Psychology - Obedience

• Obedience

  Your behavior is the result of the orders or demands of a person you see as an authority figure
• Stanley Milgram's study on obedience

  • Showed that 100% of participants acting as a 'teacher' would give what they thought was a real painful 300 volt electric shock to a 'participant' in the next room, on the orders of a scientist acting as an authority figure
  • 65% of participants actually gave a potentially lethal maximum voltage even after the 'victim' stopped shouting
• Agency


  The state where we feel in charge and responsible for our decisions
• Agentic state

  The state where we give up our agency and allow an authority figure to make decisions for us, following their orders
• Legitimate authority figures

  • We learn through socialization who is higher on the social hierarchy, e.g. police and scientists are seen as more legitimate than postal workers and cleaners
  • The social hierarchy varies between cultures
• Proximity to the person being hurt

  Increases personal responsibility, reducing obedience (from 65% to 40% in Milgram's study)
• Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi, claimed he didn't feel responsible for his actions as he was only following Hitler's orders
• Authoritarian personality

  • Excessive obedience and respect for authority, rigid black-and-white thinking, dislike of minorities
  • Likely stems from a strict, physically punitive upbringing
• The 'F scale' developed by Adorno measures authoritarian personality traits
• Participants who gave the full shocks in Milgram's study scored higher on the F scale than those who refused to continue
• Adorno's theory struggles to explain the large number of people who complied with the Holocaust