Explanations for obedience

• Agentic shift- moving from an autonomous state, where a person feels responsible for their actions into an agentic state where they feel someone else is responsible. For example soldiers obeying orders of their superiors. due to this diminished responsibility they obey the orders of authority figures.
• Legitimate authority- where we believe someone has been given authority by society and they have the power to inflict consequences for disobedience. Their status is often shown by a uniform and connection with a prestigious location. We obey them because we have been socialised to do so. When the experimenter in a lab coat was replaced by a man in everyday clothes obedience dropped to 20%. When milgram changed the location to a run down office obedience dropped to 48%.
• agentic shift- moving from autonomous state (feeling responsible for your own actions) into an agentic state where they feel that somebody else is responsible, soldiers obeying orders of their superiors, due to this diminished responsibility they obey the orders of authority figures
• legitimate authority- where we believe someone has the power to inflict consequences for disobedience, eg- lab coat in milgram experiment being replaced by an experimenter with regular clothes obedience dropped, when setting was changed from prestigious Yale University to a run down office obedience dropped
• Adorno developed the F-Scale, which measures an individuals tendency towards fascism- a core element of the authoritarian personality and found that those who scored highly on the F scale also reported being obedient and having strict parenting
• Elms and Milgram (1966)- gave the F scale to 20 pps who obeyed in one of the variations of Milgram's obedience study and 20 pps who didn't months after the study was conducted. they found the obedient pps scored higher on the F scale