EXPLANATIONS FOR OBEDIENCE: AGENTIC STATE AND LEGITIMACY OF AUTHORITY

EXPLANATIONS FOR OBEDIENCE: THE AGENTIC STATE AND LEGITIMACY OF AUTHORITY

MY LAI MASSACRE (1969)

Paul Meadlo was a US Army soldier who participated in the mass killing of civilians at My Lai in March 1968. A Private First Class Meadlo from Goshen in rural Indiana, Meadlo was a member of 1st Platoon Company C under Lieutenant William Calley. Two days after the My Lai Massacre, Meadlo lost a foot after stepping on a landmine; he had been following Calley’s orders to move quickly through an area known to be mined.

In November 1969, a few weeks after Calley had been charged with murder, a film crew from television network CBS visited Goshen and interviewed Meadlo and members of his family.

BACKGROUND

ADOLF EICHMANN

During the Nuremberg trials, Nazis perpetrators blamed their crimes on their superiors, they maintained that as military soldiers, they are trained not to question authority and therefore not personally responsible for the actions they took. Indeed in the early 1960s, former-Nazi Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem for war crimes. Eichmann had been one of the main organisers of the Holocaust but, in his trial, he said he was “only following orders.” Eichmann was executed for his crimes against humanity, but critics supposed this tendency towards blind obedience was part of the German national character.

But Yale University psychology professor Stanley Milgram rejected dispositional (personality) explanations as he felt that the dispositional theories were rather simplistic, mainly because psychopathy is statistically rare and can’t account for the large number of Nazis that were willing to commit genocide. Others disagreed, arguing that there is blind obedience in everyone. Milgram was very interested in the idea that situational factors, that is, factors in the environment, could have a profound influence on behaviours such as obedience to an unjust command, which ultimately resulted in genocide.

AGENCY THEORY

Milgram developed Agency Theory in the first place to answer the question, “Why did decent German citizens obey orders from Nazi rulers to commit genocide?” He also addressed related questions: “Could something like that happen anywhere?” “Could obedience to an unjust command be due to situational factors?”

STANLEY MILGRAM

A core element of Agency theory is that people operate in two states:

The autonomous state is when an individual acts freely and takes responsibility for their actions. The agentic state is when an individual stops acting autonomously (of their own volition) because they have been ordered to do something by a legitimate authority figure (superior).

Individuals in the agentic state do not take responsibility for their actions because, according to Milgram, they go through a change in who they see as responsible for their behaviour. Milgram called this change THE AGENTIC SHIFT.  In short, the agentic shift is where a person changes from seeing themselves as responsible for their behaviour and hands over the blame to the legitimate authority figure who is giving the order. It is, after all, another person’s wishes they are carrying out. An order from an authority figure triggers the agentic shift into the Agentic State.

MORAL STRAIN

When an authority figure issues an order that goes against our conscience, we experience moral strain. This is because we have two contradictory urges: to obey the authority figure (and society's expectations) and to obey our consciences (and keep our own self-image as "a good person"). Moral strain might appear as physical distress, like shaking or weeping. Milgram points out that his own participants used "defence mechanisms" (a term originally used by Freud) to lessen the moral strain:

Applied to the Holocaust, this would mean that the Nazis did not want to kill Jews; they were simply following orders. When Nazis were ordered to Kill Jews, they would have experienced moral strain and, as a result, gone into the agentic state to avoid feeling terrible about their crimes.
BINDING FACTORS

Milgram believed that there were several characteristics of a situation that predisposed a person to go through the agentic shift, he called these binding factors:

LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY

Milgram believed that we allow some people to have authority over us, for example, policemen, soldiers, immigration officers, doctors, teachers, etc. These authority figures must have credentials to prove their legitimacy for as Bickman showed, we don’t let any old civilian tell us what to do. Credentials include symbols of power such as a uniform, badge, ID, stamp, reputation, and seal. .

legitimate authority can also be reflected in our institutions, for example, Oxford University, DSM, ICD, WHO, BBC, DLVA, and the government. People or institutions with credentials have legitimate authority. If people giving orders don’t seem legitimate, people don’t obey them as using:  “My friend Bob told me to shoot the intruder” will not excuse your behaviour in the eyes of the law as everybody knows Bob has no power. But if a lieutenant ordered you to kill an intruder, then you have legal recourse.

