4.1.1 - Explanations for obedience

What obedience explains

Obedience is a form of social influence where a person follows a direct order from someone they perceive to have authority. In AQA Social influence, obedience is not just "doing what others do". It is about a hierarchy: one person gives an instruction and another person accepts that the instruction should be followed.

This makes obedience different from conformity. Conformity usually involves pressure from a group to fit in. Obedience involves a command, a role difference and usually some sense that the authority figure has the right to tell the person what to do.

The explanations operate at different levels:

Separate description from explanation. Saying "Milgram found 65% obedience" is evidence. Explaining why obedience was high means using terms such as agentic state, legitimacy of authority, proximity, location, uniform or Authoritarian Personality.

Agentic state and legitimate authority

Milgram argued that obedience becomes more likely when people move from an autonomous state into an agentic state.

This is the state students usually expect people to be in: choosing, judging and owning the consequences.

The move from autonomous to agentic is called an agentic shift. It does not mean the person becomes emotionless or unaware. In Milgram's research, many participants showed stress, questioned the procedure or protested, but still continued. That matters for AO3: obedience can involve moral strain, not just blind agreement.

Perceived legitimacy of authority can help explain why the shift happens.

Legitimate authority is learned through socialisation. Children are taught that parents, teachers, doctors, police officers and exam invigilators can issue instructions in particular settings. This is useful because societies need organised authority, but it also creates risk when an authority figure gives harmful or unreasonable orders.

In an exam scenario, look for signs that make authority seem legitimate:

Binding factors help explain why someone who feels moral strain might continue: a sense of obligation to finish an agreed task, gradual involvement after already carrying out earlier orders, or reassurance that the authority accepts responsibility. These are proposed processes, not proof that every obedient person has entered an agentic state.

Legitimacy is also limited by context. A teacher may be entitled to direct classroom work but have less influence over the same students in a supermarket. An impressive uniform can signal authority without giving its wearer a genuine right to command; the explanation concerns the participant's perception.

Milgram and situational variables

Milgram's obedience research is central because it experimentally varied features of the situation and measured how obedience changed.

In the original study, Milgram recruited 40 men aged 20-50 from the New Haven area. Participants believed they were taking part in a study of learning and punishment at Yale University. The real participant was always assigned the role of "teacher"; the "learner" was a confederate. The teacher was instructed to give increasingly severe electric shocks for wrong answers, using a shock generator labelled from 15 V to 450 V. The learner received no real shocks, but the procedure was designed to convince the teacher that the shocks and distress were real. How fully different participants believed the situation is a question for evaluating validity.

The original finding was striking: 26 out of 40 participants, or 65%, continued to the maximum 450 V. In the 1963 report, no participant stopped before 300 V; the learner pounded on the wall at that point and no longer supplied answers. Different later conditions used different forms of learner feedback, so their procedures should not be merged into one identical baseline. This supports the claim that ordinary people may obey destructive orders under particular authority conditions.

For AQA, the most important point is not to recite the whole procedure. It is to use Milgram's variations to explain why obedience changes.

These variables are situational because they are outside the person. They change the social context in which the order is given. A dispositional explanation would instead focus on the person's personality.

Comparing conditions

Full obedience was operationalised as reaching the maximum shock setting: it is a measured action, not a direct reading of the person's private intentions. For the baseline, $26 \div 40 \times 100 = 65\%$. The denominator is participants in that condition. In the touch-proximity condition, 30% reached the maximum, a difference of 35 percentage points from 65%.

Controlled variations support a causal role for the features manipulated, but they do not directly measure an agentic state. If location and victim proximity both changed in a new study, either could explain lower obedience. Change one feature while keeping the other comparable to investigate its separate effect. None of these percentages predicts with certainty what a particular new person will do.

The Authoritarian Personality

The Authoritarian Personality is a dispositional explanation for obedience. It argues that some people are more likely to obey authority because of their personality traits and upbringing, not just because of the immediate situation.

Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford developed the Authoritarian Personality after the Second World War to explain why some people were especially submissive to authority and hostile to lower-status or outgroup members. They created the F Scale, where "F" referred to fascist tendencies.

An authoritarian personality is usually described as involving:

Adorno's theory suggested that harsh, punitive parenting can create anger and anxiety in children. Because the child cannot safely express anger towards powerful parents, the anger may later be displaced onto weaker targets, while the person remains submissive towards authority figures.

Elms and Milgram (1966) tested the link between authoritarianism and obedience using participants from Milgram's obedience research. They compared 20 obedient men, who had gone to 450 V, with 20 defiant men, who had refused to continue. The men completed personality measures including the California F Scale. Obedient participants scored higher on the F Scale than defiant participants, supporting a link between authoritarian personality and obedience.

This is useful evidence, but it must be handled carefully:

Evaluating explanations of obedience

The strongest evaluation of obedience explanations does not just say whether Milgram was "good" or "bad". It asks what the evidence tells us about why people obey.

Situational explanations have strong support because obedience changes when the situation changes. In Milgram's variations, more immediate victim proximity reduced obedience, a less prestigious location reduced obedience, and a physically absent experimenter reduced obedience sharply. Bickman's field research also supports the role of uniform as a symbol of legitimate authority. This links evidence to explanation: authority cues and social context affect obedience.

However, situational explanations are incomplete. In Milgram's studies, some participants disobeyed even in the high-authority Yale setting, while some still obeyed in lower-authority conditions. This suggests individual differences matter. The Authoritarian Personality helps explain why two people in the same situation might respond differently.

The dispositional explanation also has limits. Elms and Milgram found higher F Scale scores among obedient participants, but this does not prove cause and effect. It is possible that a third factor, such as education, political attitude, social desirability or respect for institutions, influenced both F Scale scores and obedience. Also, if obedience changes when proximity or location changes, personality cannot be the only explanation.

Methodological evaluation must stay tied to the question. Milgram's lab setting allowed control over variables such as proximity and location, which helps causal conclusions. But the procedure was artificial and ethically controversial because participants were deceived and many experienced severe tension. If participants guessed the shocks were not real, the validity of the obedience findings may be weakened. If they believed the procedure, the ethical cost was high.

Wider debates help frame the explanation:

Interacting influences on obedience

Authority cues and personality can work together, so explaining an individual case requires a linked account rather than a list of labels.

Consider a technician ordered to continue an uncomfortable procedure. A hospital setting may make the researcher seem legitimate, and a white coat provides a visible status cue. Neither cue by itself shows an agentic state: evidence such as “the researcher is responsible, not me” supports that interpretation. A worried participant who continues may be experiencing moral strain while still treating the authority as responsible.

Now suppose the technician instead carries out the task in an ordinary rented office while the researcher gives the order by telephone. Two situational supports for obedience have weakened: the authority is less physically immediate, and the technician’s setting no longer reinforces the medical role. It is reasonable to predict lower obedience, but the change does not establish which cue caused it because both changed.

A dispositional account adds a different question: why do people exposed to similar cues respond differently? Someone strongly submissive to higher-status people may accept the command more readily. This does not mean all obedient people have an Authoritarian Personality, or that every refusal proves free will. Behaviour alone cannot establish the underlying trait or settle a philosophical debate about determinism.

When applying an explanation, make the mechanism explicit: the white coat signals legitimate authority; perceived legitimacy can encourage obedience; responsibility shifting is a separate cue for an agentic state. When evaluating it, distinguish the observation from the inference. Lower obedience outside a prestigious institution supports a role for location, but does not show that location is the only cause.

Quick recap

Obedience follows an order from perceived authority. Legitimacy concerns the authority’s right to command; agentic state concerns acting for that authority and displacing responsibility. Proximity, location and visible role cues affect obedience, while the Authoritarian Personality offers a dispositional account. Neither a percentage nor a personality label fully explains an individual case.