Agency Theory
During Milgram’s experiments, a number of participants pestered the experimenter to take responsibility for the situation. They typically asked, “who is going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman?” They were determined to absolve themselves of any personal responsibility and to see themselves as simply carrying out orders from a higher authority. Milgram called this “being another person’s agent”, a situation known as the agentic state.
Milgram's agency theory states that people operate on two levels:
• as autonomous (i.e. independent) individuals, behaving voluntarily and aware of the consequences of their actions
• on the agentic level, seeing themselves as the agents of others and not responsible for their actions.
Milgram believed that this explained the behaviour of the participants in his study; they denied personal responsibility, claiming that they were merely "doing what they were told".
The consequence of moving from the autonomous to the agentic level (known as the agentic shift) is that individuals attribute responsibility for their actions to the person in authority. At this agentic level, Milgram argued, people mindlessly accept the orders of the person seen as responsible in the situation. Milgram believed that this explained the behaviour of the participants in his study; they denied personal responsibility, claiming that they were merely "doing what they were told". You probably know that when those responsible for atrocities during World War II were asked why they did what they did, their answer was simply: "I was only obeying orders". Indeed, Adolf Eichmann is a classic 'real life' example of this in so far as at his war trial he pleaded, like other Nazis at the Nuremberg trials, that he was only obeying orders. In fact, he claimed, he was not the 'monster' the media of the day had painted him to be.
In Hofling’s hospital experiment, personal responsibility was partly removed from the nurses. The doctor promised to sign the authorisation papers when he arrived at the hospital ten minutes after his phone call.
There is considerable evidence both from experiments and real life that the removal of personal responsibility encourages obedience. This is seen most vividly in the Nazi war crimes and the My Lai massacre.
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Listen to a historic Reith Lecture: Bertrand Russell - 1948 Authority And The Individual
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