Obedience (Milgram, Situational & Dispositional), Resistance & Minority Influence

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Milgram's (1963) Baseline Shock Study and Situational Variations

Stanley Milgram recruited 40 American men (aged 20-50) via a newspaper advert for a 'memory and learning' study at Yale University. Using a rigged draw, the naive participant was always the 'Teacher' and confederate Mr Wallace was the 'Learner' strapped into a chair in the next room. Supervised by an Experimenter in a grey lab coat using four standardised verbal prods ('Please continue' up to 'You have no other choice, you must go on'), the Teacher had to administer electric shocks rising in 15V steps from 15V to 450V ('XXX'). Findings: 100% of participants shocked up to 300V, and 65% obeyed all the way to the lethal 450V! In Milgram's situational variations, obedience to 450V dropped when: 1. Proximity increased: 40% in the same room, 30% in the touch-proximity variation (forcing the Learner's hand onto a shock plate), and 20.5% when the Experimenter gave orders remotely by telephone; 2. Location changed: 47.5% when moved from prestigious Yale University to a run-down office building in Bridgeport, Connecticut; 3. Uniform removed: 20% when the Experimenter was replaced by an 'ordinary member of the public' in everyday clothes (supported in the field by Bickman 1974, where passers-by obeyed a security guard uniform 38% of the time vs 19% for a jacket and tie).

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Situational Explanations: Agentic State & Legitimacy of Authority

1. Agentic state (Milgram 1974): People operate in two states, the Autonomous State (feeling free to act according to one's own conscience and taking personal responsibility) and the Agentic State (acting as an 'agent' carrying out another person's wishes and feeling NO personal moral responsibility for the consequences). Moving from autonomous to agentic is the 'agentic shift', and people remain in the agentic state due to 'binding factors' (e.g., reluctance to disrupt the experiment or appear rude), experiencing 'moral strain' (sweating, trembling, nervous laughter). 2. Legitimacy OF authority: Society is structured hierarchically, and from childhood we are socialised by parents, teachers, and police to accept that certain positions hold legitimate power to issue orders and punish disobedience (explaining cross-cultural differences like Kilham & Mann 1974: 16% obedience in Australia vs Mantell 1971: 85% in Germany, and destructive authority in Hofling et al. 1966, where 21 out of 22 nurses obeyed a doctor's phone order to give double the maximum dose of an unfamiliar drug 'Astroten').

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Dispositional Explanation: The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950)

Theodor Adorno et al. (1950) proposed that extreme obedience has a dispositional (internal personality) root formed in childhood. Studying over 2,000 middle-class white Americans using the F-scale (Fascism scale), Adorno found that individuals scoring high on the F-scale exhibited an AUTHORITARIAN personality: rigid black-and-white thinking, obsequious servility toward superiors combined with hostile contempt toward inferiors/scapegoats, and obsession with social status. Psychodynamically, this stems from harsh, punitive parenting with conditional love, generating unconscious hostility toward parents that is displaced onto weaker minority out-groups. Evaluation: Elms and Milgram (1966) found fully obedient participants scored higher on the F-scale than defiant ones, but Authoritarian Personality cannot explain how millions of Germans obeyed Nazi orders without all sharing the exact same upbringing, and the F-scale suffers from acquiescence bias (every item is worded in the same positive direction).

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Resistance to Social Influence: Social Support & Locus of Control

Why do some people successfully resist pressure to conform or obey? 1. Social support (Situational): Having an ally breaks group unanimity in conformity (Asch's dissenter variation dropped conformity to 5.5%) and provides a disobedient role model in obedience (in Milgram's two-peers rebel variation, obedience to 450V plummeted from 65% to just 10%, and in Gamson et al. 1982, 88% of groups rebelled against a smear campaign). 2. Locus OF control (Dispositional: Rotter 1966): Measured on a continuum from High internal LOC (believing you control your own destiny through your own effort and choices, making you self-confident, achievement-oriented, and less reliant on social approval) to High external LOC (believing outcomes are controlled by luck, fate, or powerful others). Holland (1967) and Oliner & Oliner (1988, studying non-Jewish rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe) confirmed that Internals are significantly more resistant to authority, though Twenge et al. (2004) found young Americans have become more external over time while still resisting authority in novel situations.

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Minority Influence: Consistency, Commitment & Flexibility (Moscovici, 1969)

Minority influence occurs when a small individual or group persuades the majority to adopt new beliefs, leading to internalisation ('conversion') because the majority must think deeply about the minority's message. Three behavioural styles are essential: 1. Consistency: repeating the same message over time (diachronic consistency) and across all members of the minority (synchronic consistency), which forces the majority to reassess the issue; 2. Commitment: making personal sacrifices or taking risks for the cause (the 'augmentation principle' - showing the minority is not acting out of self-interest); 3. Flexibility (Nemeth 1986): avoiding appearing rigid and dogmatic by showing willingness to compromise on minor details. In Serge Moscovici's (1969) 'blue-green' colour perception study with 32 groups of 6 women (4 naive participants and 2 confederates calling 36 clearly blue slides 'green'), a consistent minority (calling all 36 slides green) achieved an 8.42% conversion rate (with 32% agreeing at least once), whereas an inconsistent minority (calling 24 green and 12 blue) achieved only 1.25%.

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Processes of Social Change

How does a minority view (e.g., civil rights, women's suffrage, environmental recycling) become the new majority norm? 1. Drawing Attention through social proof; 2. Deeper Processing of the issue; 3. Consistency and the Augmentation Principle (personal sacrifice, e.g., hunger strikes or prison); 4. The snowball effect: gradually, converts switch from the majority to the minority until a tipping point is reached where the minority becomes the new majority; 5. Normative Social Influence and Obedience (new laws) then compel the remaining holdouts to comply; 6. Social cryptoamnesia: society accepts the new norm completely while forgetting the original minority activists who fought to bring it about.

