S. Alexander Haslam, Stephen D. Reicher, Kathryn Millard x Published: March 2, 2015 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0109015 Article Authors Metrics Media Coverage Abstract Attempts to revisit Milgram's 'Obedience to Authority' (OtA) paradigm present serious ethical challenges. Milgram also polled forty psychiatrists from a medical school, and they believed that by the tenth shock, when the victim demands to be free, most subjects would stop the experiment. It is very sad yet very true. Department of Media Music Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The experimenter dressed in a gray technicians coat which in the volunteers eyes showed authority. Bickman used three male actors: one dressed as a milkman; one dressed as a security guard; and one dressed in ordinary clothes. Agentic State - Teaching and Learning Resources Indeed, a major part of the psychological debrief (Step 7 of IDR above) was to make participants aware of the dangers of such ideologies. (T/F), According to French and Raven, power comes from two sources . I find myself in the same predicament. [24][25] She described her findings as "an unexpected outcome" that "leaves social psychology in a difficult situation. All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Analysis of Milgram's Obedience Study - GraduateWay Although these various findings are consistent with the engaged follower model, they are of course highly constrained by the fact of being rooted in post-hoc estimates and retrospective reinterpretations of archival data. Additional approval was obtained from the Research Ethics Committees at the University of Queensland (Approval No. The result, power can influence behavior to turn bad. In those experiments, the participant was joined by one or two additional "teachers" (also actors, like the "learner"). In this essay Meyers tone is very disgusted, and I tend to feel the same way. Data Availability: The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. This is clear in their behavior and it is also clear from their responses to psychometric measures during the psychological debriefing. He also produced a series of five social psychology films, some of which dealt with his experiments.[15]. PDF Obedience to authority: agency theory - Psychlotron So there's a powerful union between Milgram's agentic state and Arendt's notion of the banality of evil, which Milgram himself said "comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine." The teacher and learner were then separated so that they could communicate, but not see each other. Its essential that I hurt him, I dont think so. Thinking back to the study, how much did you identify with the Learner as a member of the general community? : PS11050). Only 16 of 80 "contestants" (teachers) chose to end the game before delivering the highest-voltage punishment.[44][45]. E: Then well have to discontinue the experiment then. Learn more . This highlights the impact of location on obedience, with less credible locations resulting in a reduction in the level of obedience. Copyright 2023 IPL.org All rights reserved. This method draws on the rich tradition of realist film theory and practice [41] and was initially developed by Millard [42] to restage Gamsons famous sociological research into encounters with an unjust authority [43]. In particular, this involved building a laboratory set of the same size and with similar layout and furnishings as well as building similar apparatus (see Figure 1). With the participants roles as a teacher to punish a learner by incrementing degrees of electric shocks, though they didnt know its staged, 65% of them did it to the last under the horrendous moans and the commands of the experimenters, which surpassed the expectation of 1.2%. In Milgrams original research the teacher and the learner were in separate rooms. The subject was told this was a component of the experiment and that the person they were querying the shocks to had a heart condition. Thomas Blass of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County performed a meta-analysis on the results of repeated performances of the experiment. Qualitative data also pointed to a strong correspondence between the behaviour displayed in Milgrams original studies [6], [49], [52] and that observed in the IDR paradigm. [16] In Milgram's defense, 84 percent of former participants surveyed later said they were "glad" or "very glad" to have participated; 15 percent chose neutral responses (92% of all former participants responding). In the present study, a seventh step was added to this protocol in light of the fact that IDR was also being used for the purpose of psychology research. When Zimbardo demonstrates sadistic photos of prisoners , I was shocked and sad about how far the soldiers are willing dehumanize because of power and control was involved and the environment. From this work Milgram developed a theory that, during obedience, people adopt an agentic state seeing themselves as instruments to carry out the will of another and feel little or no responsibility for their actions. [39][40] A video of this performance was first shown at the CCA Gallery in Glasgow in 2002. Instead, resistance developed in response to the Experimenters attempt to deny participants sense of free will [53] and an associated violation of norms associated with shared identity (in which cooperation is understood to be voluntary rather than coerced [54]). Whatever else they show, Milgrams studies thus provide little evidence of people blindly obeying orders [31]. T: I think I do have a choice, John. Evidence from functional