Obedience: Situational explanations Flashcards
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 conscience and allows us to obey even a destructive authority figure.
autonomous state
A person in an autonomous state is free to behave according to their own principles and feel a sense of responsibility for their actions.
agentic shift
The shit from autonomy to agency is called the agentic shift
Milgram suggested that this occurs when a person perceives someone else as an authority figure. The authority figure has greater power due to a higher position in the social hierarchy.
binding factors
aspects of the situation that allow the person to ignore the damaging effect of their behaviour reducing the moral strain they are feeling.
legitimacy of authority
Most of us accept that authority figures have to be allowed to exercise social power over others. One of the consequences of legitimacy of authority is that some people are granted the power to punish others. We learn acceptance of legitimate authority from childhood, from parents and teachers and adults.
Evaluation of situational explanations (brief)
strength - support from Milgram’s own studies
weakness - agentic shift limited, Rank and Jacobson
strength - explains cultural differences
strengths of situational explanations
there is research support from Milgram’s own studies to support the role of the agentic state in obedience. Many participants during his study, asked who is responsible if the learner is harmed. The experimenter quickly responded “I’m responsible”. The participants often went through the rest of the procedure with no further objections. Therefore, this shows that once participants perceived themselves to no longer be responsible for their own behaviour, they acted more easily as the experimenter’s agent, which supports Milgram’s theory.
it is a useful account of cultural differences in obedience. Many studies show that countries differ in the degree to which people are obedient to authority. For example, only 16% of Australian women went all the way to 450 volts in a Milgram-style study. However, for German participants this was found to be 85%. Therefore, this shows that in some cultures authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate and entitled to demand obedience from individuals. This is reflected in the way different societies raise their children to perceive authority figures.
weakness of situational explanations
the agentic shift is limited in its explanation. The agentic shift doesn’t explain many research findings about obedience. For example, it doesn’t explain the findings of Rank and Jacobson’s study. They found that 16 out of 18 hospital nurses disobeyed orders from a doctor to administer a excessive dose to a patient. The doctor was an obvious authority figure. But almost all the nurses remained autonomous, as did many of Milgram’s participants. Therefore, this suggests that the agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience.
