Obedience: Situational explanations (Agentic State)

• Agentic state

  A mental state where we feel no personal responsibility for their behaviour as we believe ourselves acting for an authority figure. Milgram's interest in obedience sparked by the trial of Adolf Eichmann 1961 who ran Nazi death camps and his defence he was only obeying orders, leading to Milgram proposing destructive authority as a person does not take responsibility, as they believe they are acting for someone else. 
• Autonomous state

  They are free to behave how they would like to and feel a sense of responsibility for their actions. Going from autonomous to agentic is an agentic shift, it happens when someone perceives someone else as an authority figure, as they have a greater power and higher on the social hierarchy. Most social groups one person is in charge and the other defer to the legitimate authority change from autonomous to agentic. 
• Blinding factors

  Milgram observed many pps that wanted to stop but felt powerless to do so., and wondered why they remained in an agentic state. Aspects of the situation that allow the person to minimise the damaging effect of behaviour reducing moral strain. They can shift the responsibility to the victim or denying the damage they were doing to the victim 
• Research support

  Milgram's own studies support the role of the agentic state in obedience. Most of Milgram's pps resisted giving shocks at one paint and many of them asked questions to the experimenter. One particular question was “ who is responsible for what he harm inflicted onto the learner” and he responded with 'I'm responsible’, and once he had responded with this the pps went through the procedure quickly with no objections. This shows that once the pps felt no longer responsible for their actions they acted more easily as the experimenters agent Milgram suggested.  
• A limited explanation

  Limitation agentic shift doesn't explain many findings in obedience. It does not explain the findings of Rank and Jacobson 1977, they found that 16/18 nurses disobeyed orders from a doctor to administer an excessive dosage of a drug. Doctor obvious authority figure. But almost all nurses remained autonomous as did many of Milgram's pps. This suggests that agentic shift only accounts for a small number  of situations.