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Unit 1- Factors affecting obedience and dissent . :star: - Coggle Diagram
Unit 1- Factors affecting obedience and dissent
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Personality factors:
The authoritarian personality
= . Adorno believed that a harsh style of parenting leads children to develop personality. He measured this trait using the F-scale. A more permissive style of parenting, centered around unconditional love might mean that children grow into adults who score low on the F-scale and are more likely to show resistance and defy what they perceive to be destructive orders.
internal and external LOC
= people with internal LOC take greater responsibility for their actions as they believe they are in control of what they do and what happens to them. external LOC take less responsibility for their actions and feel that what happens to them is governed by other people. Externals obeyed the high status experimenter more than the low status experimenter, while internals were unaffected by status.
Evaluation:
:check: A strength of personality explanation is it can be applied to the field of Human Resources. This is because some jobs require higher or lower levels of obedience. To select suitable applicants, they might be assessed by LOC. This is a strength because the use of personality testes as part of the recruitment process may result in more successful matching of people and jobs, leading to greater productivity,
:red_cross: A weakness is internal LOC does not predict defiance. Australian participants were instructed to give painful doses of ultrasound to a female student. Those who were fully obedient did not differ significantly from those participants who resisted in terms of their scores of a questionnaire measuring LOC. This is a weakness because it suggests that personality may have little impact on obedience.
Gender factors:
Research found that
women are more obedient than men.
Participants were ordered to give real electric chocks to a live puppy. They found that 100% women were fully obedient compared with only 54% of the males. The findings showed that females were in distress.
Research found that
men are more obedient than women.
This is because a replication of the Milgram study conducted in Australia suggested that In terms of gender, 40% of males were fully obedient, whereas thus was true of just 16% of the females.
Moral reasoning
= Giligan claimed that females use 'the ethic of care' to guide their decision-making. This principle relates to interpersonal relationships and nurturing and supporting those in need. In terms of destructive obedience, one might expect males to be more obedient due to their feelings of obligation to an authority figure, whereas females may be less obedient due to their desire to support. In Milgram, males may be more swayed by the apparent scientific goals of the research, which was supposedly for the 'greater good' whereas females may have been more concerned about the learner.
Evaluation:
:check: A strength of gender explanation is support from qualitative research. Male and females participants were interviewed about real life dilemmas, overall men favoured a justice orientation and women favored a care orientation. This is a strength because there are quite important gender differences in moral orientations which may well affect decision-making in situations relating to destructive obedience.
:red_cross: A weakness is that many studied find no gender differences. This is because BLass summarized the findings of 9 Milgram-style studies that included both male and female participants. Overall there were no significant differences in the observed levels of obedience between 2 genders. This is a weakness because this suggest that gender does not in fact affect obedience.
culture factors:
Individualism collectivism
= we believe that people from individualist cultures may be less obedient due to the value placed on self-determination and independence compared with those from more collectivist cultures, where obligation and a sense of duty may override the desire to rebel.
Power distance index
= PDI refers to how accepting people are of hierarchical order and inequality of society. In high PDI cultures, subordinates expect to be told what to do and the ideal boss is a autocrat. We might expect that identification with the same values of such a culture would lead a person to be highly obedient while people from nations low on this dimension might be more likely to show resistance or dissent.
Evaluation:
:check: A strength of cultural explanation is a close relationship between obedience and PDi. This is because research conducted by Kilham and Mann found a strikingly low level of obedience of 28% in Austria, it scores very low for PDI (36%). A recent replication found a very high level of obedience of 90% in Poland with a PDI score of 68%. This is a strength because it supports Hofstede's suggestion that PDi is useful in predicting obedience.
:red_cross: A weakness of cultural explanation is that behaviors are seen as being caused by nature. This is because Blass found that the average obedience rate for 8 non-US Milgram replication finding an overall percentage of 66% compared with an average of 61% in the US replication. This is a weakness because perhaps obedience is in fact a universal social behavior and culture does not affect obedience much.