MRI and dispositional measures", "Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today? The focus book of this lens was 1984 by George Orwell, as Winston recognizes that almost all Party members are utterly loyal to the Party, yet attempts to rebel against the Party with the help of Julia and OBrien, resulting in severe personal consequences. [42] Burger found obedience rates virtually identical to those reported by Milgram in 196162, even while meeting current ethical regulations of informing participants. James Waller, chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College, formerly chair of Whitworth College Psychology Department, expressed the opinion that Milgram experiments do not correspond well to the Holocaust events:[21]. As far as possible, the materials for the study were modelled on those developed by Milgram for his original studies (i.e., as described by Milgram [6], [9]). As predicted, there was a strong positive correlation between estimated identification with the Experimenter (iE) and the level of obedience observed in a particular variant, as well as a strong negative correlation between identification with the Learner (iL) and obedience, and a strong positive correlation between relative identification (iE iL) and obedience. 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. The agency theory was proposed by Stanley Milgram, the American psychologist who carried out the infamous blind obedience studies. E: You have no other choice, Teacher, you must continue. School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia, Affiliation Figure 2 plots the maximum level of shock administered by participants in different variants of the IDR paradigm against the mean maximum level of shock delivered in the corresponding OtA variant (as reported by Milgram [6]). Citation: Haslam SA, Reicher SD, Millard K (2015) Shock Treatment: Using Immersive Digital Realism to Restage and Re-examine Milgrams Obedience to Authority Research. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0109015.s001. Yet, they still lack one element which is crucial to the impact of Milgrams studies. In addition to mining the archives, one approach has been to replicate the basic paradigm but to stop before the point that people are asked to inflict apparently lethal shocks and hence both limiting stress in the study and potential harm after the study [27], [30]. The shift from autonomy to 'agency' is referred to as the 'agentic shift'. Milgram suggested that two things must be in place in order for a person to enter the agentic state: The person giving the orders is perceived as being qualified to direct other people's behaviour. She wanted to cleanse the guilt I carried around with me, which would give me a start on dealing with the depression, and remove some of the inner conflict that was causing the anxiety. But, in so doing they diminish the drama and distance the behaviours inside the laboratory from the real-world phenomena outside and hence lose the very thing that made Milgrams studies so compelling and so impactful. More specifically, do participants identify with the science of the study, and with the Experimenter as a representative of that science (in which case they obey), or do they identify with the Learner as a fellow member of the general community (in which case they disobey)? Affiliation (This surprised her.) All of this flies in the face of the overriding narrative Milgram established after his experiments of obedient people in agentic states blindly following orders. In Milgrams original experiment, the participants were told that the experimenter had full responsibility and therefore they could act as an agent, carrying out the experimenters orders. Participants were professional actors employed in that capacity by KM. Nevertheless, they continued to follow orders. When Milgram asked ordinary people what they thought they would do, most believed that they would go no further than 135 volts. . 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. He remarked: "The influence is ideological. All of the poll respondents believed that only a very small fraction of teachers (the range was from zero to 3 out of 100, with an average of 1.2) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. This page was last edited on 11 June 2023, at 03:51. Refer to Freddie's behaviour in your answer. 214 High Street, Americans are not naturally less likely to obey something that they no is wrong. After this, a full explanation of the social psychological aspects of the research was provided. Department of Housing and Urban Development. More . In 2002, the British artist Rod Dickinson created The Milgram Re-enactment, an exact reconstruction of parts of the original experiment, including the uniforms, lighting, and rooms used. Department of Justice. The actors asked members of the public to following one of three instructions: pick up a bag; give someone money for a parking metre; and stand on the other side of a bus stop sign which said no standing. For even though Milgram managed to reconcile his participants to what they had done, it is apparent that he only achieved this by convincing them that it was acceptable to cause suffering in the name of scientific progress [15]. While reading books through an obedience lenses, readers search for which characters are compliant to a more powerful character, their reasoning, and how it impacts their actions and mindset. This suggests that the more a person enters into an agentic state, the less responsibility they feel for the situation . [22], In a 2004 issue of the journal Jewish