A situational variable is often thought of as the catalyst for obedience, one of the most significant variables discovered in Milgrams research was the idea of uniform having a massive turning point on how participants followed the agentic state or the autonomous state. A single uniform made a great difference in the results and it was estimated that those with more of a serious authority experienced greater obedience rate. A simple example of this may be a teacher against a student, in this example people are most likely going to be obedient towards the teacher because they are older and will have more authority than students. Linking this idea of students and teachers, in 974 Milgram proposed the idea of the agency theory which argues that we are socialized and taught from an early age to follow obedience in order for society to stay intact and stable. From this idea Milgram may be stating that because teachers are older its in the students blood to automatically respect them and look up to them to keep society stable. This idea then ties in with uniform because from a young age we are taught to respect people in professional uniforms, for example policeman. Stanley Milgram decided to play on this thought and in one of his variations he decided that the experimenter should wear a white lab coat to make him appear more authoritative and have a respectable front but in order for Milgram to examine the efficacy and true strength of uniform he had to send the experimenter away and replace them with another participant who would be wearing normal clothes; this person was in fact the confederate (a
ctor). In this variation the participant decided to make things more interesting by increasing the voltage every time a mistake was made by the learner. The results revealed a lot about the power of uniform; the percentage of participants who administered the full 450 volts dropped from a staggering 65% to 20% this soon revealed that obedient individuals accept the power and status of authority figures to give them orders instead of a regular person in normal clothes. This also reveals that people are less likely to obey when the authority figure does not represent a legitimate source of authority.
Research supports this idea of uniform having more of an influence on a persons obedience levels. In 974, Bickman carried out a small experiment in New York. This experiment was based on picking up litter from the streets of New York. From his test it was discovered that only 9% would obey this task when he was dressed in civilian clothes, similarly only 4% would respect the task when dressed as a milkman, but 38% valued his request when he wore a security guards uniform. This was a clear sign that members of the public passing by had more trust in the security guard because of his authoritative nature in comparison to the milk man who just delivers milk for a living. This backs up my earlier point on how uniform is a powerful driving force that can have a massive impact on obedience levels. Not surprisingly, Bickman also discovered that even after asking the public to pick up litter in his security guard outfit and when walking away people still obeyed his command this displays the power of uniform.