obedience

• Obedience


  Comply with the demands of someone you see as an authority figure
• Agentic shift


  When orders come from a figure of authority we can easily deny personal responsibility because it is assumed that they will take ultimate responsibility
• Agent of external authority


  The fully obedient person undergoes a psychological adjustment or 'shift' and they see themselves as an agent of external authority
• Opposing sets of demands that lead to obedience


  • External authority: Authority of the authority figure
  • Internal authority: Authority of our own conscience
• Situational Explanations


  • Look at the dynamics of social hierarchies
• Agentic state


  An individual carrying out the orders of an authority figure, acting as their agent (the shift is from autonomy to agency)
• Autonomous state


  The opposite of an agentic state and means the person has autonomy over their actions and can act according to their own principles
• Binding factors


  Aspects of the situation mean the individual is able to take away their own 'moral strain' and ignore their damaging behaviour
• Legitimacy of authority


  Most human societies are ordered in a hierarchical way, where some members of the group have legitimate social power above those beneath them in the hierarchy
• We learn via socialisation that we will be accepted if we obey those who have authority over us (we trust them and/or because they have the power to punish us)
• Destructive authority


  Power is used for destructive purposes
• Destructive obedience


  Obedience is used to harm others
• Milgram's Research

  Stanley Milgram sought an answer to the question of why such a high proportion of the German population obeyed Hitler's commands to murder over 6 million Jews as well as 5 million Romani, homosexuals, Poles and other social groups during the Second World War
• Milgram's explanation


  One possible explanation was that Germans were different from other people in other countries, perhaps being more obedient (known as a dispositional explanation of obedience)
• Milgram's procedure (1963)

  1. 40 American men volunteered to take part in Milgram's study at Yale University, supposedly on memory

  2. When each volunteer arrived to take part, they were introduced to another participant (who was a confederate to Milgram)

  3. The two participants drew lots to see who would be the 'Teacher' (T) and who would be the 'Learner' (L)

  4. The draw was fixed, so the genuine participant was always the teacher and the confederate the learner

  5. An Experimenter (E) was also involved, who was also a confederate and was dressed in a grey lab coat

  6. One participant, the confederate, was asked to learn a set of word pairs and the teacher would test his knowledge

  7. They were placed in adjacent rooms and the teacher was positioned in front of a set of controls to administer electric shocks to the learner

  8. The teacher was instructed to punish the learner with a shock after each incorrect he gave

  9. When the teacher displayed a reluctance to injure the learner, they were encouraged to continue the procedure
• Milgram's results (1963)

  • 65% of participants went all the way up to 450 volts ('danger - severe shock')
  • 100% of participants went up to 300 volts ('intense shock')
  • Many of the participants showed signs of emotional distress e.g. shaking, sweating, groaning, seizures
• Milgram's conclusion (1963)

  Under the right conditions (e.g. the presence of a legitimate authority; the agentic state) people will commit acts of destructive obedience towards someone they have just met
• Situational factors

  May explain destructive obedience
• Research support

  • A French documentary focused on a game show, where participants thought they were contestants in a pilot episode for a new show called Le Jeu De La Mort (The Game of Death)
  • Participants were paid to give electric shocks ordered by the presenter to other participants in front of a studio audience
  • The participants who were the receiving the shocks were actors and the shocks were fake
  • 80% of the participants delivered the maximum shock of 460 volts to what appeared to be an unconscious man
  • Participants' behaviour was nearly identical to that of Milgram's participants, they showed signs of anxiety, nervous laughter and nail-biting
• This supports Milgram's original findings of obedience to authority
• Low internal validity

  • Martin Orne and Charles Holland (1968) argued that participants were play-acting as they didn't believe the setup was real
  • Gina Perry (2013) listened to tapes of Milgram's participants and reported that only around half of them believed the shocks were real and that two-thirds of them were disobedient
  • This suggests that participants may have been responding to demand characteristics
• Research support


  • Charles Sheridan and Richard King (1972) conducted a study using a procedure similar to Milgram's
  • Their participants gave real shocks to a puppy in response to orders received from the experimenter
  • Despite the real distress of the animal, 54% of male and 100% of female participants delivered what they believed to be the fatal shock
  • This supports Milgram's study and showed genuine results as people behaved obediently, even when the shocks were real
• Authoritarian Personality


