Evaluation of Situational Explanations of Obedience

Agentic state - research support

• Strength - Milgram’s own studies support the role of agentic state in obedience

• Some of the participants asked questions to the Experimenter about the procedure

• One common one was ‘Who is responsible if the Learner is harmed?’

• Experimenter replied with ‘I’m responsible’ - the participants then carried on without any further objections

• This shows that once participants perceived that they were no longer responsible for their own actions, they acted more easily as the Experimenter’s agent, as Milgram originally suggested

Agentic state - limited explanation

• Limitation - the agentic shift doesn’t explain many research findings about obedience

• Rank and Jacobson’s study (1977) - found that 16 out of 18 hospital nurses disobeyed orders from a doctor to administer an excessive drug to a patient - even if the doctor was an obvious authority figure

• Almost all nurses remained autonomous - as did many of Milgram’s participants

• Suggests that at best the agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience

Legitimacy of authority - explains cultural differences

• Strength - is a useful account of cultural differences in obedience

• Kilham and Mann (1974) found only 16% of Australian women went up to 450V in a Milgram-style study

• However Mantell (1971) found a different figure for German participants - 85%

• Shows that in some cultures, authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate and entitled to demand obedience from individuals

Legitimacy of authority - cannot explain all (dis)obedience

• Limitation - legitimacy of authority cannot explain disobedience in a hierarchy where legitimacy of authority is clear and accepted

• Includes the nurses in Rank and Jacobson’s study - most of them were disobedient despite working in a hierarchical authority structure

• Also a significant minority of Milgram’s participants disobeyed despite recognising the Experimenter’s scientific authority

• Suggests that some people may just be more (or less) obedient than others

• Also implies that innate tendencies to obey or disobey have a greater influence on behaviour than the legitimacy of an authority figure