OBEDIENCE Flashcards
(34 cards)
OBEDIENCE
obedience means acting in response to a direct order, usually from an authority figure.
situational factors affecting obedience
- proximity of authority figure
- proximity of victim
- uniform
- location
explanations of obedience
legitimacy of authority
agency theory
authoritarian personality
legitimacy of authority
- social hierarchies
- people tend to obey others if they recognise them as being morally right or legitimate.
study related to legitimacy of authority
bickman, 1974 did a field study where the passersby were asked to do a certain task like picking up the litter. researchers were dressed in guard uniform or just in normal clothes. it was found that people were more likely to obey the guards in uniform which is because they seemed to be the legitimate authority figure.
agency theory new terminology - moral strain
when people know they need to follow the authority figure but dont want to be responsible for the horrible consequences.
agency theory (1973)
agency theory states that people are more likely to obey orders if they know that the authority figure is gonna be responsible for the consequences of their own actions.
- autonomous state is when someone acts in a way they want to. the shift from the autonomous state to the agentic state is called agentic shift.
authoritarian personality
adorno et al (1950) came up with the theory of authoritarain personality where some people are very likely to blindly follow obedience.
- adorno stated that authoritarian personality is a consequence of over strict parenting where they are taught to blindly follow orders but also they feel constrained which then results in them being hostile to minority groups .
- people with authoritarian personality are likely to be rigid to moral standards and aggressive.
the f scale
f standing for fascism is a scale to measure authoritarian traits of a person .
adorno developed f scale and carried out a research after the second world war and found that most nazis secured highrr scores on the fascism scale.
- miligram found that person having over strict parents or authoritarian personality had been willing to administer bigger shocks in his prison experiment.
- however not everybody has this personality type.
dispositional explanation of obedience
authoritarian personality
miligrams additional experiments
1. proximity of victim
when the learner was in the different room from the participant, obedience was found to be 65% which then later dropped to 40% when the participant was in the same room making it harder for the learner to resist their suffering.
location
when the experiment was done again in a rundown office rather than the prestigious yale university, obedience rate dropped to 48%.
presence of authority figure
when the authority figure was giving orders from a different toom, the obedience rate dropped to 23%
uniform
obedience rate dropped to 20%
evaluation ( strength of miligram experiment)
- lab experiment so good control over extraneous variables
- could establish a cause and an effect relationship.
limitations of miligrams experiment
-demand characteristics- maybe the participants didnt believe the shocks were real and just gooin with miligrams orders.
- lacks ecological validity
- gender bias as all the participants wdre male
- ethical issues as participants were deceived and they also showed signs of distress, sweating and groaning
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evaluation of legitimacy of authority
- miligrams study provides evidence as when the researcher was in a lab coat, participants found him more legitimate.
- as explained by the definition of legitimacy of authority, people tend to follow orders from people who they consider legitimate. but however in miligrams experiment only 65% of the people agreed to his orders.
- could be other dispositional factors affecting obedience.
evaluation of agency theory
as miligrams study result shows
- partici[ants were more likely to obey when he took the responsibility.
- more likely to obey when farther away from the victims
- however ignores individual variables affecting obedience.
evidence of authoritarian personality
correctly predicts that some people obey more than the others as we can see from miligrams study.
- miligram did an additional research where he found that the people willing to do high voltage on his prison study actually scored higer on the f scale test.
- not everyone who obeys has an authoritarian personality.
- eventhough obedience has acorrelation with authoritarian personality, but it doesnt mean that there is a cause and an effect relationship.
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resistance to social influence
resistance to social influence is when someone resists a direct order from the authoritarian personality.
social support
having socual support makes the people resist more to social influence.
eg in asch study when one of the confederate agreed with them, participants were more likely to resist the pressure to conform.
- situational explanation
locus of control
locus of control means the amount of control that people think they have thier own lives. it is a dispositional explanation for resistance.
internal locus of control
people with internal locus of control are more likely to resist social influence. they feel a stronger sense of control over their lives. more likely to exhibit independent behaviour.
external locus of control
rotter suggests that people with external locus of control are more likely to obey.
