Explanations for obedience

• Agentic State


  Mental state where we feel no responsibility for our actions as we are acting for someone in authority. Frees our conscience and lets us obey even those who are bad
• Binding Factors


  Allow person to ignore/minimise effect of their behaviour and so reduce moral strain, uses strategies such as blaming victim or deny damage they are doing to victims
• Legitimacy of authority


  Explanation to obedience which says we more likely to obey those who we perceive to have more authority than us
• Authority


  Justified by person's position in social hierarchy
• Agentic state


  When someone is in a state where they perceive themselves as an agent of another person or authority figure, and thus feel less responsible for their actions
• The participants in the Milgram experiment went through with the procedure with no objections when the experimenter said he was responsible if the learner was harmed
• This shows that when someone else is responsible, people can act easily as the experimenter's agent
• The agentic shift does not explain the Jacobson and Rank study, where 16 out of 18 nurses disobeyed a doctor's order to give an excessive drug dose and remained autonomous
• This suggests that the agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience
• The Mandel incident, where a soldier shot civilians even though it wasn't required, suggests that the agentic shift is not required for destructive behaviour
• Strength of legitimacy explanation


  Explains cultural differences
• Cultural differences


  • Kilham and Mann found only 16% of Australian women gave max shock in Milgram style experiment, but Mantell found 85% of German women did
• Legitimacy explanation


  Cant explain disobedience in hierarchy where authority is clear and accepted
• Possible that innate tendencies


  Have greater influence on behaviour than the legitimacy of authority figure
• Authoritarian Personality (AP)


  People with an AP show an extreme respect for (and submissiveness to) authority, and view society as 'weaker' than it once was, so believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values
• Authoritarian Personality


  • Show contempt for those of inferior social status
  • Have an inflexible outlook on the world - everything is either right or wrong, and they are very uncomfortable with uncertainty
  • Perceive 'other' people (e.g. different ethnic groups) as responsible for the ills of society
• Origins of the Authoritarian Personality


  1. Formed in childhood, mostly as a result of harsh parenting featuring extremely strict discipline and severe criticism

  2. Parents give conditional love - their love depends on how the child behaves

  3. Creates resentment and hostility in the child, which is displaced onto others through scapegoating
• Adorno experiment

  studied over 200 american whites and developed a scale developed by Adorno et al. to measure Authoritarian Personality
• Obedient participants in Milgram's studies

  Scored significantly higher on the F-scale than disobedient participants
• However, the obedient participants differed from authoritarians in some ways, such as not glorifying their fathers, not experiencing unusual punishment in childhood, and not having hostile attitudes towards their mothers
• Authoritarianism cannot explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country's population, as most people in pre-war Germany displayed obedient and anti-Semitic behaviour despite differing in personality
• The F-scale only measures the tendency towards an extreme form of right-wing ideology, and does not account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum
• The F-scale has been criticised as a seriously flawed scale, as it is possible to get a high score just by selecting 'agree' answers