded in the same ‘direction’. This means it is possible to get a high score for authoritarianism just by ticking the same line of boxes down one side of the page. People who agree with the items on the F-scale are therefore not necessarily authoritarian but merely ‘acquiescers’, and the scale is just measuring the tendency to agree to everything (see acquiescence bias on page 185). Also, Adorno and his colleagues interviewed their participants about their childhood experiences. But the researchers knew the participants’ test scores, so knew which of them had authoritarian personalities. They also knew the hypothesis of the study. Consider: Why are these problems limitations of the explanation?

Correlation, not causation Adorno and his colleagues measured an impressive range of variables and found many significant correlations between them. For instance, they found that authoritarianism was strongly correlated with measures of prejudice against minority groups. However, no matter how strong a correlation between two variables might be, it does not follow that one causes the other. Therefore, Adorno could not claim that a harsh parenting style caused the development of an authoritarian personality. Consider: Explain why this is a serious limitation of the explanation.

The F-scale technically measures tendency towards fascism, thought to be the essence of the authoritarian personality. Fascism is an extreme right-wing ideolo gy personi ed by former dictators such as Mussolini (above) in Italy and Franco in Spain.

Concepts: The F-scale Here are some more items from the F-scale created by Adorno and his colleagues to measure the nine dimensions of the authoritarian personality. Participants had to rate their agreement with each item on a 6-point scale ranging from 1, disagree strongly, to 6, agree strongly. • The businessman and the manufacturer are much more important to society than the artist and the professor. • Science has its place, but there are many important things that can never be understood by the human mind. • Every person should have complete faith in some supernatural power whose decisions he obeys without question. •

Nobody ever learned anything really important except through suffering.

•

Homosexuals are hardly better than criminals and ought to be severely punished.

Question Use your knowledge of Adorno’s theory to explain how each of these items relates to the features of the authoritarian personality....