Obedience: Psychological factors

Question 1

Agentic state

Answer 1

• Milgram’s initial interest in obedience was sparked by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 for war crimes. Eichmann had been in charge of the Nazi death camps and his defence was that he was only obeying orders.
• This led Milgram to propose that obedience to destructive authority occurs because a person does not take responsibility.
• Instead they believe they are acting for someone else, i.e. that they are an ‘agent’. An ‘agent’ is someone who acts for or in place of another.
• An agent is not an unfeeling puppet- they experience high anxiety (‘moral strain’) when they realise that what they are doing is wrong, but feel powerless to disobey.

Question 2

Autonomous state

Answer 2

• The opposite of being in an agentic state is being in an autonomous state. ‘Autonomy’ means to means to be independent or free. So a person in an autonomous state is free to behave according to their own principles and therefore feel a sense of responsibility for there own actions.
• The shift from autonomy to agency is called the agentic shift. Milgram suggested that this occurs when a person perceives someone else as a figure of authority. This other person has greater power because of their position in a social hierarchy. In most social groups when one person is in charge, others defer to this person and shift from autonomy to agency.

Question 3

Binding factors

Answer 3

• Milgram then raised the question of why the individual remains in this agentic state. Milgram had observed that many of his participants spoke as if they wanted to quit but seemed unable to do so.
• The answer is binding factors- aspects of the situation that allow the person to ignore or minimise the damaging effect of their behaviour and thus reduce the moral strain they are feeling. Milgram proposed a number of strategies that the individual uses, such as shifting the responsibility to the victim or denying the damage they were doing the the victims.

Question 4

Legitimacy of authority- pt.1

Answer 4

• Most societies are structured in a hierarchical way. This means that people in a certain positions hold authority over the rest of us. For example, parents, teachers, police officers, nightclub bouncers all have some kind of authority over us at times.
• The authority they wield is legitimate in the sense that it is agreed by society. Most of us accept that authority figures have to be allowed to exercise social powers over others because this allows society to function smoothly.

Question 5

Legitimacy of authority- pt.2

Answer 5

• One of the consequences of this legitimacy of authority is that some people are granted the power to punish others. Most of us accept that the police and courts have the powers to punish wrongdoers. So we are willing to give up some of our independence and hand control of our behaviour over to people we trust to exercise their authority appropriately. We learn acceptance of legitimate authority from childhood, of course, from parents initially and then teachers and adults generally.

Question 6

Destructive authority

Answer 6

• This makes perfect sense; however problems arise when legitimate authority becomes destructive. History has too often shown that charismatic and powerful leaders (such as Hitler and Stalin) can use their legitimate powers for destructive purposes, ordering people to behave in ways that are callous, cruel, stupid and dangerous. Destructive authority was very clearly on show in Milgram’s study, when the experimenter used probs to order participants to behave in ways that went against their consciences.

Question 7

Evaluation- research support (Agentic state)

Answer 7

Blass and Schmitt showed a film of Milgram’s study to students and asked them to identify who they felt was responsible for the harm to the learner, Mr.Wallace. The students blamed the ‘experimenter’ rather than the participant. The students also indicated that the responsibility was due to legitimate authority (the ‘experimenter’ was top of the hierarchy, and therefore had legitimate authority) but also due to expert authority (because he was a scientist).
- In other words they recognised legitimate authority as the cause of obedience, supporting this explanation.

Question 8

Evaluation- a limited explanation (Agentic state)

Answer 8

• The agentic shift doesn’t explain many of the research findings. For example, it does not explain why some of the participants did not obey (humans are social animals and involved in social hierarchies and therefore should all obey). The agentic shift explanation also does not explain the findings from Hofling’s study. The agentic shift explanation predicts that, as the nurses handed over responsibility to the doctor, they should have shown levels of anxiety similar to Milgram’s participants, as they understood their role in a destructive process. But this was not the case.
• This suggests that, at best, agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience.