ABSTRACT
Milgram designed a series of obedience to authority experiments that provided evidence of arguably the most convincing phenomenon ever discovered by social psychology. The “agentic state,” the condition a person is in when one sees oneself as an agent for carrying out another person’s wishes, the opposite of autonomy, was Milgram’s main explanatory framework to account for obedience to destructive authority. The “engaged fellowship” account is another social-psychological explanation. Psychoanalysis has provided fairly feeble explanations for the 65% total obedience to authority, including extreme narcissism, psychopathy and sadistic and destructive character. However, because there is no scientific evidence that personality traits have a role in a naïve subject’s responses to the situation, the relationship between personality and obedience continues to be hypothetical. Rather, it is through personal moral beliefs and values that the disobedient naïve subject maintains a sense of agency, the bedrock of the narrative of self-identity, such that moral judgments and decisions are lodged in one’s relatively autonomous inner center of gravity, and not disrupted by the orders of imposing authority and other situational forces that are powerfully bearing down.
