Milgrams Agency Theory

8 Key excerpts on "Milgrams Agency Theory"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Theoretical Approaches in Psychology

  • Matt Jarvis(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  We are socialised into developing an agentic state during childhood. In school for example, children learn to put aside their individual impulses in favour of maintaining order and so catering for the good of the class as a whole. Milgram proposed that, like children in class, we are all constantly subordinating our own needs and wishes to those of wider society. We can see this tendency in how people act in their jobs. In principle most people would say that they work for their own benefit and would not go out of their way for their employers. In reality, however, once people are in a job and they identify themselves as part of an organisation, they tend to put the needs of the organisation above their own.

  An important aspect of the agentic state is the way we deal with moral strain. Moral strain results when we have to do something we believe to be morally wrong in order to function as an agent of authority, working for the good of society. Milgram suggested that we use psychological defence mechanisms (including those proposed by Freud—see Chapter 3 ) to get around the distress of having to do morally wrong things. Denial was particularly common in participants in the Milgram studies and in the Holocaust as perpetrators refused to confront what they were doing. It has been widely reported that guards at the Nazi concentration camps were supplied unlimited quantities of alcohol and that they stayed constantly drunk in order to help them deny the horror in which they were participating.

  Evaluation of agency theory

  If we accept that behaviour can be a product of evolution (we will examine this is detail in Chapter 8

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Research on Professional Responsibility and Ethics in Accounting

  • Cynthia Jeffrey(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Emerald Group Publishing Limited

    (Publisher)

  This paper describes a teaching approach that relies on readings, videos, and mini-cases to give students an appreciation for the role of organiza-tional influences on ethical decision making in today’s accounting world. It exposes students to Stanley Milgram’s experiments in obedience and relates these experiments to subordination of professional judgment by accoun-tants. This teaching approach is innovative in its use of social psychological theories to address accounting ethical dilemmas. It also incorporates contemporary international financial reporting standards and tax reporting issues into the ethics debate. OVERVIEW In the 1960s and early 1970s, Stanley Milgram conducted a series of psychological experiments testing individual’s willingness to administer electrical shocks to a test subject under the direction of an authority figure. In the original experiment, 65 percent of Milgram’s subjects administered the highest level of shock, even though they were uncomfortable doing so. Milgram explained his results using two psychological theories: the theory of conformism and agentic shift theory . Recent experiments have suggested learned helplessness as an explanation for Milgram’s results. Milgram (1974) described his findings as follows: Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Milgram devised his experiment to explain the actions of Nazi prison guards in the Holocaust. Recently, his theories have been cited to explain the behavior of the U.S.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Inaccuracies in Children's Testimony

  Memory, Suggestibility, or Obedience to Authority?

  • Letitia C Pallone, Jon'A F Meyer(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Milgram 1974 , p. 132)

  Milgram later discusses the central concept to his theory of obedience: agentic shift. Agentic shift is defined by Milgram as:

  an alteration of attitude . . . the person entering an authority system no longer views himself as acting out of his own purposes, but rather comes to see himself as an agent for executing the wishes of another person.

  (Milgram 1974 , p. 133)

  The agentic state is not "just another word for obedience . . . it is that state of mental organization which enhances the likelihood of obedience" (Milgram 1974 , p. 148). When an individual feels he or she is in a situation that falls under the control of another person's authority, he or she has entered the agentic state (Milgram 1974 , p. 134). The agentic state, as defined by Milgram, is in direct opposition to the concept of autonomy, or freedom to act as an independent individual. Milgram states that not all persons are destined to enter this agentic state, but "the propensity to do so is exceedingly strong" (Milgram 1974 , p. 134).

  Milgram's (1974) theory may also generalize to situations far less odious than the task of administering shocks to innocent victims;3 situations such as a child's inaccurate answers during testimony may also be explained, if only in part, by Milgram's theory. For this reason, Milgram's application of his theory to his experiments is presented.

  Milgram's Application of His Theory to His Experiments

  Milgram (1974

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Arguing, Obeying and Defying

  A Rhetorical Perspective on Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments

  • Stephen Gibson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  But where does this leave Milgram’s theoretical account of his findings? As noted in Chapter 1, even those scholars who are typically most favourably inclined towards the obedience experiments have tended to acknowledge that the agentic state theory does not provide an adequate explanation for the observed behaviour of people in Mil- grams’s laboratory (Blass, 2004; Miller, 1986). In this respect, a further important element of the recent reawakening of interest in the Milgram experiments has involved taking a second look at Milgram’s theoretical account of his studies and the development of alternative explanations for Milgram’s findings. Theorising Obedience The Agentic State Reconsidered Many obedience scholars still interpret their findings in terms of Milgram’s (1974) agentic state theory, despite the fact that Milgram’s conclusions have been challenged over several decades (Mantell & Panzarella, 1976; Miller, 1986). For example, Doliński et al. (2017; see also Doliński & Grzyb, 2016) interpret their findings as supporting Theorising Obedience 53 Milgram’s theory; Beauvois et al. (2012) collected responsibility data similar to Milgram’s, and they interpret their findings that obedient participants allocate less responsibility to themselves as supporting the agentic state theory. In many respects, these authors deal rather briefly and unsatisfactorily with theoretical issues, but there are recent studies that have undertaken a more extended re-examination of concepts that relate to Milgram’s theory. Burger, Girgis and Manning (2011) analysed participants’ spontaneous comments regarding responsibility in Burger’s (2009) experiment. They found that more defiant participants than obedient participants made comments which indicated that they saw themselves as responsible for the punishment being inflicted on the learner.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Psychoanalysis, Classic Social Psychology and Moral Living

