Topic Summaries

Obedience: situational variables

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Addiction

  • Milgram wanted to explain why we surrender our independence to authority figures so easily. He argued that from early childhood we are taught to respect authority and that in a given context, certain people have ‘legitimate authority.’ This begins with respecting our parents and teachers in childhood and then develops into respecting institutions like the police. We trust these figures to exert their power responsibly.
  • Milgram repeated this experiment with different variables to explore whether it would change the levels of obedience. This included: ◦
    • Uniform: he changed the lab coat and clipboard of the experimenter to a casual t-shirt and jeans. This decreased the perceived authority of the experimenter and their academic importance. 
    • Location: moved from Yale University to a run-down, downtown office.
    • Proximity: moving teacher to the same room as the learner, or even telling them to force the learner’s hand onto the shock plate allowed them to see the consequences of their actions. He also did trials with the experimenter in another room.
    • Social support: two additional confederates in the room refused to shock the learner.
  • Obedience dropped to: 10% when social support refused to shock the learner, 20% when the experimenter was in casual clothing, 20.5% when the experimenter left the room, 30% when the teacher forces hand on the shock plate, and 48% in a downtown office.
  • Agentic shift: when person with perceived authority gives someone an order, they go through a shift from an autonomous state (where people direct their own behaviour and take responsibility for their actions) to an agentic state (where people act by the orders of a perceived authority and believe that the responsibility for their actions can be attributed to the person giving the order).
  • Binding factors: Milgram argued that even when participants knew that their behaviour was causing harm and were acting in ways against their morality, they continued due to things called binding factors. These include factors such as politeness, the desire to uphold a promise of helping, and fear of awkwardness if they withdraw from the experiment.

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