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A* 16 mark on Obedience explanations
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AQA A Level Psychology Exemplary essay
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Outline and evaluate one or more of the explanations of obedience (16 marks)The situational explanations of obedience are agentic state and legitimacy of authority whereas the
dispositional explanation, involving your own personality, is said to be due to the Authoritarian
personality. All of these 3 explanations offer reasons for why people obey in society.
One situational explanation for obedience the agentic state which Milgram proposed, a mental state
where we feel no personal responsibility for our behaviour and therefore act as an “agent” for an
authority figure. The agent often experiences high levels of anxiety and moral strain when they
realise they are doing something wrong, yet in the moment they feel powerless therefore disobey.
Autonomous state is the opposite and therefore means that we feel independent and free to behave
according to our own principles. The shift from autonomy to agency is called the agentic shift and is
usually brought about upon the presence of an authority figure as this person holds greater power
due to their social hierarchy. Milgram observed that many of his participants said they wanted to
stop however remained powerless and in the agentic state. He discovered that binding factors,
aspects of the situation that allow the person to minimise or ignore the damaging effect of their
behaviour, was the reason for participants remaining in the agentic state. This led Milgram to
propose a number of strategies that the participants used when staying in the agentic state, such as
shifting the responsibility onto the victim.
The second situational explanation for obedience of legitimacy of authority, which states that we are
more likely to obey people who we perceive to have authority over us. This authority is again
justified by social norms, the social hierarchy. One consequence of legitimacy of authority is that
some members of society are granted the power to punish others and events such as the Holocaust
in which Hitler was an authority figure, leads to legitimate authority turning into destructive
authority. Milgram’s experiment demonstrates destructive authority because the Experimenter used
prompts to order to participants to behave in ways that went against their consciences.
One strength of agentic state as an explanation for obedience is that Milgram’s study offers research
support. The majority of Milgram’s participants resisted giving shocks at one point in the experiment
and often asked questions to the Experimenter such as “Who us responsible if Mr Wallace who is the
learner is harmed?” When the Experimenter replied “I’m responsible” the participants often
continued with the procedure remaining in the agentic state with no further objections to the task.
This shows that once the participants deem themselves to no longer be responsible for their own
actions they easily remain the Experimenter’s agent, which is what Milgram proposed.
One limitation of agentic state as an explanation for obedience is that it does not explain many of
the other research findings. One instance for example is that the findings of Steven Rank and Cardell
Jacobson’s study in 1977 show that 16 out of the 18 nurses disobeyed orders from a doctor who
admitted an excessive drug to a patient. The doctor is clearly a legitimate authority figure however
almost all of the nurses remained autonomous as did some of Milgram’s participants. This suggests
that the agentic state can not be generalised to all situations of obedience, only some therefore it
has low population validity.
One strength of the legitimacy explanation is that it is a useful account of cultural differences in
obedience. Many studies show that countries differ in the degree of which people are obedient to
authority. For example, Wesley Kilham and Leon Mann in 1974 found that only 16% of Australian
woman went all the way up to 450 V in a Milgram style study. However, David Mantel 1971 found a
very different figure of German participants where obedience was found to be 85%. This shows that
in some cultures authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate. This reflects the ways that
different societies are structured and how children are raised to perceive authority figures.
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