Milgram believed that we operate on two levels:
1. Autonomous individuals, conscientious and aware of the consequences of our behaviour.
2. Agentic individuals seeing ourselves as the puppets of others and no longer responsible for our actions
Normally we behave as autonomous, but under certain circumstances we undergo agentic shift and move to the agentic level. They are then responsible only to the person giving the orders and their responsibility to others disappears. He believed this explained the behaviour of participants in his own studies, with the experimenter being in charge during the agentic state. It would also explain the behaviour of people like Eichmann who could switch from ordinary, dull and uninspired to mastermind of the final solution.
Milgram believed this shift was possible because we are taught at an early age to obey without question. Once in the agentic state, binding factors keep us there:
- Fear of being rude and for example spoiling someone’s experiment.
- Fear of increasing our levels of anxiety by disobeying
- Graduated commitment - Used by sales people all over the world and usually referred to as foot in the door. Get people to make a small commitment, i.e. buy a small item or give a small electric shock, and then build up to bigger, expensive items or ‘fatal’ shocks. Once we’ve agreed to a small concession, then in principle it becomes more difficult to refuse a larger one.
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