Obedience Vs Conformity

There are some individuals, such as Hitler or Mussolini, who have used their authority to manipulate people into doing behaviour they would not normally do. Through a combination of legitimising their authority through fear, and social pressure, they persuaded normal people into obeying them and committing horrific acts. Obedience is the process by which an individual complies with the instruction given by an authoritative figure. It is different to conformity which is when an individual changes their behaviour to fit in with a group. In obedience an instruction must be given to follow whereas in conformity there is no instructions given and individual chooses to change due to group pressure.

It is important to conduct research into obedience
In the early 1960s (1961 onwards), He conducted an experiment looking at the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Conducted just after WWII, Milgram wanted to look at the justification for the people involved in the acts of genoside. Where they just following orders and if so why? The experiments started just after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram questioned "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1974). His aim was to get an answer from these
It suggested that in social situations people have to states of behaviour, the autonomous state and the agentic state. The autonomous state is when people direct their own actions and therefore take full responsibility for them whereas in the agentic state they allow someone else to direct their actions and then pass the responsibility to that person. In other words, they act as an agent for someone else's actions and therefore they do not feel like they have done wrong and so do not take responsibility. Milgram also suggested that there were two factors which had to be there for the agentic state to happen. The person giving the orders must be perceived as legitimate authority, and therefore they have the right to direct the other persons behaviour, and the person acting as the agent must believe that the authority will take the responsibility for the consequences of the actions. In Milgrams study, people who were told the experimenter would take responsibility went to much higher volts than those who were reminded that it was all their responsibility, supporting the Agency