Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Why do people obey?
- Evaluation
- Monocausal emphasis
- Mandel (1998)
- Suggests that by focusing on just obedience, Milgram ignored other more plausible explanations
- Goldhagen
(1996)
- Identified anti-Semitism as the primary motivation
for the actions of the Germans, not obedience
- Agentic shift
- Important aspect of Milgram's obedience
explanation as applied to the Holocaust
- Believed that the same psychological
process was at work in both situations
- Some differences suggest not
- Amount of time
- Holocaust perpetrators carried out duties for months
- Milgram's experiment happened in a day
- Perception of harm
- Browning (1992)
- 38,000 Jews were executed over 4 years by the Reserve Police Battalion 101
- Milgram's participants
were told there would be no
permanent tissue damage
- The consequences of the obedience alibi
- Mandel (1998)
- Distressing for those
effected
- Exonerates war criminals of crime
- Obedience as a key role in the Holocaust is not justified
- Gradual commitment
- Once committed to a course of action it becomes
difficult for people to change their minds
- Increased shocks gradually from low to high
- Agentic shift
- Agentic state
- The condition a person is in when they see themselves
as an agent for carrying out another persons wishes
- Autonomous state
- The state when a person sees himself acting on his own
- Upon entering hierarchy of authority, switch to agentic state
- No longer feel like they are acting on their own purposes
- The role of
buffers
- Whether the teacher and the learner are in the same room
- Being in different rooms acts as a buffer
- Can't see the consequences of actions
- If in the same room, the buffering effect is reduced
- Justifying obedience
- Offering an
ideology
- Good for science etc
- End justifies the means
- Shocks given were justified as they were told it would help improve memory