Agentic State And Legitimacy Of Authority

Question 1

What is the agentic state?

Answer 1

A person sees himself or herself as an agent for carrying out another persons wishes.

Question 2

What’s the agentic shift?

Answer 2

The process of shifting responsibility for ones actions onto someone else as ‘agentic shift’.

Question 3

What does the agentic shift involve?

Answer 3

Moving from an autonomous state, where a person sees himself or herself as responsible for their own actions, and into an agentic state (milgram, 1974).

Question 4

What happened at the end of milgrams study?

Answer 4

Interviews were carried out, when obedient participants were asked why they had continued to administer electric shocks, a typical reply was: ‘I wouldn’t have done it myself. I was just doing what i was told’.

Question 5

What was the biggest consequence of Milgrams findings?

Answer 5

The most far reaching consequence of this appears to be that an individual feels responsible to the authority directing him or her but feels no responsibility for the actions that the authority dictates.

Question 6

What is one explanation for the agentic state?

Answer 6

The need to maintain a positive self-image.

Question 7

Explain self-image and the agentic state?

Answer 7

Tempted to do as requested and shock the leaner, the participant may assess the consequences of this action for his/her self image and refrain.

However, once the participant has moved into the agentic state, this evaluative concern is no longer relevant.
Because the action is no longer their responsibility, it no longer reflects their self-image.
Actions performed under the agentic state are, from the participants perspective, virtually guilt-free, however inhumane they might be.

Question 8

What are the binding factors?

Answer 8

In all social situations, including experiments, there is a social etiquette that plays a part in regulating our behaviour.

In order to break off the experiment, the participant must breach the commitment that they made to the experimenter.
Thus, the subject fears that if they break of, they will appear arrogant and rude and so such behaviour is not taken lightly.

These emotions, although they appear small in scope alongside the violence being done to the learner, nonetheless help bind the subject into obedience.

Question 9

What is legitimate authority?

Answer 9

A person who is perceived to be in a position of social control within a situation.

Question 10

What did milgram believe? (Legitimacy of authority)

Answer 10

That there is a shared expectation among people that many situations do ordinarily have a socially controlling figure.

Question 11

Where does the power of legitimate authority stem from?

Answer 11

Not from any personal characteristics but from his/her perceived position in a social situation.

Question 12

What do participants expect in Milgrams study? (Legitimacy)

Answer 12

They enters the laboratory with an expectation that someone will be in charge.
The experimenter, upon first presenting himself, fills in this role for them.

He does this through a few introductory remarks, and as this and the experimenter’s ‘air of authority’ fits the participants expectation on encountering ‘someone in charge’, it is not challenged.

Question 13

What are the evaluative points?

Answer 13

The agentic state explanation and real-life obedience
Agentic state or just plain cruel?
The legitimate authority explanation and real-life obedience
The agentic state as loss of personal control
Obedience in the cockpit - a test of legitimate authority

Question 14

What is meant by the agentic state explanation and real-life obedience?

Answer 14

Milgram claimed that people shift back and forth between the automonous state and the agentic state.

However, this idea of rapidly shifting states fails to explain the very gradual and irreversible transition that Lifton (1986) found in his study of German doctors working at Auschwitz.

Staub (1989) suggests that rather than agentic shift being responsible for the transition found that in many Holocaust perpetrators, it is the experience of carrying out acts of evil over a long time that changes the way in which individuals think and behave.

Question 15

What did Lifton find?

Answer 15

The doctors had changed from ordinary medical professionals, concerned with the welfare of their patients, into people capable of carrying out vile and potential lethal experiments on the helpless prisoners.

Question 16

What is meant by the agentic state or just plain cruel?

Answer 16

Although milgram believed that the idea of the agentic state best explained his findings, he did concede other possibilities.

One common belief among social scientists is that he had detected signs of cruelty among his participants, who had used the situation to express their sadistic impulses.
This belief was subsequently given substance by the Stanford prison experiment - within just a few days, the guards inflicted rapidly escalating cruelty on increasingly submissive prisoners despite the fact there was no obvious authority figure instructing them to do so.

Whatever the reason for participants’ behaviour, both studies clearly expose unflattering aspects of human nature.

Question 17

What is meant by the legitimate authority explanation and real-life obedience?

Answer 17

Although there are positive consequences of obedience to legitimate authority (responding to a police officer), it is also important to note that legitimacy can serve as the basis for justifying the harming of others.

If people authorise another person to make judgements for them about what is appropriate conduct, they no longer feel that their own moral values are relevant to their conduct.
As a consequence, when directed by a legitimate authority figure to engage in immoral actions, people are willing to do so.

History is littered with examples of unquestioning obedience to authority no matter how destructive the actions that these order called for.
This sort of extreme obedience is fostered in the course of military training and is reinforced by the structure of military authority.

Question 18

What is meant by the agentic state as loss of personal control?

Answer 18

Fennis and Aarts (2012) suggest that the process of agentic shift is not confined to obedience to authority, but may also extend to other forms of social influence.

They suggest that the reason for ‘agentic shift’ is a reduction in an individual’s experience of personal control, i.e. where they feel ‘less in control of’ their actions.
Under such circumstances people may show an increased acceptance of external sources of control to compensate for this.

Question 19

What did Fennis and Aarts demonstrate?

Answer 19

That a reduction in personal control resulted not only in greater obedience to authority, but also in bystander apathy (tendency to remain passive in the presence of unresponsive others when faced with an emergency), and greater compliance with behavioural requests.

Question 20

What is meant by obedience in the cockpit - a test of legitimate authority?

Answer 20

Tarnow (2000) provided support for the power of legitimate authority through a study of aviation accidents.

He studied the data from a US national transportation safety board (NTSB) review of all serious aircraft accidents in the US between 1978 and 1900 where a flight voice recorder (the black box) was available, and where flight crew actions were a contributing factor in the crash.

As with Milgram’s study, where the participant accepts the experimenter’s definition of the situation, Tarnow found excessive dependence on the captains authority and expertise -
One second officer claimed that, although he noticed the captain taking a particularly risky approach, he said nothing as he assumed ‘the captain must know what he’s doing’.

The NTSB report found such ‘lack of monitoring’ errors in 19 of the 37 accidents investigated