Agentic state

• What is the Agentic state?

  A state in which a person sees themselves as an agent for carrying out another persons wish’s.
• what is the autonomous state?

  when a person takes full responsibility for their actions
• What is the agentic shift

  the movement between the autonomous state and Agentic state
• Why do people adopt an Agentic state?

  People adopt an Agentic state to maintain a positive self image. This is because they do not want to feel guilty or responsibility for the actions they are asked to do.
• Give an example of when people adopted an Agentic state - AO1

  people obeyed in Milgrams study because they believe if something went wring it is the experimenters responsibility and not there own as they were just acting as an agent.
• Give an example of when people adopted an autonomous state - AO1

  In the teacher discretion variation in milgrams study the participants chose the shock level delivered to the learner and the level of obedience rapidly dropped to 2.5%. As the participants would feel guilty if they harmed the learner
• Explain the evaluation point for the Agentic state using evidence from Milgrams study

  • Support for the agentic state as an explanation of obedience can be found in Milgrim’s study.
  • participants saw the experiment as an authority figure, they knew what they were doing was wrong but They were acting as agents of the experimenter and perceived him to have responsibility of any harm that was done.
  • This explains the high level of obedience in his study 65%. in many post interviews participant said that they were just following orders and felt no responsibility for their actions suggesting that they thought they were acting as an agent of the experimenter and confirms that the Agentic state may why people obey
• Explain the evaluation point for the autonomous state using evidence from Milgrams study

  The autonomous state can be observed in the absent variation as the experimenter isn’t present so participants couldn’t shift their blame onto him. Due to this obedience 65% – 21 suggests that participants were in an autonomous state and for their action as there’s no authority figure to blame. this is because they were in control and so they would feel guilty about what they were doing. so ww see that the participants shifted from the Agentic state to the autonomous state as there was no one to blame.