Obedience

• What is meant by obedience?

  Obedience is when a person follows the direct orders of a person who they feel has authority over them.
• What are four variables that affect obedience?

  • the proximity of the authority figure
  • the proximity of the victim
  • the location
  • the presence of uniforms.
• What is meant by a social hierarchy?

  A social hierarchy is when some people have authority over the other people in a social group, so the power structure is unequal.
• What is meant by legitimate authority?

  The legitimacy of authority explanation of obedience says that because we grow up in social hierarchies, we learn from a young age to obey people who are higher up in the social hierarchy, because we respect their authority over us and see it as legitimate.
• What is meant by moral strain?

  When people are given destructive orders by legitimate figures of authority, they experience conflict, which is referred to as moral strain. - Milgram
• What is meant by the agentic state?

  The agentic state is when a person shifts responsibility and sees themselves as an agent acting on behalf of the authority figure.
• What is meant by the autonomous state?

  The autonomous state is when a person acts of their own free will, and takes responsibility for their actions.
• What is meant by the agentic shift?

  When people obey the orders of an authority figure, they shift from the their usual state of being, which is referred to as the autonomous state, to the agentic state.
• What is the agency theory explanation of obedience?

  Milgram - When people obey the orders of a legitimate authority figure, they shift responsibility for the consequences of their actions away from them to the authority figure. So, they make an agentic shift from the autonomous state to the agentic state.
• Who came up with agency theory?

  Stanley Milgram
• What is meant by the authoritarian personality?

  A person has an authoritarian personality if they believe in strict adherence to social rules, absolute obedience towards people with more power, and look down on people with less power.
• Who came up with the authoritarian personality theory of obedience?

  Theodor Adorno
• What is the authoritarian personality theory of obedience?

  Developed by Adorno to describe individuals who have a tendency to obey authority figures without question and to hold rigid, conservative beliefs such as Nazis
• Which researcher investigated obedience using electric shocks?

  Stanley Milgram
• What is meant by the F-scale?

  The F-scale is a questionnaire developed by Adorno developed as a way of measuring authoritarian personality. 
• Which of Milgram’s findings supports authoritarian personality theory?

  Milgram as a variation of his shock test gave participants a F-scale to fill in, those who scored higher on the F-scale were more likely to obey and correlated with those who obeyed to the full shock limit
• What is meant by resistance to social influence?

  Resistance to social influence is when a person withstands and doesn’t give in to the pressure to obey and conform.
• What is meant by locus of control?

  Locus of control means the amount of control a person thinks they have over events in their own life.
• What is meant by having an internal locus of control?

  They think they have control over events in their lives
• What is meant by having an external locus of control?

  They think don’t have control over events in their lives. 
• What is meant by social support?

  Social support is a situational explanation for why people resist social influence, which says that we resist social influence when we feel that other people around us will support our resistance
• What are two factors that can increase resistance to social influence?

  • Social support
  • Locus of control
• Who developed a questionnaire to measure locus of control?

  Rotter