situational explanations

• What is the agentic state?


  a mental state where we feel no personal responsibility for our behaviour because we believe we are acting for an authority figure

  frees us from the demands of our consciences and allows us to obey destructive authority figures
• what is autonomous states?


  free to behave according to their own principles and feels a sense of responsibility for their actions
• what is agentic shift?


  shift from autonomy to agency

  Milgram 1974 said this happens when a person perceives someone as a authority figure

  authority figure has higher greater power because of social hirearchy
• what are binding factors?


  aspects of a situation that allow the person to ignore or minimise the damaging effects of their actions and reduce the moral strain

  does it by shifting the blame onto the victim or denying there was any damage being done
• what is legitimacy of authority?


  more likely to obey someone who society perceives have authority over us.

  the authority is justified by the persons position in social hirearchy

  teachers, police, parents etc
• what is one consequence of legitimacy of authority?


  some people are granted power to punish others so we are willing to hand control of our behaviour over to people we trust to exercise their authority appropriately.

  we learn acceptance of legitimacy of authority from childhood from parents then teachers
• what is destructive authority?


  when legitimate authority becomes destructive

  ordering people to behave in ways that are cruel and dangerous

  destructive authority was obvious in milgram's study when the experimenter used prods to make participants behave in ways against their consciences
• give on strength for agentic state?


  research support

  most of milgrams participants resisted giving the shocks at some point

  asked who was responsible if the learner got hurt and the experimenter said he was

  the participants then continued with the experiment

  showed when they knew they weren't responsible they acted more easily
• give one limitation of agentic state?


  doesn't explain many research findings about obedience

  findings of Rank and Jacobson's when they found 16 out of 18 hospital nurses disobeyed orders from a doctor to give an excessive dose of a drug to a patient

  most nurses remained autonomous like most of milgram's participants

  agentic shift only accounts for some situations of obedience
• Give one strength of legitimacy of authority?


  explains cultural differences in obedience

  Kilham and Mann found only 16% of australian women went all the way up to 450 volts

  however Mantell found figure for german participants was 85%

  authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate in some cultures

  reflects ways that different cultures are structured
• give one limitation of legitimacy of authority?


  can't explain all instances of disobedience in a hierarchy where the legitimacy of authority was clear and accepted

  includes nurses in Rank and Jacobsons study

  most of them were disobedient despite working in a hierarchical structure

  significant minority of milgrams participants disobeyed despite recognising the experimenters authority

  possible innate tendencies to obey or disobey have a greater influence on behaviour