Obedience: Situational explanations

• Agentic state: Milgram proposed that obedience to destructive authority occurs because a person does not take responsibility, instead they believe they are acting for someone else; they are an ‘agent’, therefore feels no personal responsibility for their actions.
• Autonomous state: (opposite of agentic state) A person in an autonomous state is free to behave according to their principles and feels a sense of responsibility for their own actions.
• Agentic shift: shift from autonomous state to agentic state. Milgram suggested that this occurs when we perceive someone else as an authority figure, because they have a higher position in a social hierarchy.
• Binding factors: Aspects of the situation that allow the person to ignore or minimise the damaging effect of their behaviour and reduce ‘moral strain’. Milgram proposed some strategies e.g., shifting responsibility to the victim, denying the damage they are causing.
• Legitimacy of authority: Most societies are structured hierarchically, people in certain positions hold authority, e.g. police officers. This is agreed by society to allow society to function. People with legitimate authority have the power to punish others, we learnt to accept during childhood.
• Destructive authority: History has shown that some leaders (e.g. Hitler) use legitimate authority destructively, ordering people to behave in cruel and dangerous ways.
• Strength of agentic state: Milgram's own studies support the role of the agentic state in obedience. Most of Milgram's participants asked the ‘Experimenter’, who is responsible if Mr Wallace (the learner) is harmed? When the experimenter replied ‘I’m responsible’ the participants went through the procedure quickly without objecting. This shows participants acted more easily as an agent when they believed they were not responsible for their behaviour. 
• Limitation of the agentic shift: The agentic shift doesn’t explain many research findings about obedience, therefore can only account for some situations of obedience. E.g., it does not explain the findings of Rank & Jacobson that found most nurses disobeyed a doctor's order to give an excessive drug dose.
• Strength of situational explanations: research shows that countries differ in obedience to authority .e.g. 16% of Australian women obeyed in a Milgram-style study, 85% of German participants did, this shows that authority is more likely seen as legitimate in some cultures, reflecting upbringing
• Limitation of situational explanations: legitimacy cannot explain instances of disobedience in a hierarchy, e.g. most of Rank & Jacobson’s nurses were disobedient, as were some of Milgram's participants