Obedience

• What is obedience

  When somebody acts in response to a direct order from an authority figure as they have a fear of punishment
• What did Milgram want to investigate?

  Whether people would commit unjust orders on others if ordered by an authority figure
• How many participants continued to 450V?

  65 percent
• How many participants went up to 300V

  All of the participants
• How many participants stopped at 300V

  5 participants
• What did Milgram conclude from his study?

  • under the right circumstances, ordinary people will commit unjust orders
• What is the agentic state

  • the state in which a person does not view themselves as responsible for their actions
  • they have passed responsibility onto the person they perceive to have legitimate authority
  • they are an agent of another person
• What is the agentic shift?

  • When a person changes from the autonomous to agentic state
  • once the agentic shift has taken place, the person will blindly obey
• What is authoritarian personality?

  • a person who has extreme respect for authority and is more likely to be obedient to those who hold power over them
  • Adorno believed that those who have authoritarian personality are more likely to obey
• Why does Adorno believe some people develop an authoritarian personality?

  • due to strict parenting which enforced high standards of discipline
  • due to their fear of punishment, the child displaces their resentment towards their parents on those below them
• People with authoritarian personality will always obey authority due to fear of punishment and expect those below them in social status to show respect to them
• What is legitimacy of authority

  • it is agreed in society that certain groups or people have authority
  • as a society we agree and accept that these people hold power
  • we learn via socialisation that we will be accepted if we obey those with authority because they have the power to punish us
  • societies are ordered in a hierarchal way
• It is accepted that some groups have legitimate social power above those beneath them in the hierarchy
• What is Adorno's F-scale

  • he developed a questionnaire called the fascism scale to measure levels of authoritarian personality
• What did Adorno find about people who scored highly on the F-scale?

  • they identified with strong people and showed disrespect to the weak
  • they were conscious of status - showing excessive respect to those in power