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Why do obedience and conformity rise in some circumstances and fall in others — and why do some individuals yield where others resist? The Edexcel Social Psychology topic requires you to explain the factors that affect obedience and conformity, and crucially to recognise that these fall into two families: situational factors, which are features of the environment (proximity, location, uniform; group size, unanimity, task difficulty), and dispositional factors, which are features of the person (most importantly the Authoritarian Personality). This lesson draws the situational and dispositional threads together, so that you can move fluently between them and reach the interactionist judgement that examiners reward. It consolidates material introduced in the earlier obedience and conformity lessons and adds the dispositional explanation in full.
Key Definition: A situational factor is a feature of the external environment or context that influences behaviour; a dispositional factor is a stable internal characteristic of the individual, such as personality, that influences behaviour.
By the end of this lesson you should be able to:
Edexcel 9PS0 — Paper 1, Topic 1: Social Psychology. This lesson maps to the specification's requirement to explain the factors affecting obedience and conformity, spanning both situational variables (proximity, location and uniform in obedience; group size, unanimity and task difficulty in conformity) and the dispositional explanation of obedience, the Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950), including the F-scale.
Assessment Objectives exercised:
Connects to…
The situational account holds that obedience is determined chiefly by features of the situation rather than the personality of the obeyer. Milgram's variations provide clean evidence for three named factors.
| Situational factor | What changes | Effect on obedience | Why it works |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proximity | Physical/psychological closeness of the victim to the participant | Same room: 65% → 40%; forcing the learner's hand onto the plate: 30% | Reduces the buffer between the act and its consequence; the participant can no longer deny responsibility for visible suffering |
| Proximity of authority | Closeness of the experimenter | Experimenter telephoning from another room: 20.5% | Reduces the immediacy and surveillance of the authority; some participants secretly gave lower shocks |
| Location | Prestige/legitimacy of the setting | Run-down Bridgeport office: 65% → 47.5% | Loss of institutional legitimacy weakens the authority's perceived right to command |
| Uniform | Visible symbol of authority | Experimenter in ordinary clothes: 65% → 20% | Removing the recognised symbol (the grey lab coat) removes a visual cue of legitimacy |
Proximity operates by dismantling the psychological buffers that let a person distance themselves from harm: the further away the victim, the easier it is to focus on the task and not the suffering, so obedience is higher. Bringing the victim closer — and especially requiring physical contact — forces an empathic confrontation with the consequence, and obedience falls. Location matters because prestigious institutions confer legitimacy; the same orders in a shabby office carry less authority, though notably obedience remained high (47.5%), showing legitimacy is only part of the story. Uniform matters because uniforms are powerful, instantly recognised symbols of legitimate power. Bickman's (1974) New York field experiment confirmed this outside the lab: passers-by obeyed a confederate roughly twice as often when he wore a guard's uniform rather than ordinary clothes.
Exam Tip: In an applied Edexcel item, look for cues to each factor in the scenario — a described uniform or title (uniform/strength), a hospital or official building (location/legitimacy), whether the "victim" is visible or remote (proximity). Naming the factor and the mechanism earns the marks.
The situational account of conformity rests on Asch's (1956) variations, each of which manipulates one feature of the group.
| Situational factor | What changes | Effect on conformity | Underlying process |
|---|---|---|---|
| Group size | Number of confederates (1–15) | Rises up to ~3 confederates, then plateaus | Beyond a small majority, extra members add little pressure (matching Latané's diminishing returns) |
| Unanimity | Whether the majority is unanimous | A dissenter cuts conformity from 37% to 5.5% (or ~9% if the dissenter gives a different wrong answer) | Breaking unanimity removes the social cost of being the lone deviant |
| Task difficulty | Ambiguity of the judgement | Harder (more similar) lines increase conformity | Ambiguity engages ISI — genuine uncertainty makes others' judgements informative |
The elegance of these variations is that they isolate the two explanations of conformity. Task difficulty isolates informational social influence (ISI): when the task is genuinely ambiguous, people conform because they think others know better. Unanimity and private responding isolate normative social influence (NSI): a dissenter or an unobserved response removes the pressure to be liked. Group size links directly to social impact theory's psychosocial law — the plateau after three confederates is exactly the decelerating effect of "number" that Latané predicted.
graph TD
A["Factors affecting obedience & conformity"] --> B["Situational factors<br/>(features of the environment)"]
A --> C["Dispositional factors<br/>(features of the person)"]
B --> B1["Obedience: proximity,<br/>location, uniform"]
B --> B2["Conformity: group size,<br/>unanimity, task difficulty"]
C --> C1["Authoritarian Personality<br/>(Adorno et al., 1950)"]
In contrast to situational accounts, Adorno and colleagues (1950) argued that obedience reflects a particular personality type. Having fled Nazi Germany, they sought to understand what made some people especially susceptible to fascist, authoritarian ideology and to obeying destructive authority.
People with an Authoritarian Personality show:
Adorno argued this personality develops in childhood through harsh, punitive parenting. The child feels hostility toward the strict, demanding parent but cannot express it safely, so the hostility is repressed and later displaced onto those perceived as weaker or inferior — a psychodynamic mechanism of scapegoating. This explains why authoritarian submission to authority and authoritarian aggression toward out-groups tend to occur together in the same person.
