Zusammenfassung der Ressource
obedience: social - psychological factors
- agentic state
- Eichmann triad for war crimes and said he was just
obeying orders
- Milgram - a person does not take responsibility for their actions
- autonomous state
- opposite of agentic state
- free to behave how they want and have
responsibility over their actions
- agentic shift
- the move from autonomous state to agentic
- when a person sees someone as a figure of authority
- greater power due to social hierarchy
- binding factors
- many of Milgram's participants wanted to quit but couldn't
- binding factors - allow the person to ignore or
minimise damage they are making
- e.g. shifting responsibility to the victim - they shouldn't have applied
- or denying that they were causing any damage
- legitimacy of authority
- societies have a hierarchy
- teachers police nightclub bouncers all have
authority in some situations
- the authority is legitimate as it is agreed by society
- consequences
- some people have the power to punish others
- we will follow them as they have authority
- we learn it from parents and teachers
- destructive authority
- problems can occur when legitimate authority
becomes destructive
- e.g. Hitler
- use their authority to order cruel things
- Milgram supports this by using prods
in his experiment - people went
against their conscience
- evaluation - agentic shift
- research support
- Blass & Schmitt
- students shown Milgram's study and asked to identify who was responsible
- students said experimenter
- the experimenter was top of the hierarchy and had expert authority (scientist)
- limited explanation
- doesn't say why some people didn't obey
- in Hofling's nurse study not all
obeyed or showed signs of distress
when they should
- evaluation - legitimacy of authority
- cultural differences
- strength - countries differ to how obedient they are
- Kilham & Mann
- replicated study in Australia - 16% went all the way
- Mantell
- replicated in Germany - 85% went all the way
- it shows how different societies
are structured & how children
see authority figures
- good validity
- evaluation +
- obedience alibi
- limitation of agentic state
- Nazis behaviour cannot be explained by authority and agentic shift
- e.g. Mandell found
- a group of German police shot civilians even thought they
were not directly told to do so
- real life crimes of obedience
- strength of legitimacy of authority
- help to explain war crimes
- Kelman & Hamilton
- the My Lai massacre can be understood in
terms of the power of hierarchy of the US
army - only following orders