Milgram's Agency Theory
© Myles Cook, 2006
Milgram’s Agency Theory of Obedience
One of the areas that have fascinated psychologists is that of obedience – why does someone obey another? In the period following World War 2, the subject became a popular one for researchers fascinated by the amount of obedience shown by the German soldiers in Nazi Germany when faced with orders that resulted in the torture and deaths of millions of Jews. Stanley
Milgram, a Jew himself, decided that the only way to prevent any further occurrence of the Holocaust was to understand why the German soldiers had apparently blindly followed orders.
The ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis
Some commentators believed that the Germans had a defect in their character that made them more prone to obedience than the members of any other racial group. It was this basic flaw that made them blindly obey any orders given to them no matter the consequences of that order.
Looking at the atrocities that took place in Nazi Germany, it is easy to see how people believed in this hypothesis especially when it appeared that the armies of the other countries involved in the war were not committing similar acts. It was this lack of similarity between the actions of the Germans and the other armies that prompted the view that the Nazis were different.
Milgram decided to prove or disprove the hypothesis and to this end, created an experiment to test the level of obedience to a potentially lethal task.
The Study
The experiment that Milgram conducted involved asking a group of volunteers to give electric shocks to another volunteer. The shocks were to be given in increments of 15 volts starting at 15 volts and increasing to the lethal 450 volts in response to any incorrect answers given in a memory test.
Milgram measured the level of obedience of the volunteers by noting how high a shock they were prepared to give the other volunteer before they disobeyed his instructions.
The equipment was set up to look
Milgram’s Agency Theory of Obedience
One of the areas that have fascinated psychologists is that of obedience – why does someone obey another? In the period following World War 2, the subject became a popular one for researchers fascinated by the amount of obedience shown by the German soldiers in Nazi Germany when faced with orders that resulted in the torture and deaths of millions of Jews. Stanley
Milgram, a Jew himself, decided that the only way to prevent any further occurrence of the Holocaust was to understand why the German soldiers had apparently blindly followed orders.
The ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis
Some commentators believed that the Germans had a defect in their character that made them more prone to obedience than the members of any other racial group. It was this basic flaw that made them blindly obey any orders given to them no matter the consequences of that order.
Looking at the atrocities that took place in Nazi Germany, it is easy to see how people believed in this hypothesis especially when it appeared that the armies of the other countries involved in the war were not committing similar acts. It was this lack of similarity between the actions of the Germans and the other armies that prompted the view that the Nazis were different.
Milgram decided to prove or disprove the hypothesis and to this end, created an experiment to test the level of obedience to a potentially lethal task.
The Study
The experiment that Milgram conducted involved asking a group of volunteers to give electric shocks to another volunteer. The shocks were to be given in increments of 15 volts starting at 15 volts and increasing to the lethal 450 volts in response to any incorrect answers given in a memory test.
Milgram measured the level of obedience of the volunteers by noting how high a shock they were prepared to give the other volunteer before they disobeyed his instructions.
The equipment was set up to look