Obedience: Milgram and the Authoritarian Personality
What Is Obedience?
Obedience is when a person follows a direct instruction from someone they perceive to be in authority. Unlike conformity, which involves going along with a group without being told to, obedience involves a clear command from a perceived authority figure. Milgram’s work revealed just how powerful this influence can be.
Milgram’s Agency Theory
Milgram proposed the Agency theory to explain why people obey. He argued that humans shift between two psychological states depending on the social situation.
When a person is in an agentic state, they view themselves as an agent or instrument of an authority figure. They feel they are simply carrying out orders and pass the responsibility for any consequences upward to the person giving the instructions. This state increases obedience dramatically.
In contrast, when a person is in an autonomous state, they act independently and take personal responsibility for what they do. In this state, people are far more likely to resist instructions that conflict with their own values.
Milgram’s Agency theory states that people enter an agentic state when following an authority figure, passing responsibility upward and increasing obedience. In an autonomous state, people feel personally responsible for their actions and are more likely to resist.
Milgram’s (1963) Study of Obedience: Aim — to investigate whether ordinary people would obey an authority figure’s instruction to harm an innocent person. Method — 40 male American participants were told to administer electric shocks to a confederate ‘learner’ for wrong answers; shocks ranged from 15V to 450V in 30 increments of 15V; when participants hesitated, the experimenter used four verbal prods (“Please continue” through to “You have no other choice”). Results — 65% of participants (26 out of 40) administered the maximum 450V shock; all participants gave at least 300V. Conclusion — ordinary people will obey authority figures even when ordered to cause serious harm to others, supporting the idea that the agentic state overrides personal morality.
Social Factors Affecting Obedience
Milgram identified four key social factors that affect how much a person obeys: agency, authority, culture and proximity.
Authority affects obedience because people learn from an early age to respect those in positions of power such as doctors, teachers and police officers. The more legitimate and credible the authority figure appears, the more obedience is shown. In Milgram’s research, when the experimenter’s authority was made less clear — for example, by replacing them with an ordinary person — obedience dropped considerably.
Culture shapes how much people are taught to value obedience to authority. Different societies place different emphasis on compliance with rules and hierarchies. Research replicating Milgram’s design in other countries has generally found high levels of obedience, suggesting this is a widespread human tendency, though exact rates vary across cultures.
Proximity to the victim reduces obedience. When the person being harmed is nearby or visible, the reality of what is happening becomes harder to ignore and participants are more likely to resist. When the victim is physically distant — for example in another room — it is easier to remain in the agentic state and continue obeying. Milgram found that obedience fell when the ‘learner’ was in the same room as the participant.
Dispositional Factors: Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality
Not everyone obeys to the same degree. Adorno argued that some people have a personality type that makes them particularly prone to obedience. He called this the Authoritarian Personality.
People with an authoritarian personality tend to show great respect for authority figures while being hostile towards those they see as inferior or different. They prefer clear rules and rigid categories. Adorno linked this personality type to a strict, punitive upbringing where children learned to obey without question and to fear and resent those with less power. As a result, they displace their anxieties downward onto weaker groups while showing submission upward to those in authority.
Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality is a dispositional explanation of obedience: individuals with this personality type show high deference to authority and hostility towards out-groups, linked to a harsh, rule-bound upbringing.
Evaluating Agency Theory and the Authoritarian Personality
Agency theory has a strength in that it fits with Milgram’s own experimental evidence. When variations reduced the authority of the experimenter or increased the participant’s proximity to the victim, obedience fell — exactly as the theory would predict. This gives the theory empirical support.
A weakness of agency theory is that it does not easily explain why some individuals resist obedience even in the same agentic-state conditions. It treats the shift to the agentic state as relatively automatic, but many people do manage to disobey even under strong authority pressure, which the theory cannot fully account for.
Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality theory is criticised for relying heavily on case studies and self-report questionnaires, which may lack reliability and validity. It also presents obedience as a stable personality trait, which underestimates the powerful situational factors that Milgram’s work revealed. The two explanations — dispositional (Adorno) and situational (Milgram) — are best seen as complementary rather than competing.
Understanding both theories also has real-world applications. Milgram’s situational account suggests that obedience can be reduced by weakening the conditions that trigger the agentic state — for example, by making authority less legitimate, bringing people closer to the consequences of their actions, or encouraging individuals to take personal responsibility. Adorno’s dispositional account suggests that how people are brought up and taught to relate to authority also matters in shaping whether they will resist destructive orders.