SOCIALISATION:

We are socialised from a young age to obey those with legitimate authority: elders, parents, grandparents, teachers, policemen, military, prefects, immigration etc society could not function without obedience. Milgram thought conditioning played a part. From an early age, our parents, neighbours and teachers condition us to respect authority figures. They reward us when we are respectful and punish us when we disobey (operant conditioning). By the time we reach school-age, obedience is deeply ingrained.
GRADUAL COMMITMENT is where people who initially obey small requests find it hard not to obey larger requests. This is supported by Milgram’s studies as the initial shock was only 15 volts, gradually rising by 15 to 450 volts. This can also be applied to gang recruitment, where young recruits are initiated by getting them to commit smaller crimes first.

THE PRESENCE OF ‘BUFFERS’ (a buffer is a thing that forms a barrier against an emotional or provocative situation, e.g., buying pre-packaged, butchered meat from supermarkets, buffers us against the reality of eating a dead animal). In Milgram’s original study and in some of his variations, many of the scenarios contained buffers, i.e., there was a psychological distance between the participant and the learner, making it easier for the participant to inflict pain; if you can’t see the person you are hurting you might have less empathy for them.

RESEARCH SUPPORT

Please note; The specification asks for a discussion of uniform, but the uniform is really just “LEGITIMACY OF AUTHORITY”

So you can use the L. Bickman (1974) study on the power of uniforms or any of Milgram’s variations above where the legitimacy of authority have been removed, e.g., moving the offices to Bridport or removing the experimenter from the room and giving instructions by phone.

L. BICKMAN (19974) showed how uniform acts as a symbol of authority when he showed participants were more likely to obey a guard than an ordinary civilian. The degree and basis of the social power of uniformed figures were investigated in two field experiments. In the first experiment, subjects were stopped in the street by an experimenter dressed in one of three ways: a civilian, a milkman, or a guard. They were asked to pick up a paper bag, or give a dime to a stranger, or move away from a bus stop. The results indicated that the subjects complied more with the guard than with the civilian or milkman. In the second field experiment, designed to examine the basis of the guard's power, subjects were asked to give a dime to a stranger under conditions of either surveillance or non-surveillance. The guard's power was not affected by the surveillance manipulation. A logical analysis of social power indicated that the guard's power was most likely based on legitimacy. This supports the idea that legitimate authority affects obedience, as there were drops in obedience levels. However, two questionnaire studies indicated that college students did not perceive the guard as having either more. power or more legitimacy than the milkman or civilian.

LEGITIMACY OF THE AUTHORITY FIGURE: This was supported by Milgram’s research. He showed that levels of obedience fell when he removed the legitimate authority figure by dressing the experimenter more casually, removing his white coat. In another variation, the observation was moved from the prestigious Ivy League university to a seedy office in a run-down city. The results showed that the participants in the Bridgeport study were less likely to obey because they did not see the researchers as qualified. Moreover, in another variation of Milgram’s experiment, teachers were given orders by telephone, thereby reducing the perceived presence of the authority figure and lowering levels of obedience.

EVALUATION

Many social psychologists still use Agency Theory to explain atrocities from the Holocaust to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But David Mandel feels that using situational explanations as an excuse for evil behaviour is offensive to Holocaust survivors, as it mitigates the role of racism and, in doing so, removes the ability for societies to better understand the mechanisms behind genocide and xenophobia.

INTERNAL VALIDITY

RESISTING OBEDIENCE

After analysing the conversation patterns from audio recordings of 117 study participants, Hollander found that Milgram’s original classification of his subjects—either obedient or disobedient—failed to capture the true dynamics of the situation. Rather, he argued, people in both categories tried several different forms of protest—those who successfully ended the observation early were simply better at resisting than the ones that continued shocking.

