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Explanations for Obedience - Coggle Diagram
Explanations for Obedience
Agentic State A01
Proposed by Milgram, electric shock study.
An Individual believes they are acting on behalf of someone with more authority than them and therefore, the consequences fall to the authority figure rather than the individual.
When the individual starts acting as an agent, they go through the agentic shift from an autonomous state of working on their own principles, to the agentic state of working under the orders of someone else.
They believe their authority figure to hold blame and take the consequences so they feel no responsibility for their actions and often no guilt.
Aim was to find a reason for the actions of the Nazi party.
Adolf Eichmann - SS officer who planned sending of Jews and minorities to concentration camps. Before his execution 1962, he wrote a letter refusing to accept responsibility saying he only acted on the orders of his leaders and never gave his own orders, so was an agent of the Nazi Party.
Agentic State A03
Real Life Obedience
Lifton 1986 - found doctors who worked at Auschwitz changed from normal medical professionals concerned about their patients to be able to perform vile experiments on helpless prisoners.
Staub 1989 - rather than agentic shift being responsible for the transition found in holocaust perpetrators, it is experience of carrying out evil acts over and over that changes the way the individual thinks and behaves.
Cruel?
Common belief that Milgram detected signs of Cruelty in his participants who used the situation to express sadistic impulses.
Stanford Prison Experiment sustained this belief, within days the 'guards' became increasingly cruel on increasingly submissive prisoners despite no obvious authority figure telling them to.
Suggests some obedience may be explained through agentic shift, but others are obedient due to their fundamental desire to inflict harm upon someone else.
Loss of personal control
Under such circumstances, people show increased acceptance of external sources of control to compensate.
Fennis and Aarts 2012 - reduction in personal control resulted in greater obedience to authority, bystander apathy and compliance with behavioural requests.
The process of agentic shift is not confined to obedience but may extend to other forms of social influence where they feel less in control.
Legitimacy of Authority A01
Legitimacy of authority is a person perceived as having social control over a situation
For a person to shift to an agentic state, they need to believe that the orders/instructions came from someone with legitimacy of authority.
Often, if the demands are seen as potentially harmful, for the authority figure to be seen as legitimate, a institutional setting such as the military or a university is required to enhance the authority.
Example - Lt William Calley at My Lai, ordered his men to kill over 500 unarmed villagers apparently because his senior officer Capt. Ernest Medina told him to.
Legitimacy of Authority A03
Real Life Obedience
If people allow another person to make judgement for them regarding conduct, they no longer feel their own morals are responsible.
When directed by a legitimate authority figure to engage in immoral actions, people are concerningly willing to do so.
People may as a consequence, readily engage in obedience without question even if it seems destructive and immoral.
Test of Legitimate Authority
Tarnow 2000 - studied data from a US National Transport Safety Board (NTSB) to review all serious aircraft accidents in the US 1978 - 90 where a black box was available and flight crew actions were a contributing factor.
Found excessive dependence on the captain's authority and expertise with some tragic consequences much like in Milgram's study.
Report found such 'lacking errors' in 19/37 accidents investigated, showing real life demonstration of the power of legitimate authority to enforce obedience.