Social-psychological factors
- Created by: MollyL20
- Created on: 12-10-20 20:44
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- Social-psychological factors
- Agentic state
- Milgram's initial interest was sparked by the trial of Adolf Eichman (1961) for war crimes. He was responsible and charged for the Nazi death camps an his defence was that he was just obeying orders
- This led to Milgram to propose that obedience to destructive authority occurs because the person does not take responsibility.
- Instead, they believe that they are acting for someone else eg an agent. An agent is someone who acts for or in place of another person who acts for or in place of another. An agent is not an unfeeling puppet
- They experience high anxiety when they realise that what they are doing is wrong but feel powerless to disobey
- Autonomous state
- Is the opposite of agentic state
- Autonomy means to be independent so a person in the autonomous state is free to behave accordingly to their own principals and therefore feels a sense of responsibility for their actions
- The shift from autonomy to agent is called the agentic shift. Milgram suggested that this occurs when a person perceives someone else as a figure of authority
- This person has a greater power because of their position in the social hierarchy
- Binding factors
- Milgram raised the question of why the individuals remain the the agentic state. He observed how his participants wanted to quit but never did. The answer is binding factors
- Aspects of the situation that allow the person to ignore or minimise the damaging effect of their behaviour and thus reduce the moral strain
- Milgram proposed a number of strategies that the individual uses such as shifting the blame or denying the damage that they had caused
- Legitimacy of authority
- Most society are arranged in a hierarchal way, meaning that certain people hold authority over us. This authority has been accepted by all of society
- Most of us accept that the police and the courts have the power to punish wrongdoers so we are willing t give up some of our independence than hand control of our behaviour over to the people in which we trust
- We learn to accept and obey authority from a young age by parents and teachers
- Destructive authority
- Problems arise when people use their authority in the wrong ways for the wrong reasons
- Historically, there have been many instances of charismatic, powerful leaders who order people to behave in certain ways that are cruel, stupid and dangerous
- Shown in Milgram's study when the experimenter used prods to order participants to behave in ways which went against their consciences
- Agentic state
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