Social-psychological factors of obedience

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  • Explaining obedience
    • Legitimacy of authority
      • Definition: an explanation for obedience which suggests that we are more likely to obey someone we perceive to have authority over us. This authority is legitimated by the individual’s position of power within a social hierarchy
      • The destructive authority
        • Leaders such as Hitler, Stalin and Pot used their legitimate powers for destructive purposes such as genocide. Individuals will follow without question due to the perceived and legitimated authority of their country’s leader
    • Agentic state
      • Definition:  a mental state where we feel no personal responsibility for our behaviour as we believe ourselves to be acting for an authority figure. This frees us from the demands of our consciences and allows us to obey even a destructive authority figure
      • The autonomous state
        • The opposite of agentic state. This is when an individual feels free and independent and bound by their own conscience.
      • Binding factors
        • Factors of a situation which we ignore and thus allow us to reduce the effect we feel our behaviour is having.
    • Evaluating the legitimacy of authority theory
      • Strengths
        • Can explain differences in culture e.g through the study by Kilham and Mann in Australia vs Mantell in Germany
        • Helps us to understand how obedience can lead to real crimes - real world application
        • Research from Blass and Schmitt found that the participant identified the experimenter as the person to blame in Milgram’s study rather than the participant
    • Evaluating the agentic shift
      • Weaknesses
        • Cannot explain research findings so can only account for some situations of obedience
        • Cannot explain why Nazis behaved in a  certain way (Mandel study of German Reserve Police Battalion)

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