obedience: situational explanations

• agentic state:

  a mental state where we feel no personal responsibility for our behaviour because we believe ourselves to be acting for an authority figure (as their agent). this frees us from the demands of our consciences and allows us to obey even a destructive authority figure
• legitimacy of authority:

  an explanation for obedience which suggests that we are more likely to obey people who we perceive to have authority over us. this authority is justified (legitimate) by the individual's position of power within a social hierarchy
• milgram's initial interest in obedience was sparked by the trial of adolf eichmann in 1961 for war crimes. he was in charge of the nazi death camps and his defence was that he was only obeying orders. this led milgram to propose that when obeying a destructive authority figure, people believe they are acting for someone else as an agent. an agent experiences 'moral strain' when they realise what they are doing is wrong but they feel powerless to disobey
• autonomous state:

  • the opposite of being in an agentic state is being in an autonomous state
  • when in an autonomous state, people are free to behave according to their own principles and feel a sense of responsibility for actions
  • the shift from autonomy to agency is called the agentic shift
  • milgram (1974) suggested this occurs when a person perceives someone else as an authority figure. this authority figure has more power as they have a higher position in the social hierarchy
• binding factors:

  • milgram observed many of his participants wanted to stop but felt powerless to do so
  • aspects of the situation that allow a person to ignore/minimise the damaging effects of their behaviour and reduce their moral strain are known as binding factors and keep people in an agentic state
  • examples in milgram's study include; shifting the responsibility to the victim, and denying the damage they were doing to the victim
• most societies are structured in a hierarchal way, meaning people in certain positions hold authority over the rest of us. the authority they wield is legitimate in the sense that it is agreed by society. we accept that authority figures have to be allowed to exercise social power over others as this allows society to function smoothly.

  on of the consequences of this legitimacy of authority is that some people are granted the power to punish others. this means we are willing to hand control of our behaviour over to people we trust to exercise their authority appropriately.
• destructive authority:

  problems arise when legitimate authority becomes destructive

  • powerful leaders can use their legitimate powers for destructive purposes by ordering people to behave in ways that are cruel and dangerous
• evaluating agentic state; research support:


  strength

  • milgram's studies support the role of agentic state in obedience
  • most participants resisted giving shocks at some point and often asked the experimenter questions about the procedure (such as who is responsible if the learner is harmed)
  • when the experimenter made it clear it would be their responsibility the participants carried on with no objections
  • therefore this shows that once participants found out they weren't responsible for their actions, they acted more easily as an agent
• evaluating agentic state; limited explanation:


  limitation

  • agentic shift doesn't explain many research findings about obedience
  • doesn't explain the findings of rank and jacobson (1977) which found that 16/18 nurses disobeyed when a doctor ordered them to give a large drug dose to a patient
  • therefore this suggests that the agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience
• evaluating agentic state; obedience alibi:


  extra

  • mandel (1998) described an incident in ww2 concerning german batallion 101 who shot civilians in a small polish town despite not being directly ordered too
• evaluating legitimacy of authority; explains cultural differences:


  strength

  • a useful account of cultural differences in obedience
  • studies show that countries differ in the degree to which people are obedient to authority
  • kilham and mann (1974) found only 16% of australian women went up to 450v in a study like milgram's, however mantell (1971) found that 85% of german participants went to 450v
  • therefore this shows that authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate in some cultures rather than others
• evaluating legitimacy of authority; cannot explain all (dis)obedience:


  limitation

  • legitimacy can't explain instances of disobedience in a hierarchy where the legitimacy of authority is clear and accepted
  • this includes the nurses in rank and jacobson's (1977) study as most of them were disobedient despite working in a rigidly hierarchical authority structure
  • a significant minority of milgram's participants disobeyed despite recognising the scientific authority of the experimenter
  • therefore this suggests some people may just be more/less obedient than others due to innate tendencies
• evaluating legitimacy of authority; real world crimes of obedience:


  extra

  • kelman and hamilton (1989) argue that a real world crime of obedience (such as the my lai massacre) can be understood in terms of the power hierarchy of the us army
• my lai massacre:


  • milgram's findings have been used to explain the war crime at my lai, vietnam in 1968 where up to 504 unarmed civilians were killed by american soldiers
  • women were gang raped, people were shot down emerging form their homes, buildings and villages were blown up, and all the animals were killed
  • only 1 soldier faced charges and was found guilty - lt william calley
  • his defence was the same as the nazi officers at the nuremberg trials in the sense that he was only doing his duty by following orders