The agentic state: is it an explanation of the obedience findings or a redescription of them?

Stanley Milgram, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

A person who enters a hierarchy stops seeing himself as the author of his acts and becomes the instrument of another's will.¹ Responsibility moves upward. That is a change of state, not a change of attitude.²³⁴⁵

Sources

1. This transformation corresponds precisely to the central dilemma of our experiment: how is it that a person who is usually decent and courteous acts with severity against another person within the experiment? He does so because conscience, which regulates impulsive aggressive action, is per force diminished at the point of entering a hierarchical structure.

   Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View

2. Social organizations, and the individuals who participate in them, are not exempt from the requirements of system integration. What in human experience corresponds to the transition from the autonomous to the systemic mode, and what are its consequences in specifically human terms?

   Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View

3. If it is superfluous we shall find that it adds nothing to the coherence of our findings. For clarity, let me again define what is meant by the state of agency. It may be defined both from a cybernetic and a phenomenological standpoint.

   Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View

4. The act does not originate in his own motive system and thus is not checked by the inhibitory forces of his internal psychological system. In growing up, the normal individual has learned to check the expression of aggressive impulses. But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority.

   Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View

5. Similarly, in this experiment, subjects become immersed in the procedures, reading the word pairs with exquisite articulation and pressing the switches with great care. They want to put on a competent performance, but they show an accompanying narrowing of moral concern. The subject entrusts the broader tasks of setting goals and assessing morality to the experimental authority he is serving.

   Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View

Where the argument is made

• Obedience to Authority (1974), the theoretical chapters on the agentic shift, binding factors and strain

How the argument was received

Contested as theory even by those who accept the findings; the least settled part of the account.