Ordinary people can do terrible things when told to by somebody in authority. Discuss.

This essay will discuss obedience in authority, considering why people can do terrible things when instructed to by someone of a higher standing. It will first discuss social psychological explanations into obedience, outlining and evaluating agency theory and legitimate authority. It will then go onto evaluate the contrasting research of Milgram and Hofling’s studies into obedience, also looking at other similar studies. The third section will discuss and analyse the ethical issues into social psychological research referring to the specific issues contained in the studies of the previously mentioned psychologists. A conclusion will sum up the entirety …show more content…
Agency theory suggests that there are two mental states, the autonomous where we take responsibility for our own behaviour and therefore feel guilt for what we have done and the Agentic, one sees themselves as an agent for someone else’s actions often an authority figure and are no longer responsible for their actions and feel no guilt. The transition between these two states was named an ‘Agentic shift’ (psychologywizard.net, Online). Within this theory it was suggested that two main points must be in place before an agentic shift would happen, the person taking orders must believe that the authority would take responsibility for the outcome and the person giving the orders must be seen to be qualified to do so (McLeod, 2007, online) this was named Legitimate authority, an obedience theory of its own that was supported by Bickman (1974). It states people will obey someone who is perceived to have an authority given by a rightful, legal or social standing. Bickman’s study used three confederates dressed as a security guard, milkman and one as a plain clothed civilian they asked members of the public one of three commands (Pick up a plastic bag, give a dime or to move away from a bus stop). The results of this study showed the participants showed …show more content…
Hofling's research into obedience differed from that of Milgram's, however, the results of both studies showed equally high rates of obedience. 54 years later and Milgram's study is still coming under fire for many reasons including its ecological validity. His study was set inside of a laboratory at Yale University using 40 male volunteers selected from an advertisement for a memory study in a local newspaper with the promise of $4.00 and car fare (Brain et al, 2008). The participants as teachers were instructed to give an electric shock, starting at 15v to the learner (confederate) when answering a memory question wrong, for each wrong answer the voltage was increased by 15 volts. The shocks were fake and the responses of the learner were prerecorded unbeknown to the teacher. In the controlled experiment, both the teacher and learner were taken to a room containing a chair with electrodes, the teacher then experienced a shock of 15 volts the lowest voltage that would be used. This action ensured that the participant believed the experiment to be real and there would be no demand characteristics. Once this had taken place and the learner had been strapped into the chair with electrodes in place the teacher was moved to a separate room containing the shock generator. This generator had thirty switches labeled from 15 volts (slight shock), 300v (danger: severe