Kumar Das (On Milgram)

According to Milgram, the subjects, through signing the
contract to become a part of the experiment, entered into an
agentic state [4]. The agentic state of a person in a society is influenced by the milieu or lattice of our social structure which is often based upon a hierarchical form. This
hierarchical form of the society is internalized by the
individuals living in that society throughout their raising
since birth – going first through family and then through
school and other institutional modulators. These past
antecedent modulations of a subject’s mental constitution,
influenced and guided by various situational determinants,
often enforces and encourages them to immerse into a typical
agentic state casting off their individual independence of
actions and behaviours.

In the agentic state created by this experiment, the
experimenter claimed an authoritative power to which
obedience was usually automatic and socially accredited.
Signing the contract and pledging to help the experimenter
for the sake of science further bound the subjects to that state where they lost the liberty to act upon their own, and where breaking off from the allegiance was considered socially disapproved and supposed to confer shame and discredit upon the subjects. Within this ambience, even if the subjects felt their own intentions and mental tendencies were going against the proceedings of the experiment, yet they found it difficult to get them out of the situation, and continued to carry out the experimenter's commands. Disobedience only emerged when the force of this personal strain, arising out of the conflict between the individual's own intentions or mental tendencies and the experiment's demands, outweighed the binding factors that had been keeping them submerged into that agentic state.

Other explanations for the outcome of the experiment
include conformity with the request of the experimenter, and
yielding to the 'foot in the door technique' [7-8]. When the
subjects were complying with the small requests of the
experimenter to give low doses of shocks, at the same instant, they were also synchronically giving way to conforming and considering themselves as the type of persons behaving that way. So, when they reached to the positions demanding of delivering larger voltage shocks, they felt less cognitive dissonance as they had been already accustomed to it. However, Milgram excluded conformity as a possible
reason for the result as mutually countervailing demands, both from the experimenter and from the learner, to conform in favour of them in the experiment actually nullified or zeroed its effect[4]. But it depended also on the closeness of the persons in the experiment. In experiment 5, the subject and the experimenter were in the same room whereas the learner was in the other room; but in experiments, where the subject and the learner were in the same room, the obedience to the experimenter fell.

Krishanu Kumar Das