Currents, Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment at Yale University, wrote about his early withdrawal as a "teacher", suspicious "that the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period. The experimenter told them that they were taking part in "a scientific study of memory and learning", to see what the effect of punishment is on a subject's ability to memorize content. However, participants in this condition obeyed at the same rate as participants in the base condition. Agentic state is the state in which we switch, in order to allow us to carry out orders given by an authority . IDR involves six core steps. Theories of obedience; Agency Theory Milgram (1974) - psychologyrocks AQA A-level Psychology Social Influence - Learndojo Yes Clip from the movie "The Experimenter" in which an actor portraying social psychologist Stanley Milgram explains the concept of the "Agentic State" Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock. [16 marks]- PLAN, Agentic state- definition, opposite is autonomous state, binding factors, Legitimacy of Authority- definition, authority is legitimate due to person's position of power in society . The lack of a uniform and questionable position of authority reduced the credibility of the authority, which meant the participants were far less likely to obey. T: Sorry, what do you mean that I dont have a choice? agentic - Wiktionary, the free dictionary )[30], In a 2006 experiment, a computerized avatar was used in place of the learner receiving electrical shocks. Milgram also combined the effect of authority with that of conformity. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". While arguably one of the defining psychological studies of the 20th Century, the research was not without flaws. Milgram's Agentic State Theory - 1659 Words | Internet Public Library Analytically, then, using this methodology raises two key questions: first, whether or not IDR does actually capture similar behaviour to Milgrams original studies; second, whether or not it is capable of shedding light on the psychology of Milgrams participants. here. An agentic state is when an individual carries out the orders of an authority figure and acts as their agent, with little personal responsibility. No, Is the Subject Area "Research ethics" applicable to this article? Generally, when the participant was physically closer to the learner, the participant's compliance decreased. Milgram 's implications for the study of obedience to authority are pretty straightforward, if a person is in authority, or if they look like they are in authority, requests some sort of action or favor from someone they are more liable to do it for them rather than if another normal, average person were to ask them to do something. Two further participants were assigned to No Learner Feedback, 2 Peers Rebel, and Experimenter Absent conditions and one to the Learner Proximal Condition1. This was achieved in the present research by using Immersive Digital Realism (IDR) to revisit the OtA paradigm. Speaking to the first of these questions, it is apparent from our quantitative analyses that there is a close correspondence between the behaviour observed in our IDR study and that observed in Milgrams original research. This allowed us to test a further hypothesis: Participants were 14 actors (8 men, 6 women) chosen to participate in the study on the basis of their proven competence as professional actors. Milgram says the essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes and therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions. Post-experimental interviews also assessed participants identification with Experimenter and Learner. Political Theory (PT), peer-reviewed and published bi-monthly, serves as the leading forum for the development and exchange of political ideas. Finally, Milgrams work did not account for the role of participants hearing the learners voice shouting in pain. Roth added a segment in which a second person (an actor) in the room would defy the authority ordering the shocks, finding more often than not, the subjects would stand up to the authority figure in this case. This was the experiment where normal people were ordered to deliver shocks to someone behind a curtain. It requires a lengthy period of set up, it requires extensive dialogue between the film makers and the psychologists so that each understands the perspectives and the requirements of the other. The proximity of the authority figure also affects the level of obedience. However A critique of all the methodologies is that they only look for what they intend and ignore other possibilities. E: You have no other choice, you must go on. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute other peoples behavior to internal factors, instead of accounting for situational factors. broad scope, and wide readership a perfect fit for your research every time. Participants behaviour closely resembled that observed in Milgrams original research. As reported by Perry in her 2012 book Behind the Shock Machine, some of the participants experienced long-lasting psychological effects, possibly due to the lack of proper debriefing by the experimenter.