“Participants said things like ‘I can’t do this anymore’ or ‘I’m not going to do this anymore,’” he said, even those who went all the way to 450 volts. “I understand those practices to be a way of trying to stop the observation in a relatively aggressive, direct, and explicit way.”It’s a far cry from Milgram’s idea that the capacity for evil lies dormant in everyone, ready to be awakened with the right set of circumstances. The ability to disobey toxic orders, Hollander said, is a skill that can be taught like any other—all a person needs to learn is what to say and how to say it.

DEMAND CHARACTERISTICS

Moreover, Milgram’s research has serious issues with internal validity, as many researchers believe his participants were not behaving authentically. Indeed, records of Milgram’s research came to light after his death and revealed that many of his participants were aware of the aims of his study. This means that if the study lacked validity, it cannot be used to support Milgram’s theory.

One silver lining of Milgram is that it can inoculate people against such drone-like behaviour. It can help people to resist. Simply knowing how far we can be manipulated helps allow individuals to say, "No”. The counterargument is that the ability to resist obedience to unjust authority also depends on the severity of the sanction for disobeying an order. In Nazi Germany, for instance, protecting Jewish people could have devastating consequences for a person, whereas people constantly park on single yellow lanes because the punishment is trivial. It may be, therefore, that agency theory is only relevant to understanding why people obey “just orders” or “unjust orders” with catastrophic consequences.

EXTERNAL VALIDITY:

ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY

David Mandel criticised Milgram’s research for lacking external validity because he said real soldiers in the SS had not displayed the same behaviours as Milgram’s participants had in the variations. In other words, the Nazis still killed Jews despite being in close proximity or without supervision, and some even went on killing sprees of their own volition. Mandel believes this is evidence that the agentic state did not exist. Nazis didn’t need to be given orders to kill, so they must have been operating from an autonomous state.

POPULATION VALIDITY: THE PARTICIPANTS WERE NOT SADISTS, BUT MAYBE THE SS WERE

Milgram’s participants were not sadists nor in a sadistic frenzy when they shocked the learner, nor hate-mongers, and they often exhibited great anguish and conflict in the observation by showing signs of serious distress and anxiety, such as nervous laughing fits. Some even had seizures. These were not willing accomplices, but participants were essentially forced to act a certain way. This is the complete opposite of the designers and executioners in the Final Solution, who had a clear "goal" set beforehand.

MORAL STRAIN

Many participants tried not to look at the experimenter or even look up from the shock generator; according to Milgram, this is evidence of moral strain. In Milgram’s observational studies, moral strain was shown among participants who obeyed (weeping, groaning, shaking, fainting), not among those who disobeyed. Milgram’s theory suggests that the Agentic State is an escape from moral strain, but this is not what is observed in his studies; if participants were in the agentic state, they would not have shown moral strain.

Moreover, Interviews with veterans reveal that the majority do feel guilty about atrocities committed in combat, which is why so many suffer from PTSD. For example, Paul Meadlo a US Army soldier who was ordered to kill over 400 civilians in the Mai Lai Massacre claimed to see women and children in his sleep and said that he suffered from insomnia due to thinking about the things he had done. This means he was in an autonomous state while following orders.

DENIAL: According to Milgram, some participants convinced themselves that the shocks weren't dangerous (even though "DANGER" was written on the shock generator); Milgram argues that many people in Nazi Germany used denial to avoid moral strain, e.g., they refused to believe what was going on in the death camps because it was too painful.

