Agentic state

• Agentic vs autonomous states

  agentic is when we feel no mental responsibility for our actions as we feel we are acting for an authority figure

  autonomous is when we are free to behave exactly how we wish, we have a sense of responsibility for our actions

  We experience an agentic shift when we perceive someone else as an authority figure.
• Agentic shift

  when a person sees someone else as an authority figure

  The authority figure has greater power because they have a higher position in social hierarchy

  A person does not take responsibility for their actions. Instead, they believe there are acting for someone else.

  they experience high anxiety when they realise what they are doing is wrong, but feel powerless to disobey
• self image

  When in an autonomous state participants may refuse to obey because the instructions conflict with the image, they have them self

  After an agentic shift, the actions participants perform no longer reflect their self image but the authority figures

  this means they have no guilt or self evaluation, which would of prevented them from carrying out their actions
• binding factors

  aspects of a situation that allow a person to ignore and minimise the damage and affects of their behaviours, this in turn reduces the more strain

  When participants agreed to perform an action, they made a commitment to the authority figure, which, as a task progresses, is harder to break

  participants then remain in agentic state, and they feel powerless to stop
• A strength is that milgrams own study supports the role of the agentic state in obedience

  most of milligrams participants resisted giving the shocks at some point and asked questions about the procedure

  When they asked who was responsible if the learner was harmed, if the experimenter replied on responsible, the participant often went through the procedure quickly with no objections

  this shows that if they are no longer responsible for their own behaviour, they acted more easily as they experimenters agent
• A limitation is that the agentic shift doesn’t explain research findings about obedience

  It doesn’t explain the findings of a study that found 16 out of 18 hospital nurses disobeyed orders from a doctor to administer excessive drug doeses to a patient. The doctor has an obvious authority figure, but almost all the nurses remained in an autonomous state.

  This suggest that the agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience