Outline and evaluate one or more explanations of why people obey. One of the main reasons that people obey is the feeling of relinquishing personal responsibility. During the course of Milgram’s experiment, many participants enquired about responsibility; who would be to blame if any harm came to the learner? In many cases, informing the participant that the experimenter was completely responsible was reassurance enough to encourage the participants to continue with the deadly electric shocks. In many cases, where harm has come to someone as a result of obedience, the perpetrators have justified their actions by the lack of responsibility. The participants most likely to obey are those who feel they have relinquished personal responsibility to an authoritative figure, and obedience levels are often diminished when the rate of personal responsibility has increased. It has also been suggested that obedience levels drop radically when participants are informed that they must accept full responsibility for their actions. One way that we can prove that this is the case, is by looking at variations of Milgram’s experiment. In the initial experiment, the ‘teacher’ could not see the pain that they were supposedly inflicting on the ‘learner,’ only hear them. They felt responsible when they heard the cries of anguish, but as the experimenter had accepted responsibility, many people continued administering the shocks. However, in a similar experiment where the ‘learner’ was in the room and the ‘teacher’ was required to place the learners hand on a plate that ‘shocked’ them, the levels of obedience reduced dramatically. It is suggested that because the participant had to physically place the ‘learners’ hand on the plate that they believed was causing them so much pain, the sense of personal responsibility was a lot stronger, so many more refused to obey. Legitimate