Agentic state

• 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
• The opposite of being in an agentic state is being in an autonomous state.
• A person in an autonomous state is free to behave according to their own principles and therefore feels a sense of responsibility for their own actions.
• The shift from autonomy to 'agency' is called the agentic shift. Milgram suggested this occurs when a person perceives someone else as a figure of authority. This other person has greater power because of their position in a social hierarchy.
• Binding factors = aspects of the situation that allow the person to minimise or ignore the damaging effect of their behaviour and therefore reduce 'moral strain'
• Milgram suggested binding factors are the reason why an individual remains in this agentic state
• Milgram proposed a number of strategies that individuals use to reduce moral strain, such as shifting the responsibility to the victim or denying the damage they were doing to the victims.
• Blass and Schmitt showed a film of Milgram's study to students and asked them to identify who they felt was responsible for the harm to the learner. The students blamed the 'experimenter' rather than the participant. The students also indicated that the responsibility was due to legitimate authority ( the experimenter was top of the hierarchy) but also due to expert authority (because he was a scientist). So they recognised legitimate authority as the cause of obedience.
• However, the agentic shift does not explain many research findings. For example, it does not explain why some of the participants did not obey (human are social animals involved in social hierarchies so should all obey). It also does not explain Hofling's findings. The agentic shift explanation predicts the nurses would feel similar levels of anxiety as participants in Milgram's study's they understood their role in a destructive process, but this was not the case. This suggests the agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience.