Explanations for obedience Flashcards
What are the two explanations for obedience
Agentic state
- agentic shift, self image, binding factors
Legitimacy of authority
- definition of the situation, legitimate authority requires an institution
Agentic state definition
A person sees himself or herself as an agent for carrying out another person’s wishes.
Agentic state explained
This allows them to deny responsibility for their action and distance themselves from the consequences of those actions.
Milgram referred to this process of shifting responsibility for one’s actions onto someone else as ‘agentic shift’
Agentic shift involves moving from an autonomous state, where a person ‘sees himself or herself as responsible for their own actions, and into an agentic state, in which a person ‘sees himself or herself as an agent for carrying out another persons wishes’
Self image and the agentic state
One explanation for why people adopt an agentic state is the need to maintain a positive self-image.
Actions performed under the agentic state are, from the participants perspective, virtually guilt-free, however inhumane they might be.
Binding factors in agentic state
People remain in an agentic state because they don’t want to deal with the hassle of overcoming the situation.
In Milgram’s study in order to break off the experiment the participant must breach the commitment made to the experimenter,and they do not want to be seen as rude.
So the participant remains binded into obedience.
Legit authority definition
A person who is perceived to be in a position of social control within a situation.
Legitimacy of authority
The first condition for a person to shift into an agentic state is the perception of a legitimate authority.People are more likely to obey those who are perceived to have more authority.This authority is justified by the individual’s position of power in the social hierarchy.
The definition of the situation
People tend to accept definitions of a situation that are provided by a legitimate authority.
In Milgram’s study ,the participants themselves perform the action of shocking the learner but let the authority figure define its meaning.
Legitimate authority requires an institution
If an authority figure’s commands are of a potentially harmful or destructive form,then for them to be perceived as legitimate they must occur in some sort of institutional structure.
eg a uni or the military
Milgrams variation: may be the category of instituion eg a lab, not the status within the catergory eg yale lab that matters
AO3:
lim: agentic state or cruel?
str: research support
lim: real life obedience- auschwitz
lim: agentic state or cruel?
Alternative explanation of the behaviour displayed Milgram’s study is that the participants showed signs of cruelty and the participants used the situation to express their sadistic impulses.
This is demonstrated in the Stanford prison experiment because within just a few days, the guards became increasingly abusive and cruel towards prisoners who were becoming increasingly submissive, even though the guards were given complete control over the prisoners and had no legitimate authority figure present.
This means that the guards were in an autonomous state and not an agentic state as there were no legitimate authority figures present.
Therefore, legitimacy authority and the agentic state explanation cannot explain the behaviour of the prisoners.
This suggests that, for some people, obedience might be explained in terms of agentic shift, but for others, ‘obedient behaviour may be due to some more fundamental desire to inflict harm on others.
str: research support
Research evidence from Blass and Schmidt: supports the validity of the Agentic state explanation.
Blass and Schmidt showed students a film of Milgram’s study and asked them to identify who was responsible for harming the learning the learner. Students blamed the ‘experimenter’ rather than the participant. They believed that the experimenter was responsible because he had legitimate authority, because he was on top of the hierarchy and had expert authority, as he was a scientist.
The students recognised that that cause of obedience to be legitimate authority, showing how in obedience situations people see the authority figure as morally responsible for the harm caused, supporting Milgram’s agentic state theory.
lim: real life obedience- auschwitz
Milgram’s claim that people shift back and forth between an autonomous state and an agentic state fails to explain the very gradual and irreversible transition that Lifton found in his study of German doctors working at Auschwitz.
doctors had changed gradually and irreversibly from ordinary medical professionals, concerned only with the welfare of their patients, into men and women capable of carrying out vile and potentially lethal experiments on the helpless prisoners.
Staub (1989) suggests that rather than agentic shift being responsible for the transition found 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.
