Explanations for obedience: agentic state and legitimacy of authority, and the dispositional explanation of the Authoritarian Personality as proposed by Adorno.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to explain obedience through two situational concepts (agentic state and legitimacy of authority) and one dispositional explanation (the Authoritarian Personality), with evaluation. The exam skill is to keep the situational and dispositional explanations clearly separate and to evaluate the F-scale evidence carefully.

The agentic state and legitimacy of authority

The first two explanations are situational, locating the cause of obedience in the social situation rather than the person. According to Milgram, people can occupy one of two states. In the autonomous state they act on their own free will and feel responsible for their behaviour, but when they perceive someone as a legitimate authority they undergo an agentic shift into the agentic state, where they see themselves merely as an instrument carrying out the authority's wishes and so feel no personal responsibility for the harm they cause. Once in this state, binding factors (such as the wish not to disrupt the situation, or having already begun the task) keep the person from breaking off, helping them reduce the moral strain. We obey legitimate authority because we have learned, through childhood socialisation, to accept a social hierarchy in which certain people (police officers, teachers, doctors) have the right to exert control over our behaviour, and we trust that they will use this power responsibly. This explains why uniforms and prestigious settings, which signal legitimate authority, increase obedience.

The Authoritarian Personality

Adorno et al. (1950) proposed a dispositional explanation: people high in authoritarianism are obedient to those above them, hostile to those below, rigid and conventional. It develops from harsh, strict parenting, creating displaced hostility onto weaker groups. It is measured by the F-scale (potential for fascism).

In contrast to the situational explanations, Adorno's account is dispositional, locating the cause within the person's personality. He argued that people with an Authoritarian Personality are especially obedient because they are submissive towards those they see as having higher status, hostile and contemptuous towards those of lower status, rigid in their thinking and strongly conventional. He traced this to harsh, strict and critical parenting in childhood, which creates hostility the child cannot express towards their parents, so it is displaced onto weaker, "safer" targets (scapegoating). Adorno measured the trait with the F-scale (the "potential for fascism" scale), and Milgram and Elms found that participants who had been fully obedient in Milgram's study tended to score higher on it, providing some support. The explanation is heavily criticised, however. The F-scale is prone to acquiescence bias, since all its items are worded so that agreeing produces a high authoritarian score, and the evidence is correlational, so it cannot show that authoritarianism causes obedience. Most damagingly, a dispositional explanation cannot account for whole societies obeying, since the millions who obeyed in Nazi Germany could not all have shared the same personality, which is why most psychologists favour the situational explanations.