Why are people obedient

• Milgrams research into obedience is often counter-intuitive in that the results go against what we might reasonably expect, given our knowledge of human behaviour
• What milgram seems to have demonstrated is the power of the situation in shaping behaviour
• Milgram proposed that the participant becomes an ‘agent’ of the person in authority and they merely became a cog in a large machine of obedience
• when an individual is in an agentic state, they cease to act according to their own conscience and they lack a sense of responsibility for their own actions
• A legitimate authority is somebody who’s perceived to be in a position of social control within a situation
• If the authority figures commands are a potentially harmful or destructive form, then for them to be perceived as legitimate they must occur within some sort of institutional structure
• Adorno et al (1950) proposed that some individuals are more likely to be obedient because of the way they were brought up. Their parents tended to give conditional love, strict discipline, expected unquestioning loyalty and were insensitive to the child’s needs
• Such experiences create an insecure adult who respects authority and power and who may increase their self esteem through in-group favouritism, which leads to prejudice
• The identification of the authoritarian personality provided a possible explanation for why some individuals require very little pressure in order to obey
• The California F scale was used by Adorno to measure the different components that made up the authoritarian personality. The F scale contained statements like “obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues”. agreeing with such statements was indicative of an authoritarian personality
• Elms and Milgram carried out a follow study using ps who had previously taken part in one of milgrams experiments two months prior
• They selected 20 obedient ps and 20 defiant ps. each participant completed the MMPI scale and the California F scale. Participants were also asked a series of open ended questions, including questions about their childhood
• The researchers found little difference between obedience and defiant participants on the MMPI variables. However, they did find higher levels of authoritarianism among those participants classified as obedient, compared with those classified as defiant
• Obedient ps reported being less close to their fathers during childhood and were more likely to describe them in distinctly more negative terms. These findings suggest that the obedient group was higher on the trait of authoritarianism
• Staub (1989) suggests that rather than genetic shift being responsible for the transition found in many holocaust perpetrators, it’s the experience of carrying out acts of evil over a long time that changes the way people think and behave
• One common belief among social scientists is that milgram had detected signs of cruelty among his ps, who had used the situation to express their sadistic impulses. This belief was subsequently given substance by the standford prison experiment. Within just a few days, the guards inflicted rapidly escalating cruelty on increasingly submissive prisoners despite the fact there was no obvious authority figure instructing them to do so which suggests that obedience may be due to some fundamental desire to inflict harm on others
• Milgram showed that variations in the social context of the study were the primary cause of differences in participants’ levels of obedience, not variations in personality. he believed that the specific social situation participants found themselves in caused them to obey or resist regardless of their personalities
• Dambrun and Vatiné (2010) overcame this problem by using an ‘immersive virtual environment’ where an actor taking the role of the learner was filmed, recorded and displayed on a computer screen. Ps we’re informed that the experiment was a situation and that the shocks and the victims reactions weren’t real but simulated. Despite this ps still tended to respond as if the situation was real and there was a clear and significant correlation between ps‘ RWA scores and the maximum voltage shock administered to the victim