Explanations for obedience

• The Agentic state


  where an individual is acting on behalf of someone else - diminished personal responsibility
• The Autonomous state


  The individual assumes full responsibility for their behaviours and actions. An individual’s behaviour is guided by their own values, beliefs and principles
• Strength (agentic state)


  Research Support - Milgram found that obedience rates reduced to 20.5% when an instruction to the Teacher to give an electric shock was given over a telephone, rather than them being in the same room as the Experimenter
• Legitimacy of Authority


  This refers to the amount of social power that is held by the person giving instructions. Social power may be associated with social roles (teachers, police officers, doctors etc.) or with social status (gang members, older family members etc.)
• Strength (Legitimacy of authority)


  For example, Kilham and Mann (1974) replicated Milgram’s procedure in Australia and found that only 16% of their participants went all the way to the top of the voltage scale. On the other hand, Mantell (1971) found German 85% participants obeyed.
• One limitation of agentic state and legitimacy of authority as explanations of obedience is that they do not consider other factors which can influence obedience levels.
• The Authoritarian Personality (Dispositional explanation)


  a specific personality type may be more likely to be obedient than others. This is a dispositional explanation of obedience, which suggests that an individual has a collection of traits (or dispositions) that have evolved as their personality has developed throughout their childhood
• Research support for the the dispositional explanation of obedience comes from Adorno et

  al (1950) who developed 9 dimensions (scales), including the “ F-scale” (potential for fascism)- which had items such as “obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn”.
• A limitation of the dispositional explanation is that it attempts to explain the complex human personality and the complex behaviour of obedience in a simplistic way by assuming that a correlation provides empirical evidence for cause and effect.