Questions: Obedience to Authority

Question 1

In Milgram's variations, when the experimenter gave instructions by telephone rather than in person, what happened to compliance rates?

• A. Compliance increased — participants felt less observed and more willing to continue without the experimenter watching
• B. Compliance stayed roughly the same — the verbal content of the instructions was equally compelling regardless of delivery mode
• C. Compliance dropped substantially — physical proximity of the authority figure was a significant situational factor maintaining obedience
• D. All participants refused to continue — telephone instructions lacked the institutional legitimacy of in-person commands

Answer: (C)

Physical presence of the authority figure was a key situational variable. When instructions came by phone, many participants administered lower shocks than ordered and some lied to the experimenter, claiming they were following instructions when they were not. This drop in compliance demonstrates that obedience was maintained not by the content of the commands alone but by the situational architecture — including the authority's physical presence and the institutional context. This is a core finding of situationism: changing one contextual variable substantially changes behavior.

Question 2

A psychologist offers a dispositionist explanation for why Milgram's participants administered the full 450-volt shocks. Which of the following reflects a dispositionist account?

• A. Participants were embedded in an institutional authority structure at Yale that legitimized the experimenter's commands
• B. Gradual escalation from small to large shocks made each increment feel proportionally small relative to what had already been done
• C. The participants had unusually authoritarian or sadistic personality traits not representative of the general population
• D. Physical distance from the victim reduced the participants' empathic response to the learner's distress

Answer: (C)

A dispositionist explanation locates the cause of behavior in stable personal traits — in this case, claiming that the people who obeyed were unusually cruel, authoritarian, or morally deficient. Options A, B, and D are situationist explanations: they identify features of the social environment (institutional context, gradual escalation, victim proximity) that produced the behavior. Milgram's findings were striking precisely because they challenged dispositionist assumptions — ordinary people from diverse backgrounds showed the same high compliance under the same situational conditions.

Question 3

Milgram's participants who administered the full 450 volts typically showed no distress and appeared to enjoy administering the shocks.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This is the most important misconception about the study. Many participants showed visible signs of extreme distress — trembling, sweating, nervous laughter, and signs of emotional breakdown — while continuing to obey. The study demonstrates obedience *despite* discomfort, not because of sadistic pleasure. This is precisely what makes the findings disturbing: people can be induced to act against their apparent moral feelings by situational authority structures. The agentic state mechanism explains how this occurs — participants transferred moral responsibility to the experimenter.

Question 4

When confederate 'peer teachers' refused to continue administering shocks, compliance among real participants dropped dramatically, demonstrating that situational social support can enable resistance to authority.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

In the peer rebellion condition, compliance fell to roughly 10% — from 65% in the baseline. This is one of the most theoretically important variations because it shows that high baseline obedience was not inevitable. A single defiant peer gave participants permission to act on their own moral discomfort, breaking the social consensus that compliance was the expected behavior. This result illustrates that the same norm-based conformity mechanisms that produced obedience can also produce resistance, depending on what behavior the social environment models as normal.

Question 5

What is the 'agentic state,' and how does it explain why Milgram's participants continued administering shocks despite expressing visible distress?

Model answer: The agentic state is Milgram's term for a psychological shift in which a person stops functioning as an autonomous moral agent and begins experiencing themselves as an instrument of an authority's will. In this state, the person perceives moral responsibility as transferred upward to the authority figure giving commands, rather than residing with themselves as the actor. This explains the apparent paradox of distressed obedience: participants were not indifferent to the harm — they showed real discomfort — but they experienced themselves as executing orders rather than making moral choices. The responsibility, in their phenomenology, belonged to the experimenter, not to them.

The agentic state is produced by situational factors: legitimate authority, an institutional context that validates the authority's role, graduated commitment that makes stopping feel like self-condemnation, and the absence of social permission to resist. When those conditions change (peer defiance, authority ambiguity, proximity to the victim), the agentic state is disrupted and autonomous moral agency is restored. This is why Milgram's findings support a situationist rather than a dispositionist account of harmful obedience.