Obedience - situational explanations Flashcards
What are the 2 situational explanations for obedience?
Agentic State
Legitimacy of authority
What is agentic state?
A mental state where we feel no personal responsibility for our behaviour because we believe ourselves to be acting for an authority figure. This frees us from the demands of our consciences and allows us to obey even a destructive authority figure.
What is the opposite of agentic state?
Autonomous state
What is autonomous state?
Where a person is free to behave according to their own principles and therefore responsible for their own actions.
What is agentic shift?
The shift from an autonomous state to an agentic state
How does a person remain in an agentic state?
Due to binding factors
What are binding factors?
Aspects of the situation that allow a person to ignore or minimise the damaging effect of their behaviour and thus reduce the ‘moral strain’ they are feeling.
What is legitimacy of authority?
This is an explanation for obedience which suggests that we are more likely to obed people who we perceive to have authority over us. The authority is justified (legitimate) by the individual’s position of power within a social hierarchy e.g. a judge, police officer
What is a consequence of legitimacy of authority?
Some people are granted the power to punish others. E.g. the police and courts of law. This can become a problem if a person uses their legitimate power for destructive purposes e.g. dictators such as Hitler.
Give two criticisms
Ethnocentric
Temporal validity
How is research ethnocentric?
It judges other cultures by the standards and values of the culture where the research was originally conducted. In its most extreme form, it is the belief in the superiority of one’s own culture and can lead to prejudice and discrimination.
How does the research lack temporal validity?
When a lot of social influence research was conducted, America was a much more conformist/obedient society in general. Therefore, any findings could be due to this and not due to manipulation of the independent variable in the research.
