Скачать или смотреть Milgram's - agentic state allows us to carry out orders from an authority, even if they conflict us

Agentic state – A mindset which allows us to carry out orders from an authority figure, even if they conflict with our personal sense of right and wrong. We absolve ourselves of responsibility, believing that as we are acting on someone else's behalf, blame for any negative consequences ultimately lies with them.

Stanley Milgram's now famous obedience to authority (OTA) experiments, conducted in 1963, 1965, and 1974, shocked the world and are still among the most well-known experiments of all time in social psychology.

Attempting to find scientific explanations for the Holocaust (Russell, 2011), Milgram designed the experiment to test ordinary people’s susceptibility to authority. Subjects were instructed to administer increasingly strong electric shocks via a specially designed fake shock generator to a victim in another room, even when the subject protested (Milgram, 1963). In his ‘baseline study’ (the first official trial run) (Haslam & Reicher, 2012), 65% of participants administered what could have lethal electric shocks (Milgram, 1963).

Milgram's obedience studies have as a result been taken as evidence for what Arendt (Arendt & Elon, 2006) described as the ‘banality of evil.’ It seems that people's desire to be good subjects and abide by authority is greater than their desire to do good (Haslam & Reicher, 2012). Milgram (1974) theorised an 'agentic state,' arguing that humans evolved to be submissive to hierarchy (Waller, 2007). In this agentic state, we act as agents of others in authority and thus divert responsibility away from ourselves.