  Let the Conversation Begin

  • Paul Marcus(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  278). Within a few minutes of entering the laboratory, Milgram’s naïve subjects found themselves being requested—and by prompt number four, ordered—to administer punitive electric shocks to the Learner, what must have felt surreal and overwhelming to their usual sense of themselves as morally feeling and reasoning agents. In such a fast-paced, disorienting, biopsychosocially stressful context, child-like obedience to authority is often the outcome. Disobedience to destructive authority Milgram was very interested in the naïve subjects who were disobedient to the four prods, especially the last one, “You have no choice—you must go on.” 15 Milgram discusses what he calls “strain,” the “experience of tension” in naïve subjects that shows the weakness of the power of authority, in that it only partially transformed the naïve subjects into the agentic state of profound submersion in their roles (1974, pp. 154, 155). Milgram mentions that “residues of selfhood, remaining in varying degrees outside the experimenter’s authority, keep personal values alive in the subject and lead to strain, which, if sufficiently powerful, can result in disobedience” (ibid., p. 155). In other words, it is through personal moral beliefs and values that the disobedient naïve subject maintains his sense of agency, the bedrock of his narrative of self-identity, such that his moral judgments and decisions are lodged in his relatively autonomous inner center of gravity, and not disrupted by the orders of imposing authority and other situational forces that are powerfully bearing down on him

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 1

  Milgram's Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust

  • Nestar Russell(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1974 , p. 154])

  In explaining not only obedience but also disobedience, Milgram conveyed his theoretical model by way of the following formula, and its accompanying explanation:

  in which O represents obedience; D , disobedience; B , binding factors ; s , strain; and r , the strain-resolving mechanisms . Obedience is the outcome when the binding factors are greater than the net strain (strain as reduced by the resolving mechanisms), while disobedience results when net strain exceeds the strength of the binding forces.

  89

  So what, if anything, did this theory say about the perpetration of the Holocaust? Although Milgram conceded “enormous differences” between his experiments and the Holocaust, he maintained that, via the hierarchical chain of command, the agentic state was “a common psychological process…centrally involved in both events.”

  90

  Milgram writes,

  The most common adjustment of thought in the obedient subject is for him to see himself as not responsible for his own actions. He divests himself of responsibility by attributing all initiative to the experimenter, a legitimate authority. He sees himself not as a person acting in a morally accountable way but as the agent of external authority. In the postexperimental interview, when subjects were asked why they had gone on, a typical reply was: ‘I wouldn’t have done it by myself. I was just doing what I was told.’ Unable to defy the authority of the experimenter, they attribute all responsibility to him. It is the old story of ‘just doing one’s duty’ that was heard time and time again in the defense statements of those accused at Nuremberg . But it would be wrong to think of it as a thin alibi concocted for the occasion. Rather, it is a fundamental mode of thinking for a great many people once they are locked into a subordinate position in a structure of authority. The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

  91

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Art of Followership

  How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations

  • Ronald E. Riggio, Ira Chaleff, Jean Lipman-Blumen, Ronald E. Riggio, Ira Chaleff, Jean Lipman-Blumen(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Jossey-Bass

    (Publisher)

  But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man unhindered by the limitations of indi-vidual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.” 13 And how does this transformation take place? What mediating mechanisms result in an individual’s willingness to follow a leader’s reprehensible orders when he would not normally behave this way when acting under his own steam, as an autonomous individual? Milgram argues that when people accept the legitimacy of an authority—that the person in charge has the right to prescribe their behav-ior and that they in turn feel an obligation to do so—certain internal changes take place. The first change that makes destructive obedience possible is accepting the authority’s definition of the situation, of reality. The follower comes to see things through the eyes of the leader, so to speak. As Milgram put it, “With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, What Can Milgram’s Obedience Experiments Contribute? 203 by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts.” 14 A Vietnam veteran who was a student in one of my social psychology classes told of an incident that illustrates this process. He was a member of a unit patrolling the coastline. He saw a boat approaching in the distance. As it got nearer, he realized that it was only a fishing sloop and, therefore, presumably harmless. The officer in charge asked him, “What are you waiting for? Blow it out of the water.” “But it’s only a fishing sloop,” the soldier replied. “No,” said the officer, “it’s a gunboat.” The soldier blew it out of the water.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Full Darkness

  Original Sin, Moral Injury, and Wartime Violence

  • Brian S. Powers(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Eerdmans

    (Publisher)

  During the Vietnam War era, the rejection—and at worst, outright demonization—of veterans by vocal groups in America contributed to a significant gap between the veterans’ conceptions of a hero and their own self-images. Shay recounts a similar tale of a Vietnam veteran who described how the war, rather than producing heroes, “strips you of all your beliefs, your religion, takes your dignity away.” He later said that it makes you an “animal in the sense of being evil,” and he recounted that when he returned home, he often acted in animalistic rage, attacking his own family members in inexplicable acts of anger. 28 The differential in character between the recruiting-poster self-image of American warriors, filled with implicit exaltations of honor and glory, and the self-image many veterans have after their experiences in conflict, involves a sense of social betrayal. For Milgram, one of the crucial antecedent conditions that would move subjects into the agential state was their perception of the legitimacy of the authority to which they were ceding their own sense of responsibility and personal agency. The legitimacy of the authority, he argues further, was based on the power of a justifying ideology to which the subjects had already acceded on a basic level. If the subjects, then, understood the authority as acting in accord with this basic societal ideology, they tended to view the authority and its demands as tacitly necessary. This is a crucial step, since, as Milgram later notes, subjects ceded nearly all sense of morality and responsibility to this authority, and their own moral horizon narrowed to questions of obedience to the duties the authority required of them. Implicit in his analysis is the notion that some level of axiological agreement concerning the moral values within which the authority will operate is necessary for the subject to willingly enter into the agential state

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book