Situational factors

• Agentic state


  A person does not take responsibility, instead they believe they are acting for someone else
• Agent


  Someone who acts for or in place of another
• An agent is not an unfeeling puppet- they experience high anxiety ('moral strain) when they realise that what they are doing is wrong, but feel powerless to disobey
• Autonomous state


  A person is free to behave according to their own principles and therefore feels a sense of responsibility for their own actions
• Agentic shift

  The shift from autonomy to 'agency' when a person perceives someone else as a figure of authority
• Binding factors


  Aspects of the situation that allow the person to ignore or minimise the damaging effect of their behaviour and thus reduce the 'moral strain' they are feeling
• Legitimacy of authority


  The authority wielded by certain positions is agreed by society and accepted as necessary for society to function smoothly
• Some people are granted the power to punish others, and we are willing to give up some of our independence and to hand control of our behaviour over to people we trust to exercise their authority appropriately</b>
• Destructive authority


  When legitimate authority becomes destructive, such as charismatic and powerful leaders ordering people to behave in ways that are callous, cruel, stupid and dangerous
• Blass and Smith showed students a film of Milgrams study to students and asked them who was responsa for harming Mr Wallace. The students blamed the experimenter rather than the participant.

  The students recognised legitimate authority as the cause of obedience, supporting this explanation.
• The agentic shift explanation also does not explain the findings from Hofling et al.'s study (see page 23). The agentic shift explanation predicts that, as the nurses handed over responsibility to the doctor, they should have shown levels of anxiety similar to Milgram's participants, as they understood their role in a destructive process. But this was not the case. At best, agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience
• A strength of the legitimacy of authority explanation is that it is a useful account of cultural differences in obedience.
• Many studies show that countries differ in the degree to which people are traditionally obedient to authority.
• Cultural differences in obedience


  • Kilham and Mann (1974) replicated Milgram's procedure in Australia and found that only 16% of their participants went all the way to the top of the voltage scale. Mantell (1971) found a very different figure for German participants - 85%. Milgram found 65% in Americans
• This shows that in some cultures, authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate and entitled to demand obedience from individuals. This reflects the ways that different societies are structured and how children are raised to perceive authority figures.
• Such supportive findings from cross-cultural research increase the validity of the explanation.
• The Nazi‘s behavior can not be explained 


  Mandel described one incident involving German Reseve Police Battalion 101, where men obeyed orders to shoot civillians in a small town in Poland. Despite the fact that they didn’t have direct orders. This suggests that the men where in autonomous state rather than agentic, so agentic shift can not be blamed
• Other Situational factors

  Milgrams variations

  location

  proximity

  uniform
• What is Gradual Commitment 


  Asked to do something small, even if it is harmful/hurtful. Once complied with request, it gets increasingly difficult to refuse to carry out more serious and escalating requests
• What was Bickman‘s study 


  Power of uniform

  In a street in New York a confederate was dressed in either in normal clothes , milkmaids or guard uniform. They told people on street to pick up a piece of litter.

  Bickman found that people were more likely to listen to guard as they saw him as legitimate authority.

  Study is not representative as only took place on one street in New York

  Task was simple- what about more extreme tasks