  Obedience may be due to personality rather than situational factors
• Ethical issues

  • Participants were deceived in multiple ways:
  • Participants thought the allocation of roles of both Teacher and Learner was random but they were not as Milgram's confederate was always the learner
  • Participants believed the electric shocks were real
  • Milgram debriefed the participants afterward to ensure they understood the real intentions of the experiment
• People with a high External Locus of Control


  • More likely to follow orders as they take less personal responsibility and are more affected by what others tell them
• People with a high Internal Locus of Control

  • More likely to be self-directed and less likely to follow orders from an authoritative figure if they do not agree with them
• Milgram & Situational Variables Affecting Obedience

  1. Proximity

  2. Location

  3. Uniform
• Authoritarian personality

  Tends to show extreme respect for authority, status and hierarchies; despises those they consider to be 'weak'; has conventional attitudes towards gender, sexuality, race etc. is rigid in their beliefs; is justice-focused; is likely to have right-wing political views
• Authoritarian personality

  Likely to be the result of harsh parenting in which discipline was a key feature and expectation of 'perfect' behaviour is common i.e. the child is shown love as long as they behave exactly how the parent wants them to behave
• Adorno et al.'s research


  1. Developed a questionnaire called the F-Scale (fascist scale) to test whether someone had an authoritarian personality

  2. Studied more than 2000 middle-class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups
• Examples from the F-Scale

  • Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues for children to learn
  • Homosexuals are hardly better than criminals and ought to be severely punished
• Those who scored high on the F-Scale identified with strong people, had contempt for the weak, admired high-status individuals and exhibited 'black and white' views
• Proximity

  • In Milgram's original procedure, the Teacher could hear the Learner but could not see him
  • In the proximity variation, both were moved to the same room
  • The obedience rate dropped from 65% to 40%
  • In the touch proximity variation, the teacher then had to force the Learners hand onto the electroshock plate
  • The obedience rate dropped further to 30%
  • In the remote instruction variation, the experimenter left the room and gave instructions by telephone
  • The obedience rate dropped to 20.5%
  • Explanation: Decreased proximity allows people to psychologically distance themselves from the consequences of their actions, however, when they have to witness and be physically together, this becomes difficult
• There were strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice
• Location

  • Milgram conducted a variation in a run-down office block
  • The obedience rate dropped to 47.5%
  • Explanation: Participants were more likely to be obedient in the university environment as they perceived the experimenter had legitimate authority and obedience was expected
• Strengths of Adorno et al.'s research

  • Elms & Milgram interviewed a small sample of Milgram's original participants who had fully obeyed and found that when participants completed the F-Scale they scored significantly higher than those participants who had disobeyed
  • There is real-world evidence for the authoritarian personality as seen in the behaviour of right-wing dictators such as Mussolini
• Limitations of Adorno et al.'s research

  • Extreme left-wing personalities also show high levels of authoritarianism e.g. Stalin
  • A self-report is open to social desirability and misuse: Greenstein (1969) stated that it was possible to get a high score just by putting 'agree' as your answers which would invalidate the F-scale
• Uniform


  • In the uniform variation, the experimenter was called away and replaced by an 'ordinary member of the public', meaning they were not wearing the 'uniform' of a grey lab coat
  • The obedience rate dropped to the lowest of all the variations to 20%
  • Explanation: Uniforms are often associated as symbols of authority and therefore encourage obedience as those around them see them as legitimate authority figures
• There have been other studies conducted that have demonstrated the influence of situational variables on obedience which is a strength of Milgram's research
• Research support

  • Bickman (1974) conducted an experiment in New York where he had 3 confederates dress in different outfits, one wore a jacket and tie, one in a milkman uniform and the 3rd a security guards uniform
  • The confederates stood on the street and asked passers-by to perform tasks such as picking up litter or lending money to someone for the parking meter
  • They found people were twice as likely to obey the security guard compared to the other two confederates
  • This supports the idea of uniform increasing obedience and that a situational variable can have a powerful effect on obedience levels