obedience situational explanations

• agentic state: when we feel no personal responsibility for our behaviour because we believe ourselves to be acting for an authority figure.
• autonomous state: free to behave according to their own wishes, not controlled by others - more likely to disobey
• legitimacy of authority: an explanation for obedience which suggests that we are more likely to obey people who have authority over us.
• strength for agentic state: support from milgram's study support the role of the agentic state in obedience, when participants asked who was responsible if the learner was harmed, the experimenter takes the blame. The obedience rates increased when they were not accountable.
• limitation for agentic state: doesnt explain many research
• authoritarian personality: a type of personality that Adorno argued was characterized by a strong sense of obedience to authority.
• Adorno research: developed F-scale to measure authoritarian personality - higher the score the more authoritarian
• Limitation of authoritarian personality: cannot explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country's population, limited because an alternative explanation is much more realistic
• Strength of authoritarian personality: Milgram interviewed a small sample and got them to complete the F-scale, they scored significantly higher on the F-scale than a comparison group of disobedient participants.