Agentic state and legitimacy of authority

Agentic state

The agentic state is when people believe that they are no longer responsible for their actions and that they are working as an agent on behalf of someone. When people believe that they are responsible for their actions they are in an autonomous state.

Explain how self-image affects this - agentic state

to maintain a positive self image  can be a reason why people shift to the agentic state. Tempted to do as requested and shock the learner, the participant may assess the consequences of this action for his/her self image and refrain.

However, once the participant has moved into the agentic state, this evaluative concern is no longer relevant. Because the action is no longer their responsibility, it no longer reflects their self image. Actions performed under the agentic state are, from the participants perspective, virtually guilt free, however inhumane they might be.

explain the binding factors that keep people in the agentic state

Once a person has entered the agentic state, what keeps them in it?

in all social situations, including experiments, there is a social etiquette that plays a part in regulating our behaviour. In order to break off the experiment, the participant must breach the commitment that he made to the experimenter. Thus, the subject fears that if he breaks off, he will appear arrogant and rude and so such behaviour is not taken lightly. These emotions, although they appear small in scope alongside the violence being done to the learner, nonetheless help bind the subject into obedience

Legitimacy of authority - how can it cause someone to shift to the agentic state

The person feels the ‘guilt’ of obeying orders but feels powerless to disobey them. Social groups and having someone who is ‘incharge’ others defer to this person showing responsibility to the person in charge rather than their own actions.

explain how a legitimate authority re defines a situation

The perception of legitimate authority is powerful in shifting people to the agentic state. There is a tendency for people to accept definitions of a situation that are provided by a legitimate authority. Although it is the participant himself who performs the action (e.g shocks the learner) he allows the authority figure to define its meaning.

On one hand, the apparent suffering of the learner convinces him that he should quit, but on the other, the experimenter, a legitimate authority to whom the subject feels some commitment, orders him to continue, reassuring the participant that the learner is in fact fine and not in danger.

explain why an institution is important

if an authority figures commands are of a potentially harmful or destructive form, then for them to be perceived as legitimate they must occur within some sort of institutional structure (e.g uni or military). It is clear from Milgram's study that this does not have to be a particularly reputable or distinguished institution.

One variation of the study moved it from Yale to a run down building where the study was to be conducted by ‘research associates of Bridgeport’. This was apparently a relatively unimpressive firm lacking in credentials, yet still obtained relatively high levels of obedience. It is possible that it is the category of institution (e.g specific laboratory), rather than its relative status within that category, that causes participants to obey. Participants may well consider one laboratory to be as competent as another, provided it is a scientific laboratory

AO3 - cockpits a test of legitimate authority

P: tarnow (2000) provided support for the power of legitimate authority through a study of aviation accidents 

E: Tarnow (2000) studied data from aircraft accidents in the US and found that there was excessive dependence on the captain’s authority and expertise - one second officer claimed that, although he noticed the captain taking a particularly risky approach, he said nothing as he assumed ‘the captain must know what he’s doing’. 

E: A black box voice recording was available at the time between 1978-1990 and where flight crew actions were a contributing factor in the crash. As with milgram's study, where participants accepts the experimenters definition of the situation, Tarnow found excessive dependence on the captain's authority and expertise 

L: the NTSB report found such ‘lack of monitoring’ errors in 19 of the 37 accidents investigated, providing a real life demonstration of the power of legitimate authority to enforce obedience in those around them.

AO3 - agentic state explanation and real life obedience

P: Milgram claimed that people shift back and forth between the autonomous state and the agentic state. 

E: However in his study of German doctors working in Auschwitz, Lifton (1986) found a gradual and irreversible transition rather than a rapid shift in states. L: This suggests that the agentic state explanation can not explain real life obedience.

E: Furthermore, Staub (1989) suggests that rather than agentic shift being responsible for the transition found in many Holocaust perpetrators, it is the experience of carrying out evil acts over a long time that changes the way in which individuals think and behave.

L: These pieces of evidence both undermine the agentic state explanation

More AO3 on agentic state shifting back and fourth nazi

Doctors who acted on behalf of the Nazi parties switched from signing anoath to always protect life to carrying out unethical painful procedures on nnocent people. This wasn’t just shifting between agentic state and autonomous state - Lifton 1986 found it was ‘gradual and irreversible’

Staub (1989) suggests that rather than agentic shift being responsible for the transition found in many Holocaust perpetrators, it is the experience of carrying out evil acts over a long time that changes the way in which individuals think and behave.

From protecting life and acting on behalf of patients for their benefit Since 200 BC

To

To experimenting on thousands of children (particularly twins) intentionally to disease, disfigurement, forced insemination amputations and torture under the guise of medical “research” into illness to follow orders to explore the theory of eugenics - creation of the ‘perfect race’ Only 200 of the 3,000 twins subjected to medical experiments at Auschwitz survived.

AO3 - agentic state or just plain cruel

P: Although milgram believed that the idea of the agentic state best explained his findings, he did not concede other possibilities

E: Guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment quickly escalated the level of cruelty towards the prisoners despite no obvious authority figure being present.

E: one common belief among social scientists is that he had detected signs of cruelty among his participants, who had used the situation to express their sadistic impulse -???

L: this suggests that for some people obedience might be explained in terms of agentic shift, but for others, ‘obedient behaviour’ may be due to  some more fundamental desire to inflict harm on others

Otto Adolf Eichmann[one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. He was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II. Eichmann was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina on 11 May 1960 and subsequently found guilty of war crimes in a widely publicised trial in Jerusalem, where he was executed by hanging in 1962 He claimed that he was only ever ‘following orders’ and never carried any task out of his own accord..