Adorno developed the F-scale ("fascism scale"), a questionnaire measuring authoritarian tendencies through agreement with statements such as those endorsing obedience and respect for authority as the most important virtues children should learn. A higher score indicates a more authoritarian orientation.
Milgram and Elms (1966) followed up Milgram's obedience study by measuring participants' F-scale scores. They found that participants who had been fully obedient scored higher on the F-scale than those who had been defiant, offering some dispositional support: those who went all the way to 450V tended to be more authoritarian. In interviews, the obedient participants were also more likely to report having had a distant relationship with a strict father and to view the experimenter as an admirable figure — details that fit Adorno's developmental account, in which harsh parenting seeds deference to authority. This is a genuine, well-attested link — but, as the evaluation below stresses, it is correlational: it cannot show whether authoritarianism causes obedience, whether obedient people reconstruct their childhoods in authoritarian terms after the event, or whether some third factor drives both. Keeping the finding and its correlational limitation together in your mind is what lets you use it as qualified support rather than overclaiming it as proof of a dispositional cause.
| Factor | Type | How it raises obedience/conformity |
|---|---|---|
| Proximity (of victim / authority) | Situational | A closer authority and a more distant victim both raise obedience |
| Location | Situational | A prestigious, legitimate setting raises obedience |
| Uniform | Situational | Visible symbols of authority raise obedience |
| Group size / unanimity / task difficulty | Situational | A small unanimous majority and an ambiguous task raise conformity |
| Authoritarian Personality | Dispositional | A more authoritarian person is more likely to obey and conform |
The situational variables show that most people can be made to obey or conform far more than intuition suggests, simply by changing the context. The dispositional factor explains individual differences the situation cannot: why, in identical conditions, 35% of Milgram's participants resisted and 65% did not. Neither alone is complete, which is why the interactionist position — a person high in authoritarianism, placed in a situation of high legitimacy and low victim-proximity, is most likely to obey — is the one examiners reward.
Edexcel's applied questions reward the ability to read a scenario and identify the operating factors, so it is worth working through an example. Consider a junior member of hospital staff who administers an unusual drug dose because a consultant, in a white coat, instructs them to over the telephone. Almost every named factor is present and pulling in the direction of obedience: the consultant carries high legitimacy (an agreed medical hierarchy) and the visible symbol of the uniform (the white coat, or the title "Doctor"); the setting is a prestigious, legitimate location (a hospital, the medical equivalent of Milgram's Yale); the "victim" — the patient who may be harmed — is remote from the decision, so proximity to the consequence is low and the psychological buffer is high; and if the junior staff member happens to score high on authoritarian deference to seniority, the dispositional factor compounds the situational pressure. This is essentially the structure of Hofling et al.'s (1966) real hospital study, in which 21 of 22 nurses obeyed. Notice, too, how the resistance factors from the next lesson map onto Rank and Jacobson's (1977) contrasting result: when the drug was familiar and nurses could consult a peer, obedience collapsed — the peer supplying social support (breaking the "unanimity" of the authority's instruction) and the familiarity removing the uncertainty that had encouraged deference. A good applied answer names each factor visible in the stem, explains the mechanism, and predicts how obedience would change if a factor were altered (for instance, if the consultant gave the order in person, on a busy ward, with a colleague openly questioning it).
Exam Tip: In an applied item, do not merely label the factors — for each one, state the cue in the scenario, the mechanism, and the predicted effect. That three-part move (cue → mechanism → effect) is what turns identification into analysis and unlocks the AO2 marks.
The situational account rests on well-controlled experimental evidence: Milgram manipulated proximity, location and uniform and obedience changed accordingly, and Asch manipulated group size, unanimity and task difficulty. Because these were controlled manipulations, we can infer the situational variables caused the changes rather than merely correlating with them. Bickman's (1974) uniform field study and Meeus and Raaijmakers' (1986) cross-cultural replication extend this support beyond the original labs. The implication is that the situational factors are not merely plausible but demonstrated causes, giving the account strong internal validity.
A limitation of a purely situational account is that it cannot explain why, in identical conditions, people behave differently — 35% of Milgram's participants resisted, and 25% of Asch's never conformed. If the situation determined behaviour, such variation would not exist. This is precisely the gap the dispositional explanation fills, and it cautions against reading Milgram as showing that "anyone will obey": some clearly will not. The implication is that a complete account must incorporate the person as well as the situation.
Milgram and Elms's (1966) finding that obedient participants scored higher on the F-scale supports a dispositional contribution. However, the evidence is correlational: it shows authoritarianism and obedience co-occur, but it cannot show that authoritarianism causes obedience. A third variable — such as lower education, which is associated with both higher F-scale scores and greater deference — could underlie the association. Indeed, Middendorp and Meloen (1990) found less-educated people tend to score higher on authoritarianism, suggesting education, not personality per se, may drive part of the effect. The implication is that the dispositional account identifies a real correlate of obedience but has not proven it is a cause.
The F-scale has serious methodological weaknesses. Every item is worded so that agreement indicates authoritarianism, which means the scale is vulnerable to acquiescence bias — respondents who tend to agree with statements regardless of content will score as authoritarian, inflating the measure. It is also open to social desirability distortion. These flaws matter because the entire dispositional case rests on the F-scale being a valid measure; if the instrument is contaminated by response style, the link between "authoritarianism" and obedience becomes harder to interpret. The implication is that some of the apparent dispositional effect may be an artefact of measurement rather than a genuine personality difference.
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