Explanations for Obedience Flashcards
What are the two explanations for obedience?
Situational and Dispositional
What are the two situational explanations?
- Agentic + Autonomous State
- Legitimacy of Authority
Explain Agentic State
- A mental state in which we feel no personal responsibility for our behaviours because we think we are acting as an agent for an authority figure
- We would obey even a destructive authority
Explain Autonomous State
- Where we feel free and responsible for our own actions
What is the Agentic Shift?
When we move from an autonomous state to an agentic state (when given orders from someone above us in the social hierarchy)
What are binding factors?
- Aspects of the situation that allow a person to minimise the damaging effect of their behaviour
- Examples include blaming the victim and denying what they have done
- Allow a person to stay in the Agentic State
Explain Legitimacy of Authority
- We are more likely to obey people who we perceive as having more authority over us
- Legitimatised by the individual’s position of power in a social hierarchy
- We accept that these authority figures from childhood, and understand that they are allowed to have social power over us
What is a strength of Legitimacy of Authority?
- Studies show that countries differ in the degree in which people are traditionally obedient to authority
- Kilber and Man replicated Milgram’s experiment in Australia and found that only 16% of participants went to 450V
- However Mantell found that 85% of German participants went to 450V
- Strength because legitimacy of authority can be used to explain cultural differences
What is a weakness of Agentic state?
- the agentic shift doesn’t explain many research findings
- Rank and Jacobs study found that 16/18 nurses disobeyed orders from a doctor to administer an excessive drug dose to a patient
- Doctor was authority but the nurses remained autonomous
What is a strength of Agentic State?
- Milgram
- Most of Milgram’s participants resisted giving shocks at some point and often asked - “who is responsible if the learner is harmed?”
- When the experiemnter replied “I’m responsible”, the participants often went through the procedure quickly with no objections
What is a weakness of legitimacy of authority?
- It cannot explain all (dis)obedience
- Rank and Jacobson’s study found that 16/18 nurses disobeyed orders from a doctor to administer an excessive drug dose to a patient
- The doctor was an obvious authority figure
What is the Dispositional explanation of obedience?
- Adorno and the Authoritarian Personality
What was Adorno’s procedure?
- Created an ‘F’-Scale (potential for fascism) to measure relationship between a persons personality and prejudiced beliefs
- 2000 white Americans completed the F-Scale
What were Adorno’s findings?
- Those who had scored highly on the ‘F’ scale identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally disapproving of the ‘weak’.
- They were very conscious of their own and others’ status, showing extreme respect and servility to those of higher status
- There were no ‘grey areas’ between categories of people – black and white thinking
- They had fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups
- There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice
Explain the authoritarian personality
A distinct personality pattern characterised by strict adherence to conventional values and a belief in absolute obedience or submission to authority
What are some characteristics of the Authoritarian Personality?
- Always obedient to authority
- Submissive to authority – driven by blind respect
- Dismissive of anyone “below them”
- Inflexible with their outlook – no grey areas
What are the origins of the Authoritarian Personality?
- Harsh parenting (Strict discipline, expectation of
absolute loyalty, severe criticisms, not enough love) - Fear of parents = excessive respect for authority figures
- Hatred of parents = Hate and anger displaced onto others who they perceive to be weaker
What was the average score of Adorno’s participants, and what was the ‘normal’ range at the time?
- 3.75 = average
- Normal range between 3 and 4.5
What is a strength of the Authoritarian Personality theory?
- Research Support
- Milgram and his assistant Alan Elms (1966) conducted a follow up study using pps who had taken part in Milgram’s original study
- They found that those who were fully obedient and went all the way to 450 volts scored higher on tests of authoritarianism than those who defied the experimenter
What is a weakness of the Authoritarian Personality theory?
- Limited explanation
- Any explanation of obedience in terms of individual personality will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population
- In pre-war Germany, millions of individuals all displayed obedient, racist and anti-Semitic behaviour – they cannot all have had the same personality!
What is a weakness of the Authoritarian Personality theory?
- The ‘F’-Scale itself
- It is possible to get a high score by selecting only ‘agree’ answers, and anyone with this response bias could be assessed as having an Authoritarian Personality
What is a weakness of the Authoritarian Personality theory?
- Only measures tendency towards extreme right-wing ideologies
- Christie and Jahoda argue that the F scale is a politically-based interpretation of Authoritarian Personality. They point out the reality of Left-Wing authoritarianism
