obedience

• Obedience


  To 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


  When 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


  Some members of the group have legitimate social power above those beneath them in the hierarchy, and we learn via socialisation that we will be accepted if we obey those who have authority over us
• Destructive authority


  Power is used for destructive purposes
• Destructive obedience


  Obedience is used to harm others
• The agentic shift cannot explain why some participants in Milgram's study did not obey, as, in theory, they should all have been in an agentic state
• The agentic shift cannot explain obedience over long periods of time (such as in Nazi Germany)
• Most observers thought the experimenter was responsible for the harm caused to the learner in Milgram's study, supporting the agentic state explanation
• In countries where obedience and deference to authority are less valued (such as Australia), obedience rates are much lower than in countries that value legitimate authority figures (such as Germany)
• 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 thought that 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. Volunteer participants drawn to be 'Teacher'

  2. Confederates drawn to be 'Learner' and 'Experimenter'

  3. Teacher instructed to punish Learner with electric shocks for incorrect answers

  4. Teacher encouraged to continue procedure when reluctant
• 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
• 80% of the participants in the French documentary study delivered the maximum shock of 460 volts to what appeared to be an unconscious man
• Martin Orne and Charles Holland (1968) argued that participants were play-acting as they didn't believe the setup was real
• Gina Perry (2013) reported that only around half of Milgram's participants believed the shocks were real and that two-thirds of them were disobedient
• Charles Sheridan and Richard King (1972) found that 54% of male and 100% of female participants delivered what they believed to be the fatal shock to a puppy
• Participants were deceived in multiple ways in Milgram's study
• Situational variables affecting obedience

  • Proximity
  • Location
  • Uniform
• In the proximity variation, the obedience rate dropped from 65% to 40%
• In the touch proximity variation, the obedience rate dropped further to 30%
• In the remote instruction variation, the obedience rate dropped to 20.5%
• In the run-down office block location, the obedience rate dropped to 47.5%
• In the uniform variation, the obedience rate dropped to the lowest of all the variations to 20%
• Bickman (1974) found people were twice as likely to obey the security guard compared to other confederates in different outfits
• Meeus and Raaijmakers (1968) found 90% of Dutch participants obeyed instructions to say stressful things in an interview
• Smith and Bond (1998) showed that replications of Milgram's research were not very multi-cultural, and were only able to identify 2 replications that were conducted in non-western countries
• External Locus of Control

  People who take less personal responsibility and are more affected by what others tell them
• Internal Locus of Control

  People who are more self-directed and less likely to follow orders from an authoritative figure if they do not agree with them
• Authoritarian personality


  Shows 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