Describe And Explain Why People Obey. (12 Marks)

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Describe and Explain why people obey. (12 marks) Firstly, Milgram proposed the Agency theory in order to explain the levels of obedience in his experiments. He proposed that an individual’s social consciousness can operate in two ways; the Agentic state – this is where someone else directs their behaviour and they assume that the responsibility is passed to that person (diffusion of responsibility), in contrast the autonomous state is when a person directs their own behaviour as they feel that they are responsible for their actions (following a moral code). This can be supported as in Milgram’s study; participants were in the agentic state as they passed the responsibility to the experimenter. Additionally, in Hoffling’s study 95% of the nurses passed the responsibility to Dr Smith when they were asked to administrate a lethal amount of a drug to a person. On the other hand, support for the autonomous state comes from Jacobson who conducted a replication of Hoffling’s experiment and he found that 89% of the nurses disobeyed, as they were more familiar with the drug and knew better not to administer it. Furthermore, another reason why people disobey comes from the principles of the ‘Social impact Theory’ which states that the amount of influence a person has in a social situation depends of; the group size, perceived strength of the individual (legitimate authority) (for example someone is more likely to obey the orders of a police officer) and the proximity. With the group size, people are more likely to obey if the majority of a large group is obeying, however if there are people disobeying then the legitimate authority power weakens and the level obedience drops. Also, with legitimate authority, and individual is more likely obey if the person or premises have a high status. In Milgram’s experiment obedience dropped to 40% when it was conducted in a warehouse

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