A03

• What are the strengths of social psychological explanations?

  1. Research support
  2. Real-life applications
• What are the limitations of social-psychological explanations?

  1. Expression of cruel impulses
  2. The ‘obedience alibi‘ revisited
• Strength = research support

  • Most of Milgram’s participants resisted giving the shocks at some point and often asked the experimenter ‘who is responsible if Mr. Wallace is harmed?’
  • When the experimenter replied ‘I’m responsible’, the participants often went through the procedure quickly with no objections
  • This demonstrates that once participants perceived they were no longer responsible for their own behaviour, they acted more easily as the experimenter’s agent as Milgram suggested
  • This demonstrates the reliability of the social-psychological factors as explanations for obedience
• Strength = real-life applications

  • The legitimacy of authority explanation can be used to explain how obedience can lead to real-life war crimes
  • For example, the My Lai Massacre in 1968
  • During the Vietnam War, American soldiers killed as many as 504 unarmed civilians
  • Women were gang-raped and people were shot down as they emerged from their homes and soldiers blew up buildings, burnt the village to the ground and killed all the animals
  • This can be understood in terms of the power hierarchy of the US Army
  • Only one soldier faced charges and when he was found guilty, his defence was that he was doing his “duty” by “following orders”
  • Real-life war crimes are effective examples of individuals relinquishing responsibility for their behaviour, leading to obedience
  • Therefore, providing further validity for the idea that legitimacy of authority can be used to explain why people obey
• Limitation = expression of cruel impulses

  • Milgram detected signs of cruelty among his participants, who had used the situation as an opportunity to express their sadistic impulses
  • Idea is supported by Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment
  • Within just a few days the guards inflicted rapidly escalating cruelty and brutality on increasingly submissive prisoners, despite no obvious authority figure instructing them to do so
  • These findings suggest that there may be other influences at play, which could lead to the obedience, such as individual characteristics, thus calling this explanation into question and weakening its explanatory power
• Limitation = the ‘obedience alibi’ revisited

  • Although there are many positive consequences of obedience to legitimate authority (e.g. responding to a police officer during an emergency), it is also important to note that legitimising authority can serve as the basis for justifying the harming of others
  • If people authorise another person to make judgements on their behalf (acting as an agent), they no longer feel that their own moral values and judgement are relevant
  • Therefore, when directed by a legitimate authority figure to engage in immoral actions, people are alarmingly willing to do so
  • A consequence of this is that people may readily engage in unquestioning obedience to authority, no matter how destructive and immoral the actions are, which posits that legitimacy of authority may be a highly flawed theory