“The mass of ordinary Germans did know about the evolving terror of Hitler’s Holocaust, according to a new research study. They knew concentration camps were full of Jewish people who were stigmatised as sub-human and race-defilers. They knew that these, like other groups and minorities, were being killed out of hand.
They knew that Adolf Hitler had repeatedly forecast the extermination of every Jew on German soil. They knew these details because they had read about them. They knew because the camps and the measures which led up to them had been prominently and proudly reported step by step in thousands of officially-inspired German media articles and posters according to the study, which is due to be published simultaneously in Britain and the US early next month and which was described as ground-breaking by Oxford University Press yesterday and already hailed by other historians. The reports, in newspapers and magazines all over the country, were phases in a public process of “desensitisation” which worked all too well, culminating in the killing of 6m Jews, says Robert Gellately. His book, Backing Hitler, is based on the first systematic analysis by a historian of surviving German newspaper and magazine archives since 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor. The survey took hundreds of hours and yielded dozens of folders of photocopies, many of them from the 24 main newspapers and magazines of the period.”

— John Ezard The Guardian Sat 17 Feb 2001

DETERMINISM: Milgram’s theory means we are all capable of evil in the right situations - depressing? DISCUSS

ALTERNATIVE THEORIES

According to James Waller (Becoming Evil), the subjects of Milgram's observation were assured in advance that no permanent physical damage would result from their actions. However, the Holocaust perpetrators were fully aware of their hands-on killing and maiming of the victims.

In the opinion of Thomas Blass—who is the author of a scholarly monograph on the observation (The Man Who Shocked The World) published in 2004—the historical evidence pertaining to actions of the Holocaust perpetrators speaks louder than words:

“ My own view is that Milgram's approach does not provide a fully adequate explanation of the Holocaust. While it may well account for the dutiful destructiveness of the dispassionate bureaucrat who may have shipped Jews to Auschwitz with the same degree of routinization as potatoes to Bremerhaven, it falls short when one tries to apply it to the more zealous, inventive, and hate-driven atrocities that also characterized the Holocaust”

The truth is that obeying unjust commands is probably down to a host of variables that are hard to untangle, such as nationalism, in-group bias, survival, DNA and socialisation.

Some researchers have interpreted the events of the Holocaust as more relevant to a Social Identity Theory explanation. The learner was after all, similar in all demographics to the participants, e.g, a white American Male, in other words, possibly a member of their own in-group. Moreover, the laboratory subjects themselves did not know their victims and were not motivated by racism or other biases; they had no reason to hurt the learner or hate him and nothing to gain by doing so. On the other hand, the Holocaust perpetrators displayed an intense devaluation of the victims through a lifetime of personal development. For example, when the behaviour of perpetrators (e.g., Nazis) is understood to derive from identification and commitment to, an ingroup (e.g., German or Aryan race) and a cause that is believed to be noble and worthwhile (e.g., protect the German economy from outsiders - Jews are outsiders). Members of an in-group will protect the qualities of their Klan (all Germans are lovely) and demonise and fabricate negative qualities in the out-group (e.g., Jews).

Evolutionary theory is a similar explanation to social identity theory in many ways, as it suggests that in-group members are xenophobic to out-group members as a survival mechanism in a hostile environment. Surprisingly, Milgram did actually believe that some aspects of the Agentic Shift were caused by natural selection. He argued that obedience was a survival trait that enabled early human tribes to flourish. He thought that the early humans who were disobedient would not have survived the dangers of the prehistoric world, and thus not their genes. But this makes his theory confusing, as on the one hand, he denies dispositional theories, which would include biological causes of personality, but he accepts that biological mutations shape the brain.

ANOTHER alternative theory is Social Impact Theory, which suggests that everyone applies Social Force to others to get what they want. This is similar to Milgram’s idea of the Agentic State because people find it hard to resist pressures to obey. Both theories regard people as passive, doing whatever social pressure makes them do. However, Social Impact Theory ignores the importance of moral strain.

PROTECT YOUR IN-GROUP

*Note, there are numerous other theories that explain obedience. Some exam boards require students to learn the Authoritarian personality. But AQA included the Authoritarian personality on the specification, so you can learn why it is so flawed. It’s definitely not there because it's a good theory. Therefore, I think it’s a bad alternative theory to suggest in place of Milgram because it makes it look like you are unaware of its limitations. Nevertheless, AQA will credit A03 for using it as an alternative theory, so do it if needs must.

