1-Social Psychological Factor The Agentic State

• Rank and Jacobson (1977) found that most nurses disobeyed a doctor's order to give an excessive drug dose, showing the agentic shift does not explain all research findings
• Autonomous State


  Person feels in control of their actions
• Agentic State


  Person sees themselves as the agent of others, not responsible for their actions
• Agentic Shift


  Shift in thoughts
• Causes of agentic shift

  1. Socialisation process: training children to be obedient to authority at home, in school and society

  2. Many rules and regulations exist to reinforce obedience

  3. Eventually we tend to accept unquestioningly what we are told to do because most requests are perceived to be both reasonable and appropriate
• 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
• Strategies used by individuals in agentic state

  1. Shifting the responsibility to the victim (eg "he was foolish to volunteer")

  2. Denying the damage they are doing to the victim
• "The Obedience Alibi" Is a Poor Explanation
• A weakness of the agentic state argument is that some of the behaviour of the Nazis cannot be explained in terms of authority and agentic shift. The "I was simply following orders" argument cannot always be used.
• This is a weakness as it challenges the agentic shift explanation; the reserve police acted with autonomy. Why did they shoot? This suggests that the agentic state is not required for destructive behaviour.