Obedience: situational explanations

• Define agentic state

  Experiences high anxiety when doing wrong, feel powerless to stop
• Define autonomous state

  Someone who feels free to behave how they want
• Agentic shift

  The change from autonomous to agentic state when percieving someone as an authority figure
• What are binding factors?

  Minimising feeling of damaging behaviour by saying you felt forced to do it - keeps you in agentic state
• Consequence of legitimacy of authority

  Grants power to punish others - police and courts

  We trust this authority to be used appropriately
• Destructive authority

  For example - Hitler, Stalin

  This was made obvious in Milgram electric shock study