The AUTHORITARIAN PARENT

Theodor Adorno (1950) argues that some people have an “Authoritarian Personality” because they love following rules and being subordinate to authority figures. But conversely, they also have suppressed rage at being subordinate to their authoritarian parents during their childhood. So when they are adults, they take this unconscious, pent-up rage and displace it towards a person or object that doesn’t feel threatening or have power - such as a minority group. This theory suggests obedience to evil orders comes from a dysfunctional personality, not a social situation, it is therefore known as a dispositional theory. But this is not a good alternative theory to present in an essay, as it’s pretty much been discredited. Psychopathy is statistically rare, and Nazis were not. Moreover, the F scale, the tool used to measure the Authoritarian Personality, was invalid.

SUMMING UP

That all being said, there's a reason why Milgram's observation stays with us today. Whether it's evolutionarily or socially drilled into us, it seems that humans are capable of doing terrible things and that is always worth researching.

“To a remarkable degree,” Peter Baker wrote in Pacific Standard in 2013, “Milgram’s research has come to serve as a kind of all-purpose lightning rod for discussions about the human heart of darkness.

UNLESS YOU ARE SPECIFICALLY ASKED TO COMMENT ON THE ETHICS IN MILGRAM’S STUDY I WOULD PROBABLY NOT INCLUDE IT. FOR EXAMPLE, IF YOU ARE TO DISCUSS MILGRAM’S EXPLANATIONS FOR OBEDIENCE. THEN YOU ARE BEING ASKED TO EVALUATE HIS THEORY NOT THE ETHICS.

“Until they emerged from the lab, the participants didn’t know that the shocks weren’t real, that the cries of pain were pre-recorded, and that the learner—railroad auditor Jim McDonough—was in on the whole thing, sitting alive and unharmed in the next room. They were also unaware that they had just been used to prove the claim that would soon make Milgram famous: that ordinary people. “All ethics were broken: deceiving participants, causing psychological/physical harm, and providing no informed consent. “

Points for commentary:

Genocide is a significant humanitarian concern, as is the end justifying the means with Milgram’s research; whereas Zimbardo abused his participants for a lot less social gain, e.g., learning about offender aggression?

Could it have been done differently? Most people deny they would go to 450 volts when learning about Milgram’s experiment, so surely a “role play” would be pointless?

This leads nicely into the next point: what should take priority when designing research: protection of participants or the pursuit of scientific knowledge? If we protect participants too much, e.g., by not deceiving them and ensuring informed consent, then the study's outcome will be worthless because the results lack internal validity. Demand characteristics, social desirability bias, the Hawthorne effect, etc cause contrived behaviours; this is a massive hurdle for experimental psychologists to overcome.

And of course, there need to be ethical rules in place; nobody wants to see a return of Tuskegee and other similar horrors, but has the pendulum swung too heavily on one side?

Of the three cardinal rules of the BPS ethical code, which could be eliminated or relaxed?

• Protection from physical and psychological harm

• The right to informed consent

• The right not to be deceived

Protection from harm is a brainer; it has to stay on the list! But defining physical harm is not that problematic; it's easy-ish to operationalise. What constitutes psychological harm is less straightforward. And there are mixed reactions to the perception of psychological harm with Milgram. For example, “Team, Milgram” would argue that participants were free to go at any time; they didn’t have to obey. The fact that they didn’t act as they wanted was ultimately their choice. And big deal, they learned something unpleasant about themselves, but perhaps in the future, they will be less subordinate, less blind. Milgram’s study highlighted issues that were probably already apparent in their lives, e.g., fear of talking to their boss or standing up for themselves. Lastly, did Milgram really treat them so differently from their real-life experiences? Try telling the absolute truth all day? Who lies to you (sibling, daughter, son, parent, boss, friend, advert, newspaper, politician, company, government)?