When a person shifts from the autonomous state to the agentic state (the agentic shift) they give up their responsibility and follow orders without considering the consequences or whether the request is appropriate. This diffusion of responsibility means that the person no longer monitors their own behaviour. Milgram believed that his participants were ‘just following orders’ and did not consider themselves responsible; his participants even sighed with relief when the experimenter said “I am responsible for what happens here.”

Legitimate Authority

Another factor is that the participants obeyed because they believed that the experimenter had 'Legitimate Authority'. That means they believed that the experimenter had power and they were obliged to do what he said.

Milgram (1974) – “People in the agentic state behave without thinking, irrespective of the nature of the order and without conscience, as long as the order comes from a legitimate authority. It may be the result of socialisation; from a very early age people are told what to do by their parents and carers”.

This means that doing what we are told becomes a habit because we constantly told what to do (or not do) by adult authority figures when we are children.

Evaluation of Milgram's Agency Theory

Support for the Legitimate Authority factor comes from Bickman’s (1974) study investigating the effect of uniforms on obedience. A stooge wearing a guard’s uniform asked pedestrians to either pick up a piece of paper or give a dime to a stranger. The obedience rate was 80%. When civilian clothes were worn, the obedience rate was only 40%.


A similar study by Bushman (1984) found that a stooge wearing a firefighter’s costume was obeyed more often than one wearing civilian clothes.

Another strength of Agency theory is that it is a plausible explanation of why people obey authority figures to the extent that atrocities are committed. For example, soldiers in the My Lai Massacre obeyed orders to kill between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians in a Vietnamese village. It also explains why US Army soldiers tortured Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib in 2003 and 2004 (Fiske et al. 2004).

Agency theory also explains why some people do not obey – they have remained in the autonomous state where they are able to make informed decisions about how to behave

A weakness of agency theory, however, is that there is little evidence that an 'agentic shift' actually takes place and it is not clear how this could be measured. Also, the theory does not make it clear what processes are involved in the 'agentic shift'.

Useful teaching resource: Classic Studies in Psychology DVD