Obedience: Situational Explanations

Question 1

What 2 factors did Milgram claim that obedience occurs to?

Answer 1

The external authority: Authority of the authority figure

The internal authority: Authority of our own conscious

Question 2

What is the agentic shift?

Answer 2

• When orders come from a figure of authority, we can easily deny personal responsibility because it is assumed that they will take ultimate responsibility.
• When this happens we become ‘agents’ of an external authority

The agentic shift is when the fully obedient person undergoes a psychological ajustment or ‘shift’ and they see themselves as an agent of external authority (authority of the authority figure)

Question 3

What is the agentic state?

Answer 3

Milgrams interests were sparked by the trials of Nazis who had worked in the death camps: their defence was that they had simply been obeying orders.

This led Milgram to look at Agentic state as an explanation of obedience i.e an individual carrying out the orders from an authothority figure, acting as thier agent (the shift is from autonomy to agency)

Question 4

What is an autonomous state?

Answer 4

Opposite of agentic state - the person has autonomy over their actions and can act according to their own principles.

Question 5

What are binding factors?

Answer 5

• Milgram observed that many of his ppts said they wanted to stop but seemed powerless to do so
• He wondered why they remained in an agentic state
• Answer was binding factors- Aspects of situation that allow the person to ignore or minimise the damaging effect of their behaviour & thus reduce the ‘moral strain’ they are feeling
• M proposed a number of strategies that individual uses, such as shifting responsibility to victim or denying the damage they were doing to the victims

Question 6

What is legitimacy of authority?

Answer 6

• Explanation for obedience which suggests we are more likely to obey people whp we percieve to have authority over us
• This authority justified (legitimate) by the individuals position of power within a social hierarchy

Question 7

What is destructive authority?

Answer 7

• Problems arise when legitimate authority becomes destructive
• Destructive authority was evident in Milgrams study when experimenter used prods to order ppts to behave in ways that went against their conscious

Question 8

Give one strength of the agentic state.

Answer 8

• Milgram’s own studies support role of agentic state in obedience
• Most of Milgram’s ppts resisted giving shocks at some point & often asked experimenter questions about procedure
• such as ‘who is responsible if the learner is harmed?’
• When experimenter replied ‘I’m responsible’, the ppts often went through the procedure quickly w no further objections

Shows that once the ppts percieved they were no longer responsible for their own behaviour, they acted more easily as the experimenters agent, as Milgram suggested

Question 9

Give one limitation of the agentic shift.

Answer 9

• Agentic shift doesnt explain many research findings about obedience
  for example it doesn’t explain the findings of Steven Rank & Cardell Jacobson’s (1977) study:
• Found that 16 out of 18 hospital nurses disobeyed orders from a doctor to administer an excessive drug dose to a patient- doctor was an obvious authority figure
• But almost all the nurses remained autonomous, as did many of Milgram’s ppts

This suggests that at best, the agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience

Question 10

Give one strength of the legitimacy of authority explanation.

Answer 10

• OS: It is a useful ccount of cultural differences in obedience
• Many studies show that countries differ in the degree to which people are obedient to authority:
  Kilham & Mann:
• Found that only 16% of Australian women went all the way up to 450 volts in a Milgram-style study
• However David Mantell found a v different figure from German ppts- 85%
• This shows that in some cultures authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate & entitled to demand obedience from individuals
• This reflects the ways that different societies are strucutred & how children are raised to percieve authority figures

Question 11

Give one limitation of the legitimacy of authority explanation.

Answer 11

• Legitimacy cannot explain instances of disobedience in a hierarchy where the legitimacy of authority is clear & accepted
• Includes the nurses in Rank & Jacobsons study- most of them were disobedient despite working in a rigidly hierarchical authority structure.
• Also, a significant minority of Milgrams ppts disobeyed despite being recongising the experimenter’s scientific authority.

This suggests some people may just be more (or less) obedient than others
It is possible that innate tendancies to obey or disobey have a greater influence on behaviour than the legitimacy of an authority figure