Social Influence – Explanations for Obedience
Social Influence – Explanations for Obedience
EXPLANATIONS FOR OBEDIENCE
Autonomous State – individuals are seen as personally responsible for their actions
Dehumanisation – stripping individuals of their rights and anything that makes them human
FACTORS AFFECTING OBEDIENCE
| Internal Explanations | External Explanations |
| – Dispositional Explanation: the behaviour is due to a person’s internal characteristics
– Authoritarian Personality: a distinct personality pattern characterised by strict adherence to conventional values and a belief on absolute obedience or submission to authority; holds rigid beliefs, intolerant of ambiguity, submissive to authority and hostile to the lower class |
– Proximity: a situational variable which refers how close you are to someone or something. For example, how close the physical relationship is between an individual and the authority figure
– Location: people may be more likely to obey an authority figure if their locations are closer or if it is a specific type of location – Uniform: if the authority figure is wearing a uniform, people are more likely to obey |
MILGRAM CASE STUDY
Aim: – Milgram wanted to see how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing
atrocities
Background: – WW2 – he intrigued to find out why people followed the Nazis in WW2
– wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority
figures
– focused on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscious
Method: – he used 40 male students aged between 20 and 50 years; each were paid $4.50 for
turning up
– IV – uniform, change of locations, ‘two teachers’
– DV – if the participants followed the instructions from the authority figure
– CV – prods, shocks
– there were two rooms – one for the ‘learner’ and one for the ‘teacher’ & experimenter
– the learner was strapped to a chair with electrodes and the teacher tested him on a list of
word pairs that he asked him to learn
– the learner would give the wrong answers on purpose but then would be administered
with an electric shock every time he made a mistake
– a series of prods were then said by the experimenter to the ‘teacher’ to ensure they
continued
Results: – all the participants continued to 300 volts
– 65% of the participants continued to the highest volt (450 volts)
– ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure – even to the
extent of harming/killing and innocent being
– obedience to authority is ingrained in us from the way we are bought up
– Milgram suggested that two things must be in place in order for a person to enter the
agentic state: 1) the person giving the orders is perceived as being qualified to direct other
people’s behaviour 2) the person being issued the orders is able to believe that the
authority will accept responsibility for what happens
Evaluation: – lab experiment – allows for high levels of control, replication and for the IV to be
manipulated. However, lacks ecological validity and mundane realism as it is not a
real-life setting
– produced qualitative and quantitative data
– androcentric – only male samples were used
– ethnocentric – only generalisable to the specific culture/ethnicity used in the sample
– ethics broken – deceit – Milgram deceived the participants into thinking that they had
equal chance of being a ‘learner’ or a ‘teacher’. Lack of informed consent –
participants were unable to give their consent as they were deceived. Harm –
participants were psychologically distressed. Right to withdrawal – Milgram didn’t give
participants the right to withdraw
DISPOSITIONAL EXPLANATION FOR OBEDIENCE
- The perception of behaviour caused by internal characteristics of individuals
Authoritarian Personality:
- Holds rigid beliefs
- Intolerant ambiguity
- Submissive to authority
- Hostile to the lower class
- The individual has a high level of obedience for people with high authority