Explanations for obedience

• Agentic state- a mindset that allows us to carry out orders from an authority figure even if it will conflict without personal sense of right and wrong. we refuse responsibility as we believe that we are acting on someone else's behalf and blame and negative consequences ultimately lies with them.
• Legitimacy of authority- the perceived right of an authority figure to have power and control over others. this can be based on multiple factors such as expertise, position and tradition.
• Milgram- in the original study the researcher wore a lab coat and the participants were told that the researcher had full responsibility and therefore they could act as an agent and carry out the experimenters orders. if the participants were told that they were responsible, it is less likely that they would obey and Milgram would've got very different results
• it was argued that people could act in one of 2 ways- when a person changed from autonomous to an agentic state, they have undergone an agentic shift.

  • autonomously- choose their behaviour
  • agentic state- carry out orders of the authority figure
• in milgrams original experiment, 65% of participants continued to the 450 volts and were arguably in an agentic state.- however in a variation of the experiment, an additional confederate administered the shocks on behalf of the teacher, the number of participants who administered full 450 volts rose dramatically from 65% to 92.5%. this variation highlights the power of shifting responsibility.
• proximity- in the original, the teacher and the learner were in separate rooms, but in a variation they were in the same room.

  • in this variation, the percentage that administered the full 450 volts dropped to 40%.
  • in another variation, the teacher had to force the learners hand onto the shock plate. obedience dropped further to 30%.
  • proximity of the authority figure affects the levels of obedience. in one variation after the experimenter had given the initial instructions, they left the room. all instructions were delivered over the phone. in this variation, only 21% gave the full 450 volts.
• location- Milgram's original study was conducted in yale university. when the study was moved to a run down building, obedience fell to 47.5%
• uniform- the experimenter wore a grey lab coat as a symbol of authority (a type of uniform). when the role of the experimenter was taken over by a person wearing ordinary clothes and looked like a member of the public, the obedience dropped to 20%.
• application-

  My Lai massacre.

  • As many as 504 unarmed civilians were killed by American soldiers. women were gang raped and people were shot down, even in a state of surrender. The soldiers blew up buildings and burnt the village down, and killed all the animals.
  • Only one soldier faced charges and was found guilty, lieutenant William Calley. his defence was the same as the Nazis at the Nuremburg trials, that being that he was only following orders.
• the authoritarian personality-

  Adorno et al (1950)- investigated the causes of the obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups. to do this they developed several scales, including the potential for fascism scale (the f-scale) which is still used to measure an authoritarian personality.