What makes good people turn cruel? As the world learned about the devastating cruelty committed by the Nazis during World War II, this was the question many psychologists were asking themselves. Milgram wasn't convinced by the explanation that German people that engaged in these cruel acts were inherently evil or that the antisemitism distorted their judgement to a point where they saw genocide as a reasonable choice.
According to Milgram, the cruel acts so many people engaged in during the Holocaust can be explained by obedience. Today we will take a closer look at Milgram's Agency Theory, which attempts to explain this phenomenon.
- First, we will discuss Stanley Milgram's agency theory, discussing Milgram's agency theory of obedience.
- We will also provide a Stanley Milgram experiment summary to cover our bases.
- Finally, we will cover Milgram's agency theory evaluation, diving into the strengths of Milgram's agency theory and its weaknesses.
Fig. 1 - Milgram sought to understand obedience to authority figures.
Stanley Milgram's Agency Theory: Psychology
Agency theory is based on Milgram's views on obedience to authority figures. During his earlier experiments, Milgram observed participants go through moral dilemmas and experience an agentic shift, where they obeyed the orders of authority figures as they became agents of the authority figure. The participants placed the consequences of their actions on the authority figure, not themselves.
When we make decisions about how to behave, we typically consider the consequences of our actions. This is because we feel responsible for our own behaviour. Milgram called this the autonomous state.
We are in an autonomous state when we feel personally responsible for our own decisions and actions. In an autonomous state, we are thinking for ourselves.
Despite participants arriving at Milgram's experiments in an autonomous state, they experienced an agentic shift, which we will discuss more below.
However, what happens if someone else has decided and orders you to follow them? Milgram argued that in situations when we are asked to do something by a legitimate authority figure, we don't always think about what the consequences of that behaviour will be.
A reputable figure has decided, and we are just following orders. This is what Milgram called the agentic state, caused by an agentic shift.
We shift into the agentic state when we follow orders from authority and attribute the consequences of the action to the authority but not to ourselves. We become agents for them, acting on their behalf without taking personal responsibility.
Legitimate authority is a person in power who has the right to give out orders.
The capacity for an agentic shift from an autonomous to an agentic state was proposed as an evolutionary adaptation that allowed humans to create organised and hierarchical social structures.
Stanley Milgram didn't necessarily believe we are born to obey, but rather obedience develops when our capacity to obey is reinforced by our experiences in hierarchical societies that reward obedience.
Milgram's Agentic Theory accounts for both the influence of nature (the evolutionary capacity to obey) and nurture (societal reinforcement of obedience).
Milgram's Agency Theory: Binding Factors
Milgram noted certain factors were required to maintain the agentic state, known as binding factors. After entering an agentic state, participants were kept in the state due to:
- Pressures of the authority figure and surroundings
- Reluctance to disobey and disrupt
- Legitimacy of the authority figure (detailed more below)
Milgram's Agency Theory of Obedience: The Moral Strain
Not all authority figures will be moral and just. Yet, our need to obey often doesn't discriminate between orders we agree with and those we don't agree with.
So, what happens when we are asked to do something we don't consider moral? Milgram proposes that such scenarios result in an internal conflict, resulting in a moral strain when people are in an agentic state.
Moral strain is the psychological distress which can be experienced when one follows an order from an authority that is against one's own beliefs.
To cope with the discomfort of a moral strain, people can enter into denial and refuse to accept the reality of their behaviour. Others may display avoidance behaviour, try to minimise their involvement, or engage in less severe actions than ordered.
According to Milgram, entering the agentic state can relieve people of some of the guilt associated with their behaviour and decrease the effects of moral strain.
Stanley Milgram Experiment Summary
To test out his theory, Milgram conducted a famous electric shock study in 1963. The study was conducted in a laboratory, and forty male participants participated in the experiment.
- Milgram used deception to avoid social desirability bias. Participants were told they were participating in a learning study that was supposed to investigate whether punishment with electric shocks can enhance learning.
- As the 'teachers', participants were asked to administer electric shocks of increasing voltage (from 15V to 450V) to the 'learners' anytime they made a mistake.
- The learners were, in fact, confederates - actors that pretended to be real participants.
- Milgram found that 65% of participants obeyed and administered the potentially lethal (450V) electric shocks to the confederate, knowing the danger associated with the action.
Fig. 2 - Milgram used electric shocks in his infamous study on obedience.
It was concluded that the agentic theory could predict people's behaviour as most people obeyed, even when asked to do something cruel and unethical.
Stanley Milgram's Study Variations
Later Milgram conducted 19 more study variations investigating the influence of different situational factors on participants' obedience. Some of the situational factors that influenced obedience included proximity to the victim, location of the experiment and the uniform worn by the authority.
When the participants had to be near the learner, the proportion of participants who obeyed dropped by over a half.
The participants' obedience also dropped if the experiment location was less legitimate.
When the orders were given by an ordinary-looking person rather than a professional-looking experimenter in a lab coat, the level of obedience dropped to only 20%.
The importance of wearing a uniform was later supported by the study of Bickman (1974). In his study, a male researcher dressed either in a guard uniform, a milkman uniform or no uniform asked strangers on the streets of Brooklyn to perform an action.
He found that if the man giving out orders was dressed in a guard uniform, 76% of people obeyed; if he was dressed in a milkman uniform, 47% of people obeyed; and if he was wearing no uniform, only 30% of people obeyed.
Milgram's Agency Theory Evaluation
Milgram's agency theory has received a lot of support. However, some argue that it doesn't fully account for the research findings and people's behaviour in the real world. Let's examine the strengths and limitations of Milgram's theory.
Strengths of Milgram's Agency Theory
One strength of Milgram's theory is that it produces testable experimental predictions. The theory predicts that if ordered by an authority, the average person will be capable of committing even immoral acts as the responsibility is shifted to the authority figure.
Moreover, the theory has been largely supported by existing studies, including the studies conducted by Milgram and the naturalistic Hofling (1966) study. The theory is also supported by cross-cultural research (Blass, 2012).
Hofling (1966) conducted a field study to test Milgram's predictions in a naturalistic setting. Twenty-two nurses were asked by the researcher, posing as an unverified doctor on the phone to administer twice the maximum amount of an unauthorised drug to a patient. Twenty-one of them obeyed the order, even though it was against the hospital rules.
Blass (2012) reviewed ten studies that applied Milgram's paradigm to study obedience in different countries worldwide.
They found Milgram's predictions to generalise cross-culturally. The mean obedience rate in the US was around 61%; in comparison, the mean obedience rate in non-US studies was 66%.
Another strength of the theory is its ability to explain to some extent why people engaged in historical atrocities like the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide.
It was reported that during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, 800,000 members of the Tutsi minority were slaughtered over a span of 100 days. Around 200,000 civilians were involved in the killings.
Many of them later reported the pressure from the authorities as a strong motive for their actions. However, some perpetrators reported being motivated by personal motives like hatred and prejudice.
Limitations of Milgram's Agency Theory
The Agency Theory has been criticised for portraying people as passive and supporting the idea of social determinism. The theory doesn't account for people's personal motives to commit immoral acts. People can be motivated not only by the pressure from the authority but also by their personal feelings of prejudice and hatred, as the reports of the Rwanda genocide showed.
Moreover, the theory doesn't explain individual differences in obedience. After all, not everyone in the Milgram study obeyed the authority.
The Agency Theory focuses mostly on situational factors influencing obedience and can be contrasted with theories focusing on individual factors, like the Authoritarian Personality Theory, which predicts that some people are more likely to obey due to their personal characteristics.
Milgram’s Agency theory - Key takeaways
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