subordinate individuals have to obey orders from their superiors to maintain social harmony.  He outlines two ‘states’ that enable us to operate on our own and with others.

people behave independently and take greater responsibility for their actions.

we are acting on the behalf of the authority figure. This can lead to destructive obedience or harming others as we shift responsibility for our actions to the authority figure.

there is a conflict between our sense of right and wrong and what we are being ordered to do; despite this moral strain, Milgram talks of ‘binding factors’ that keep people in the agentic state

100% of participants would administer shocks up to 300V to a confederate who made mistakes on a word learning task. 65% would go to 450V.  This is important because it supports the idea that people are highly likely to obey orders from legitimate authority figures, despite high levels of moral strain.

Perry (2013) cites film footage from the Yale archive that shows participants questioning the authenticity of the shocks. She claims that if their data is discounted, then in fact 66% of participants are disobedient and this new analysis refutes agency theory.

89% of nurses failed to obey orders from a doctor who asked them to administer an overdose of Valium.

This shows that despite, the doctors being an obvious source of authority…

the vast majority of the sample remained autonomous and the qualitative data demonstrated that the nurses did consider themselves responsible for their actions.

Tarnow (2000) applied agency in an article about  commercial airline pilots. He says first officers often make the agentic shift, failing to monitor and challenge errors made by the captain due to his or her legitimate authority. He believes that 20% of plane crashes could be prevented if first officers could be trained to remain autonomous and has redesigned training protocols for cockpit behaviour to make first officers more self-aware of the dangers of agentic shift.