Obedience: Social-psychological factors Flashcards
Social support:
Whether or not a dissenter is present with you.
What is the opposite of an agentic state?
Autonomous state.
Legitimacy of the system:
The extent to which an institution (government, army, school, etc) is a genuine source of authority.
What was Milgrams suggestion as to why an agentic state occurs?
Milgram (1974) suggested an agentic state occurs when a person perceives someone else as a figure of authority.
What is being an ‘agent’?
Someone who acts in place of another, they are a puppet essentially.
Agentic shift:
The shift between an autonomous state (taking responsibility) into an agentic state when they pass this responsibility to the authority figure.
Why would someone stay in an agentic state?
Binding factors - aspects of the situation that allow the person to ignore or minimise the damaging effects of their behaviour, thus reducing the ‘moral strain’.
What effect does legitimacy of authority have in real life?
Most societies are structured in a hierarchical way, this means certain positions hold authority over the rest of us.
Legitimacy of authority figure:
The extent to which a person who gives an order is perceived to be in a genuine position of power.
What name is given to the change between autonomy to ‘agency’?
Agentic shift.
What is being ‘autonomous’?
Being independent or free, they behave according to their own principles and therefore feels a sense of responsibility for their actions.
Gradual commitment:
Carrying out a small request (order) makes you feel obliged to follow-up with increasingly larger demands.
Shifting the responsibility (scapegoating) is an example of what?
A binding factor, they use to reduce the ‘moral strain’.
Binding factors:
Aspects of the situation that allow the person to ignore or minimise the damaging effects of their behaviour, thus reducing the ‘moral strain’.
The role of buffers:
Anything that reduces the impact of an order given or anything that hides the consequences of following through with an order.
What is destructive authority?
When a legitimate authority becomes disruptive, seen many times in history (Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot).
AO3 - Cultural differences.
A strength of legitimacy of authority is that it accounts for cultural differences in obedience. Replications of Milgram’s study have shown obedience rates as low as 16% in Australia and high as 85% in Germany, showing that different cultures accept legitimacy of authority differently.
AO3 - The ‘obedience alibi’.
A limitation of the agentic state is that there is evidence showing that Nazi behaviour cannot be explained like this. Mandel (1998) found that some soldiers obeyed indirect orders to shoot a small town, an order which can be easily disobeyed.
A03 - Research support.
Blass and Schmitt (2001) showed a film of Milgram’s study to students and asked them to identify who was responsible for the harm to Mr. Wallace. The students blamed the ‘experimenter’ rather than the teacher and placed responsibility on legitimate authority.
AO3 - Real-life crimes.
A strength for the legitimacy of authority is that it can help explain how obedience can lead to war crimes such as the My Lai massacre.
AO3 - Limited explanation.
The agentic shift doesn’t explain many of the research findings, such as why some participants did not obey. The agentic shift also cannot explain the research findings of Hofling (1966) as the nurses did not show anxiety during the process.
The Mai Lai massacre can be explained through which social-psychological principle?
Legitimacy of authority.
What is a consequence of the legitimacy of authority?
Some people are granted the power to punish others (police, judges, governments etc) meaning we give up some independence to trust them to exercise their power properly.
