5. Explanations of Obedience

Two theories of obedience

Two theories of obedience

• Agentic state

• Legitimacy theory

Outline the agentic state

Individuals allow someone else to direct their behaviour – they pass responsibility to them

Outline the autonomous state

individuals direct their own behaviour, and take responsibility for the consequences

Outline the agentic shift

Shift from autonomy to ‘agency’. People move from the autonomous state into the agentic state when confronted with an authority figure.

Kelman and Hamilton (1989)

• Legitimacy of the system

• Legitimacy of authority within the system

• Legitimacy of demands or orders given

Legitimacy of the system

This concerns the extent to which the ‘body’ is a legitimate source of authority. eg. government or school.

Legitimacy of authority within the system

This is the power individuals hold to give orders because of their position in the system.

Legitimacy of demands or orders given

This refers to the extent with which the order is perceived to be a legitimate area for the authority figure.

eg. It is reasonable for a teacher to tell you off for not having completed your homework.

It is not reasonable for the teacher to demand that you go and wash their car

Destructive Authority

Milgram’s study when the experimenter used prods to order the participants to behave in ways that went against their consciences.

Evaluate a strength of the theories of obedience

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

E: The students blamed the experimenter rather than the participant.

E: The students also indicated that the responsability was due to to the legitimate authority (hierarchy) and expert authority (scientist)

L: They recognised legitimate authority as the cause of obedience, supporting this explanation.

Evaluate a limitation of the theories of obedience

P: The agent shift does not explain many of the research findings.

E: For example it does not explain why some students did not obey.

E: The findings from Hofling et al’s study showed he agentic shift explanation predicts that, as nurses handed over responsibility to the doctor, they should have shown levels of anxiety, similar to Milgram’s participants, as they understood their role in the destructive process. However this was not the case.

L: This suggests that the agentic sift can only account for some situations of obedience.

Evaluate a strength of the theories of obedience (Chinese schools)

P: The legitimacy theory is a useful account of cultural differences in obedience

E: In some cultures, authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate and entitled to demand obedience from individuals

E: For example in many Chinese schools there are more disciplinary activities such as morning exercises showing how different cultures submit to authority.

L: This reflects the ways that different societies are structured and are raised to perceive authority figures.

Evaluate the theories of obedience (the obedience alibi)

P: There is historical evidence for the theories of obedience.

E: Mandel described one incident involving German Reserve Police Battalion 101 where men obeyed the orders to shoot civilians in a small town in Poland.

E: This was despite the fact that they didn’t have direct orders to do so and they were told they could be assigned to other duties if they preferred.

L: Showing how the theories of obedience can apply to history.

Adorno (1950)

• was interested in investigating why Nazi soldiers were so willing to persecute and kill members of minority groups, such as Jews during WWII

• He claimed a particular personality type is more likely to obey an authority.

• A high level of obedience is basically a psychological disorder.

Procedure of Adorno et al. (1950)

investigated the causes of an obedient personality in a study of more than 2000 middle-class, white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups.

• They developed an ‘F’ scale to measure the relationship between a person's personality type and prejudiced beliefs.

• In the second part of the experiment some individuals were interviewed rather than using a questionnaire.

Findings of Adorno et al. (1950)

• Those who had scored highly on the ‘F’ scale identified with ‘strong’ people and were generally contemptuous of the ‘weak’.

• They were very conscious of their own and others’ status.

• High scorers had a particular cognitive style:

• There were no ‘grey areas’ between categories of people.

• They had fixed and distinctive stereotypes about other groups.

• There was a strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.

Authoritarian Personality

a distinct personality pattern characterised by strict adherence to conventional values and a belief in absolute obedience or submission to authority

Development of the auth

• A very disciplined upbringing

• Unconscious hostility

• Displacement

• Prejudice

Evaluate a strength of the dispositional explanations of obedience

• Milgram and his assistant Alan Elms (1966) conducted a follow-up study using participants who had taken part in Milgram’s original study.

• They found that those who were fully obedient and went all the way to 450 volts scored higher on tests of authoritarianism and lower on scales of social responsibility than those who defied the experimenter.

• These findings support Adorno’s claims although only a correlation could be determined. Can cause and effect be established?

• There is also a large body of evidence to indicate that people who are very rigid, conservative, and prejudiced have been brought up in the way that Adorno described, with a great deal of physical punishment and little chance to express their own opinions.

Evaluate a limitation of the dispositional explanations of obedience

• It is highly unlikely that the millions of individuals that all displayed obedient, racist and anti-Semitic behaviour in pre-war Germany all had the same personality, and so perhaps there is an alternative explanation – Social Identity Theory.

• People identify themselves as belonging to particular social groups. We favour our own group (in group) over any group to which we do not belong (out group).

• We maximise the similarities within the group and the differences between our group and others. e.g. provide rules/norms for that group.

• The majority of the German people identified with the anti-Semitic Nazi state, and scapegoated the ‘outgroup’, the Jews.

Evaluate a limitation of the dispositional explanations of obedience (political bias)

• The ‘F’ scale measures the tendency towards an extreme right-wing ideology.

• However, in reality left-wing authoritarianism (e.g. Russian Bolshevism or Chinese Maoism) also emphasises the importance of complete obedience to legitimate political authority.

• Therefore, Adorno’s theory is limited as it cannot account for obedience to authority across the whole political spectrum.

Evaluate a limitation of the dispositional explanations of obedience (interviewer bias)

• The interviews in Adorno’s study were vulnerable to interviewer bias. As the interviewers knew the hypothesis of the study, they were aware of what information they needed to confirm it.

• Knowing the participants' test scores also meant that they knew in advance whether the interviewee was likely to have an authoritarian personality.

• Therefore their questioning would have been guided by this knowledge. They may even have recorded only the information they needed to confirm their hypothesis.

• In addition, the actual F-scale is problematic as it uses items all worded in the same way – which means people may have just been ticking the same box all the way down, which is not and indicator of authoritarianism. The items were also closed, with no opportunity for clarification.