The Agentic Personality

Each of the explanations I will discuss focuses on a different aspect of human personality, and I will label them accordingly. There is, first, Milgram’s own explanation. He describes the mentality of compliant subjects as an agentic state - a state in which we view ourselves as mere agents or instruments of the man giving the orders.

The problem with this explanation is that it merely relabels the question rather than answering it. Why do we turn off our consciences and “go agentic” when an authority figure starts giving us orders? Saying “Because we enter an agentic state” is no answer; it’s reminiscent of Moliere’s phy­sician, who explains that morphine makes us sleepy because it possesses a “dormative virtue.”

Admittedly, Milgram’s subjects usually offered the agentic explanation in their debriefing. But as we all know, “I was just following orders” is often an insincere rationalization. Remember that no one who heard the Milgram experiment described stated that they would comply, and that is another way of saying that none of them accept “just following orders” as a valid reason for complying. Even if the subjects offered the agentic explanation sincerely, we should never accept it at face value, because we human beings are not very gifted at explaining our own behavior.