[38]. It is time instead, to engage with the uncomfortable truth that, when people inflict harm to others, they often do so wittingly and willingly. Three participants took part in the study on each of five consecutive days. More generally, then, the agentic state model fails to engage with the fact that these are studies of disobedience as well as obedience. In fact the machine did not deliver shocks and the Learner was a confederate, but the Teachers did not know this. segment of Curiosity on October 30, 2011. Obedience did not significantly differ, though the women communicated experiencing higher levels of stress. T: Just cut it out, after all, he knows what he can stand. www.sagepublishing.com, This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. Six years later (at the height of the Vietnam War), one of the participants in the experiment wrote to Milgram, explaining why he was glad to have participated despite the stress: While I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Aim of the Milgram Study To investigate how obedient people would be to orders from a person in authority that would result in pain and harm to another person The quickest way out was to get me to deny responsibility. In order to explain these findings, Haslam and Reicher argue that orders fail to secure compliance because they disrupt the inclusive relationship between the Experimenter and the Teacher. Three issues, in particular, are relevant here. Could we call them all accomplices? Their findings were similar to those of Milgram: seven out of 13 of the male subjects and all 13 of the female subjects obeyed throughout. What is more, can we record these actions in a way that makes them as impactful as Milgrams original? On the one hand, Milgram uncovered a phenomenon of great consequence that they were impelled to study further [2]. The procedure for running each condition was intended to replicate Milgrams own procedure as closely as possible (see Milgram [6], [9] for details). Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. Agentic State - psychologyrocks In his defence, Milgram invoked post-experimental survey data and psychiatrists reports to demonstrate that most participants were glad to have participated and that none had been harmed [14]. T: Yes I do have a choice. She concluded: I would not like to see experiments such as Milgrams proceed unless the subjects were fully informed of the dangers of serious aftereffects and his correctives were clearly shown to be effective in restoring their state of well being [13] (p. 423). Second, there is a range of evidence that points to the fact that participants pay heed to the Learner as well as the Experimenter. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In this way participation involves no harm for the actor. No, Is the Subject Area "Psychologists" applicable to this article? The Milgram Experiment By Saul McLeod2008 In 1963, Stanley Milgram conducted a study on obedience. At the conclusion of the directors debrief, SAH and SDR interviewed participants and administered a short questionnaire to collect additional data. In these terms, as Lagouranis suggests, it is time to reject the comforts of the obedience alibi [20]. They employ a range of strategies to try and overcome the contradiction between the two: even as they continue shocking they try to signal the right answer by pronouncing it more loudly, they show despair when the answer is wrong, they try to make the shocks as short as possible, they implore the Experimenter to check up on the Learner, and they try themselves to talk directly to the Learner and assess his welfare. Importantly, the researchers were able to demonstrate the validity of this method by showing that, despite the contrived nature of the set-up, participants behavioural and physiological responses were very similar to those reported by Milgram [6]. It also involved a lengthy period of dialogue between the film researchers and the psychologists so each could understand the basis of the others work. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. Yet a range of recent studies of perpetrators in general, of Nazi functionaries, and of Eichmann himself have questioned just how banal and unaware these people were [18], [19], [20], [21]. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. Although, a while after the experiment, Milgram found that many participants were happy to have taken part in the experiment. These were those in which (a) there was no feedback from the Learner (Milgrams original pilot; No L Feedback), (b) two confederates withdrew from the experiment, leaving the naive participant to continue alone (Milgrams Experiment 17, 2 Peers Rebel), (c) the Experimenter left the room and gave instructions from afar (Experiment 7, E Absent), and (d) the Learner was connected to the shock machine in the same room as the Teacher (Experiment 3, L Proximal). Individuals can act autonomously and choose their behaviour, or they can enter an agentic state, where they carry out orders of an authority figure and do not feel responsible for their actions. Tel: 01937 848885. Milgrams studies on obedience and the ethical problems - UK Essays Yes Department of Health and Human Services. A further 4 actors were recruited to play the role of confederates (1 as Experimenter, 1 as Learner, 2 as Teachers in the Two Peers Rebel condition). Company Reg no: 04489574. This can be seen from Figure 3 which presents a scatterplot and regression line for these data. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0109015, Editor: Joseph Najbauer, University of Pcs Medical School, Hungary, Received: June 27, 2014; Accepted: August 24, 2014; Published: March 2, 2015. That a majority (rather than a minority) of participants in the IDR paradigm would prove willing to administer shocks greater than 150 volts. In the context of this debriefing they were also asked to respond on 11-point rating scales to four questions. Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article "The Perils of Obedience", writing: The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. We would also like to thank Tom Murray (Co-Producer), Calvin Gardiner (Camera), James Currie (Sound), Iqbal Barkat (Associate Producer), Dave Mitchell (Engineer and technical support), Emma Kingsbury (Set Designer), Marcus Ekkerman (Technical support) and colleagues at our universities for their input into the design and realization of the study. The experimenter, dressed in a lab coat in order to appear to have more authority, told the participants this was to ensure that the learner would not escape. The Obedience to Authority Variations and Milgram's Agentic State I liked my psychotherapist, Dr Baum, but I had to argue with what she was trying to achieve. After entering an agentic state, participants were kept in the state due to: Second, by the fact that levels of obedience vary across conditions in the same way as in Milgrams own studies. [1]) The volts ranged from 15 to 450. The essay ends by providing the key conclusions drawn from the analysis, while also attempting to give an answer to whether Milgrams agentic state, Several of the elements of the experiment protocol were changed, so that Burger (2009) complies with the ethical standards of its time, as far as human participation in experiments were concerned. In particular, given that participants are actors, it needs to be shown that their behaviour corresponds to the behavior actually seen in the original studies rather than to peoples beliefs about their likely behavior (Slater uses a similar logic to interrogate virtual reality methods [38]). [2][13], The participants who refused to administer the final shocks neither insisted that the experiment be terminated, nor left the room to check the health of the victim without requesting permission to leave, as per Milgram's notes and recollections, when fellow psychologist Philip Zimbardo asked him about that point. When they turned up at the lab, they found themselves cast in the role of a Teacher and with the job of administering electric shocks to another man (the Learner) whenever he made an error on a word recognition task. Shock Treatment: Using Immersive Digital Realism to - Home - PLOS Department of Commerce. More formally, these observations became the basis for Milgrams agentic state theory which argued that participants were so focussed on the authority, and so bound up with the task of carrying out instructions to the best of their ability, that they lost sight of the consequences of their actions and of their moral implications. : 5201300440). This analysis also accords with other evidence that these researchers have drawn upon in developing an engaged followership model of obedience [15], [31], [32], [33]. Yes, I told her I had. Participants were told that their character would be taking part in a social psychology experiment for which they had volunteered. Moreover, given that shock levels differ across variants of the Milgram paradigm, it is pertinent to ask whether IDR participants show similar variation in the level of shock that they are prepared to inflict. Several experiments varied the distance between the participant (teacher) and the learner. In this variation the percentage of participants who administered the full 450 volts rose dramatically, from 65% to 92.5%. . This can be seen in the following examples [29]: A similar pattern of responses to prods emerged from a more recent replication of Milgrams studies by Burger [27], [30] in which ethical problems were side-stepped by only requiring participants to administer shocks of up to 150 volts. There is, however, an important confound with order here, as it might be the case that, having already refused three prods, participants were disinclined to respond positively to a fourth (whatever its content). From the perspective of the previous chapter, to change from a patient to an agent is to adopt or elaborate an, The next section examines ways in which network and partnership management may be able to reconcile self-organization with, Milgram (1974) suggested that one factor contributing to the maintenance of obedience was that the individual in the obedience situation entered into an, If helping is a variation on the more general, Within this framework, with gender role self-perception conceptualized as independent of biological sex, the, https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=agentic&oldid=71469374. The amount of obedience was highly underestimated. Lecture. Paid vacation days, sick days, and holidays. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. These questions cover: explanations for obedience: agentic state and legitimacy of authority, and situational variables affecting obedience including proximity, location and uniform, as investigated by Milgram. No, Is the Subject Area "Behavior" applicable to this article? The "teachers" were led to believe that they were merely assisting, whereas they were actually the subjects of the experiment. Using a series of social psychology experiments,Milgram measured participants' willingness to comply with an authority figure. The discursive approach to attitudes builds on a criticism of key assumptions and methods of the cognitive social approach and highlights the limitations of the experimental method for developing a comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon such as obedience. Agentic state - SlideShare [1] He also reached out to honorary Harvard University graduate Chaim Homnick, who noted that this experiment would not be concrete evidence of the Nazis' innocence, due to fact that "poor people are more likely to cooperate".