Explain Milgram's concept of the agentic state and discuss whether it is a valid explanation for obedience. What other explanations for obedience have been put forward and what evidence support these?

Authors Avatar by emilysmfrancisgmailcom (student)
Explain Milgram's concept of the agentic state and discuss whether it is a valid explanation for obedience. What other explanations for obedience have been put forward and what evidence support these?

Obedience is taught from childhood through a process of socialisation. Individuals are constantly facing authority figures and taking orders, often without even being aware they are doing so. Parents, teachers, bosses are just a few authority figures almost every individual will have come across throughout their life. Most orders given on a day-to-day basis will be harmless, but what happens when they are not? What happens when a person is asked to harm another with no seemingly legitimate reason? Milgram's famous studies focusing on obedience to authority look at just that, and his agency theory tries to form reasons as to why people obey.

Milgram (1963) suggests that the mind works on two levels of consciousness and individuals will shift between the two (the agentic shift) when confronted with authority due to the process of socialisation. The autonomous state is where an individual assumes responsibility for their own actions and the consequences of their behaviour. However the agentic state is where an individual believes themselves to be acting only as an agent of another. Individuals renounce themselves of all personal responsibility while acting under this state, sometimes even believing their actions to be morally wrong, yet giving up their free will unconsciously making the decision to yield to explicit authoritative orders. While doing so they place any sense of responsibility on the authority figure. A majority of men were willing to electrocute another man up to maximum given voltage (450v) when told to do so by an experimenter (Milgram, 1963). Hofling (1966, reported by Hogg and Vaughan 2011) found that twenty-one out of twenty-two real night-nurses administered a lethal dose of medication when an unknown doctor asked them to by telephone. This shows that individual's are unlikely to question authority even when having good reason to do so, but the question is why?

Milgram's agency theory suggests that if an individual sees themselves as an individual then they will respond in an autonomous state towards a situation. This happens due to basic survival instincts. For example, humans are more likely to avoid aggressive situations when alone to avoid harm. Living within social groups promotes for better survival, but with social groups comes a hierarchical system. A requirement of this is to have some individuals viewed as having more power or a higher status than others in the group. Through socialisation, the majority of society has learned to conform to this societal system, respecting some individuals and recognising those who have more power over the rest. The agentic shift happens when an individual feels they have no power, and surrender to the authority because this is what they are accustomed to.
Join now!


There are however several situational determinants that also contribute to levels of obedience and illustrate the agentic shift. Milgram (1963) demonstrates this through the variations of his study. Legitimacy of authority is one determinant. In variations of his study where the legitimacy of authority was compromised; for example, when the experiment was run from an office building, or where there were two experimenters contradicting the others authority, obedience levels fell. These findings were also confirmed by a later study by Bickman (1974) who discovered that individuals were far more likely to carry out inconvenient tasks when asked to ...

This is a preview of the whole essay