When a person enters a hierarchy and accepts an authority as legitimate, they shift into an 'agentic state' in which they see themselves as an instrument carrying out another's wishes rather than as an actor with their own purposes. In this state the person no longer feels responsible for their actions, since responsibility is transferred upward to the one giving orders.
In the baseline condition, roughly two-thirds of ordinary subjects continued administering what they believed were increasingly dangerous electric shocks to a protesting victim, all the way to the maximum, simply because an experimenter instructed them to proceed. Their behavior was driven not by cruelty or abnormal aggression but by the situation of being under a legitimate authority's direction.
Obedience rises as the victim becomes more remote and falls as the victim becomes more present: subjects obeyed most when the victim was unseen and unheard, less when audible, less still when visible, and least when they had to physically press the victim's hand onto a shock plate. Closeness to the suffering makes it harder to deny or ignore, strengthening the counter-forces to obedience.
The authority's perceived legitimacy, not its raw power, drives obedience: when the same experiment was moved from a prestigious university to a run-down commercial office, obedience dropped though it did not collapse. The institutional backdrop lends credibility to the authority's claims and the worthiness of the task.
When two confederate 'co-teachers' refused to continue and withdrew, the real subject's obedience dropped dramatically, with most subjects then also defying the experimenter. The visible example of peers rebelling supplies a model for defiance and shatters the sense that compliance is the only available response.
Obedient subjects were not comfortable; they showed intense strain through trembling, sweating, and nervous laughter, revealing an internal conflict between conscience and command. They managed this strain through psychological buffers such as focusing narrowly on technical task performance, which let them continue without confronting the full meaning of what they were doing.