obedience: situational explanations (agentic state)

Question 1

why did milgram propose that obedience to destructive authority occurred?

Answer 1

• because a person does not take responsibility
• instead, they believe they are acting for someone else ie. that they are an ‘agent’
• milgram was interested by the trial of adolf eichmann in 1961, who had been in charge of the nazi death camps and his defence was that he was only obeying orders

Question 2

what is an ‘agent’?

Answer 2

• someone who acts for or in place of another
• they are not an unfeeling puppet
  > experience high anxiety (‘moral strain’) when they realise what they are doing is wrong, but feel powerless to disobey

Question 3

what is an agentic state?

Answer 3

• a mental state where we feel no personal responsibility for our behaviour because we believe ourselves to be acting for an authority figure as their agent
• this frees us from the demands of our consciences and allows us to obey even a destructive authority figure

Question 4

what does ‘autonomy’ mean?

Answer 4

to be independent or free

Question 5

what is an autonomous state?

Answer 5

when a person is free to behave according to their own principles and feels a sense of responsibility for their own actions

Question 6

what is an agentic shift?

Answer 6

it describes the shift from autonomy to ‘agency’

Question 7

when did milgram (1974) suggest agentic shift happens?

Answer 7

• when a person perceives someone else as an authority figure
• the authority figure has greater power because they have a higher position in the social hierarchy
• in most social groups, when one person is in charge others defer to the legitimate authority of this person and shift from autonomy to agency

Question 8

what are binding factors?

Answer 8

aspects of a situation that allow the person to ignore or minimise the damaging effect of their behaviour and thus reduce the ‘moral strain’ they are feeling

Question 9

what were the 3 binding factors which milgram identified?

Answer 9

1. reluctance to disrupt the experiment
2. pressure of grand and trusted surroundings
3. pressure from authority figure

Question 10

milgram and binding factors

Answer 10

• milgram observed that many of his participants said they wanted to stop but seemed powerless to do so; he wondered why they remained in an agentic state
• milgram proposed a number of strategies that the individual uses, such as shifting the responsibility to the victim (‘he was foolish to volunteer’) or denying the damage they were doing to the victims

Question 11

evaluation of agentic state: research support from milgram’s own studies

Answer 11

• most of milgram’s pps resisted giving shocks at some point, and often asked the experimenter questions about the procedure
• one of these was ‘who is responsible if mr wallace (the learner) is harmed?’ when the experimenter replied ‘i’m responsible’, the pps often went through the procedure quickly with no further objections
• this shows that once pps perceived they were no longer responsible for their own behaviour, they acted more easily as the experimenter’s agent, as milgram suggested

Question 12

evaluation of agentic state: blass and schmitt (2001)

Answer 12

• a video of the milgram study was shown to students and asked them who they felt was responsible for the harm to the learner, mr wallace
• students blamed E rather the pp

Question 13

evaluation of agentic state: doesn’t explain many research findings about obedience

Answer 13

• rank and jacobson’s (1977) study found that 16/18 hospital nurses disobeyed orders from a doctor to administer an excessive drug dose to a patient
• doctor was obviously an authority figure but almost all nurses remained autonomous, as did many of milgram’s pps
• this suggests that agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience

Question 14

evaluation of agentic state: david mandel (1998)

Answer 14

• described one incident in ww2 involving german reserve police battalion 101
• these men shot many civilians in a small town in poland, despite not having direct orders to do so
  > behaved autonomously

Question 15

evaluation of agentic state: kelman and hamilton (1989)

Answer 15

• argued that a real-world crime of obedience, my lai massacre, can be understood in terms of the power hierarchy of the US army
• commanding officers operate within a clearer legitimate hierarchy than hospital doctors and have a greater power to punish