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1. Q1

   Outline and evaluate how situational variables have been shown to affect obedience in Milgram's research. (8 marks)

   Check Mark Scheme

   Click “Check Mark Scheme” to compare your answer, 1. [AO1 - 3 marks] Milgram (1963) systematically varied three situational factors from his baseline study (65% obedience to 450V): Proximity (putting Teacher and Learner in the same room cut obedience to 40%, touch-proximity cut it to 30%, and telephone orders from the Experimenter cut it to 20.5% as psychological distance changed); Location (moving from prestigious Yale University to a run-down office block in Bridgeport reduced obedience to 47.5% due to lower perceived institutional legitimacy); and Uniform (replacing the grey-lab-coated Experimenter with a confederate in everyday clothes dropped obedience to 20%). 2. [AO3 Strength 1: Cross-cultural and field support - 2 marks] Bickman's (1974) New York field experiment confirmed the power of uniform in real life (38% obeyed a 'security guard' uniform to pick up litter/give a coin vs 19% for a civilian jacket), giving high ecological validity to Milgram's uniform variation. 3. [AO3 Strength 2: High control of variables - 1 mark] By keeping the script, voltage generator, and prods identical while altering only one variable at a time, Milgram established clear cause-and-effect relationships. 4. [AO3 Limitation: Orne & Holland (1968) and Perry (2013) - 2 marks] Orne and Holland argued participants in the variations (such as the 'ordinary member of the public' replacement) saw through the deception more easily (demand characteristics), and Gina Perry's (2013) analysis of Milgram's archived audio tapes revealed that the Experimenter often went off-script using far more than the 4 standardised prods, undermining internal validity.

2. Q2

   Compare the Agentic State and the Authoritarian Personality as explanations for obedience. (6 marks)

   Check Mark Scheme

   Click “Check Mark Scheme” to compare your answer, 1. Situational vs Dispositional nature: The Agentic State (Milgram 1974) is a situational explanation claiming anyone can obey destructive orders when placed in a hierarchy where they shift responsibility to an authority figure, whereas the Authoritarian Personality (Adorno 1950) is a dispositional explanation attributing obedience to an internal personality trait formed by harsh childhood parenting [2 marks]. 2. Scope of explanation for mass atrocities: The Agentic State can explain why whole populations or entire battalions (such as Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Browning 1992) obeyed orders simultaneously, whereas the Authoritarian Personality cannot plausibly claim that millions of citizens in pre-war Germany all had the exact same punitive childhood and personality type [2 marks]. 3. Individual differences: Conversely, the Agentic State fails to explain why 35% of Milgram's baseline participants (and 1 nurse in Hofling et al. 1966) refused to obey despite being in the exact same situational environment, whereas the Authoritarian Personality accounts for individual differences (supported by Elms & Milgram 1966, who found obedient participants scored significantly higher on the F-scale than defiant ones) [2 marks].

3. Q3

   Discuss two explanations of resistance to social influence. (8 marks)

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   Click “Check Mark Scheme” to compare your answer, 1. [AO1 - 2 marks] Social Support is a situational explanation: the presence of an ally who resists conformity (breaking unanimity) or disobeys authority acts as a role model, freeing the individual to follow their own conscience. 2. [AO1 - 2 marks] Locus of Control (Rotter 1966) is a dispositional personality explanation: individuals with a high Internal LOC believe they control their own fate and take personal moral responsibility for their actions, making them less reliant on social approval and more likely to resist than Externals (who attribute outcomes to luck or fate). 3. [AO3 Support for Social Support - 2 marks] In Asch's (1955) dissenter variation, a single ally dropped conformity from 32% to 5.5% (and Allen & Levine 1971 showed a valid ally helped even more than an ally with thick glasses), while in Milgram's (1974) disobedient peers variation, two rebelling confederates reduced obedience from 65% to 10%. 4. [AO3 Evaluation of LOC - 2 marks] Holland (1967) replicated Milgram and found 37% of Internals refused to continue to 450V compared to only 23% of Externals; however, Rotter (1982) noted that LOC only predicts resistance in novel situations - in familiar situations, previous habits outweigh personality.

4. Q4

   Explain how minority influence leads to social change, referring to Moscovici's and Nemeth's research. (6 marks)

   Check Mark Scheme

   Click “Check Mark Scheme” to compare your answer, 1. A minority group draws attention to its cause by providing social proof of a problem (e.g., environmental protests or civil rights marches) [1 mark]. 2. The minority must display consistency (both synchronic across members and diachronic over time), which Moscovici (1969) showed is essential because a consistent minority achieved an 8.42% conversion rate on the blue-green slide task compared to just 1.25% for an inconsistent minority [1 mark]. 3. The minority demonstrates commitment through personal sacrifice or risk, which operates via the augmentation principle to convince the majority that the minority's motives are genuine and unselfish [1 mark]. 4. As Nemeth (1986) showed in her ski-lift compensation mock-jury study, the minority must also show flexibility (willingness to compromise rather than appearing rigid and dogmatic) to persuade the majority [1 mark]. 5. These factors trigger deeper cognitive processing of the minority's message, leading to internalisation and the snowball effect as growing numbers convert until the minority becomes the new majority [1 mark]. 6. Finally, NSI and legal obedience consolidate the change, culminating in social cryptoamnesia where the new norm is accepted without remembering the minority's struggle [1 mark].

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