PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS
AGENTIC STATE
– A mental state where we feel no personal responsibility for our behaviour because we believe ourselves to be acting (an agent) for an authority figure.
– This frees us from the demands of our consciences and allows us to obey even a destructive figure
– The individual may feel no responsibility for their actions
AUTONOMOUS STATE
– This is the opposite of being in an agentic state.
– So a person is free to behave accordingly to their own principles and therefore feels a sense of responsibility for their own actions.
– The shift from autonomy to agency is called the agentic shift.
– Milgram suggested that this occurs when a person perceives someone else as a figure of authority.
– In most social groups when one person is in charge, others defer to this person and shift from autonomy to agency.
LEGITIMACY OF AUTHORITY
– An explanation for obedience which suggests that we are more likely to obey people who we perceive to have authority over us.
– This authority is justified by the individual’s position of power within a social hierarchy.
– One of the consequences of this is that some people are granted the power to punish others and this is destructive authority.
EVALUATION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS
STRENGTHS
Supporting Research
– When students were shown a film of Milgram’s study they were asked to identify who they felt was responsible for the harm of the learner.
– The students blamed the experimenter rather than the participant because he was top of the hierarchy and therefore had legitimate authority.
– This supports this explanation as they see the participants as having no responsibility
Explains Cultural Differences
– A strength of the legitimacy of authority explanation is that it is a useful account of cultural differences in obedience.
– Many studies show that countries differ in the degree to which people are traditionally obedient to authority.
– This reflects the ways that different societies are structured and how children are raised to perceive authority figures.
– Such supportive findings from cross-cultural research increase the validity of the explanation.
LIMITATIONS
Not a Complete Explanation
– The agentic shift explanation doesn’t explain many of the research findings.
– For example, why some participants did not obey.
-This suggests that, at best, agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience.
DISPOSITIONAL FACTORS
THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
– Theodor Adorno wanted to understand the anti-Semitism of the Holocaust.
– To do this Adorno investigated the causes of the obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle-class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups.
– They developed the F-scale to investigate this and this is what is still used to measure authoritarian personality.
– People who scored high on the F-scale and so had authoritarian leanings identified with strong people and were generally contemptuous of the weak.
– They were very conscious of their own and others’ status, showing excessive respect, deference and servility to those of higher status.
– There was found to be a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.
AUTHORITARIAN CHARACTERISTICS
– Adorno concluded that people with an authoritarian personality have a tendency to be especially obedient to authority.
– They have an extreme respect for authority and submissiveness to it.
– They believe we need strong and powerful leaders to enforce traditional values such as love of country, religion and family.
– Everything is either right or wrong and they are very uncomfortable with uncertainty.
ORIGIN OF THE PERSONALITY
– Adorno concluded that the personality was formed in childhood, as a result of harsh parenting that typically features extremely strict discipline, an expectation of loyalty, impossibly high standards, and severe criticism of perceived failings.
– Adorno argued that these experiences create resentment and hostility in the child that is displaced onto others who are perceived to be weaker, in a process known as scapegoating.
EVALUATION OF THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
STRENGTHS
Education may determine authoritarianism and obedience
– Research has generally found that less-educated people are consistently more authoritarian than the well-educated.
– Milgram also found that participants with lower levels of education tended to be more obedient than those with higher levels of education.
– This suggests that instead of authoritarianism causing obedience, lack of education could be responsible for both authoritarianism and obedience.
– As a result, any apparent causal relationship between authoritarianism and obedience may be more illusory than real.
LIMITATIONS
Lack of Cause and Effect
– It is impossible to draw a conclusion that the authoritarian personality causes obedience on the basis of a correlation as it may be that a third factor is involved.
– For example, perhaps both of these are associated with a lower level of education, and are not directly related with each other at all.
Hard to Generalise to an Entire Population
– This one explanation will find it hard to explain obedient behaviour in the majority of a country’s population.
– For example, the millions of Germans who all displayed obedient, racist and anti-Semitic behaviour must have differed in their personalities in all sorts of ways.
– It seems extremely unlikely that they could all possess an authoritarian personality.
– This is a limitation of Adorno’s theory because it is clear that an alternative explanation is much more realistic – that social identity explains obedience.