Social- Psychological Factors Affecting Obedience

Milgram's initial interest in obedience was sparked by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 for war crimes.

Eichmann had been in charge of Nazi death camps and his defence was that he had only been following orders.

This lead Milgram to propose that obedience to destructive authprity occurs because a person does not take responsibility. Instead they believe they are acting for someone else, i.e. they are an 'agent'.

An 'agent' is someone who acts for or in place of someone else/another.

An agent is not emotionless, they feel high anxiety ('moral strain') when they realise that what they are doing is wrong, but they feel powerless to disobey.

This is the opposite of being in an agentic state.

Autonomy means to be independant or free and when someone acts in an autonomous way, they are aware of the consequences of their actions and choose voluntarily to behave in certain ways. This means that they feel responsible for their own actions.

The shift from autonomy to 'agentic state' is called the agentic shift. 

Milgram (1974) suggested that this occurs when a person percieves someone else as a figure of authority.
This other person has greater power because of their position in the social heirarchy.

Milgram then raised the question of why the individual remains in the agentic state. He had observed that many of his participants spoke as of they wanted to quit but seemed unable to do so.

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' they are feeling.

Milgram proposed a number of strategies that the individual uses, such as shifting the responsibility to the victim or denying the damage they were doing to the victims.

Most societies are structured in a hierachial way.

This means that people in certain positions hold authority over the rest of us. For example, parents, teachers, police officers, nightclub bouncers, all have some kind of authority over us at times.

The autority they have is legitimate in the sense that it is agreed by society. Most of us accept that authority figures have to be allowed to exercise social power over others beacuse this allows society to function smoothly.

One of the consequences of this legitimacy is that some peopel are granted power to ounish others. Most of us accept that the police and courts have power to punish wrongdoers. Therefore we are willing to give up some of our independance and to hand control of our behaviour over to people we trust to exercise their authority appropriately.

We learn acceptance of legitimate authority from childhood, from parents initially then from teachers and adults generally.

Probelms arise when legitimate authority becomes destructive.

History has too often shown that charasmatic and powerful leaders can use their legitimate powers for destructive purposes, ordering people to behave in ways that are callous, cruel, stupid and dangerous.

Destructive authority was very clearly shown in Milgram's study, when the experimenter used prods to order participants to behave in ways that went against their consciences.

STRENGTH

Blass and Schmidt (2001) showed students a film of Milgram's study and asked them to identify who was responsible for the harm to the learner.

The students blamed the 'experimenter' rather than the participant.

This responsibility was due to legitimate authority (the 'experimenter was top of the social hierachy') but also expert authority (he was a scientist).

The students recognised legitimate authority as the cause of obedience, supporting the explanation.

STRENGTH

The legitimacy of authority is a useful account of cultural differences in obedience.

Countries differ in obedience to authority: only 16% of Australians went to the top of the voltage scale (Kilham and Mann 1874); 85% of German participants did (Mantell 1971).

Authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate in some cultures.

This reflects how different societies are structured and children are raised to percieveauthority figures.

Supportive findings from cross-cultural research increases the validity of the explanation.

STRENGTH

Kelman and Hamilton (1989) suggest the My Lai massacre (Vietnam War) is explained by the power hierachy of the US army.

The army has authority that is recognised by the US government and the law so soldiers assume orders given by the hierachy to be legal; even orders to kill, **** and destroy villages.

The legitimacy of authority explanation is able to give reasons why destructive obedience is commited.

LIMITATION

The agentic shift does not explain many of the research findings.

Some participants did not obey- humans are social animals in social hierachies and therefore should all obey.

Also, in Hofling et al's (1966) study, nurses should have shown anxiety as they gave responsibility over the doctor, because they understood their role in a destructuve process.

However, this was not the case so the agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience.

LIMITATION

The agentic state cannot completely account for the behaviour of the Nazi's.

This is because Mandel (1998) described German Reserve Police Battalion 101- the men shot civilians in a small Polish town (WWII).

They did this even though they were not directly ordered to (they were told they could be assigned other duties).

This challenges the agentic state explanation because the Reserve Police were not powerless to disobey.