Social-psychological factors of obedience

• Real life cases that link to obedience = Massacre at My Lai

  • milgrams finding are used to explain this
  • war crime in 1968
  • over 500 civilians were killed by American soldiers
  • people were gang raped
  • buildings were blown up
  • villages were burnt
  • the solidness defense was that he was just following orders he had been give.
• Real life cases that link to obedience = Abu Graib Prison

  • 2003-2004
  • US army military police committed serious human right violations against Iraqi prisoners
  • prisoners were raped, tortured, assaulted, humiliated, and murdered
  • zimbardo noticed a lot of similarities between this even and the stanford prison experiment
• Real life cases that link to obedience = The Holocaust and nazi prosecution of Jews

  • milgrams study happened to try and answer the question of why the German population followed the orders of hitler
  • his experiment sort after an explanation for if Germans were more obedient than people from other countries
• Legitimacy of authority = the extent to which a person or group has the right to have power over others
• Destructive authority = when an authoritive figure exploits their legitimate authority to cause distraction
• Military personnel who commit war crimes often say they were only obeying orders - legitimacy of authority defence
• Agentic state = all allows others to direct their actions and pass the responsibility/consequences to the person giving them the orders
• Autonomous state = when an individual acts freely and takes responsibility for their actions
• Binding factors = aspects of the situation that allow the person to ignore or minimise the damaging effects of their behaviour and reduce the moral strain, they feeling
• Agentic shift = the shift from the autonomous states to the agenic state is called the agenic shift