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Obedience is when an individual or group performs an action or set of actions as prescribed by a percieved authority. Research into obedience, such as that of Stanley Milgram, started while the Nuremberg Trials into holocaust war crimes were going on and the excuse that the defendants were only following orders kept coming up. Psychological research was seemed necessary to validate this and to find out exactly why people obeyed and what exact factors were involved.
Two major studies have been done in this field:
Hofling's Hospital Experiment - The aim in this experiment was to see if people in a real life situation would obey the unreasonable orders of a percieved authority, in this case, a doctor. In this experiment, Hofling(1966) arranged with 22 hospitals to call up a nurse and assume the identity of a doctor. This would be a fictional name - Dr Smith - so the nurse would not know him. He would ask the nurse to give a certain patient a drug at a 20mg dosage. This dosage would double the maximum dosage, 10mg, stated on the bottle. He would give a plausible story such as being stuck in traffic and promise to sign the prescription slip when he came in. 21 out of the 22 nurses obeyed his orders. This showed that obedience to authority was not just a laboratory phenomena but one that could be reproduced in real life i.e. this study had ecological validity where some would argue Milgram´s did not(see information on Miligram). There are ethical issues with this experiment. While the drug was a placebo and the patient, a confederate, when all was revealed to the nurse, this would have caused significant distress especially as she would continue to work in the hospital and everyone would know her mistake. This also raises the ethical issue of informed consent as the nurse did not ask to participate in this experiment.
Bickman's 1974 Obedience Experiment - This investigation, like Hofling´s experiment, was done in the field and so has ecological validity. This experiment was especially interested in investigating the role of the perception of someone´s authority upon obedience. To this aim, Bickman´s investigators went out to city streets telling people to do such things as pick up a bag for someone or lend someone at a parking meter a dime. There were three conditions. In one, the investigator was dressed as a security guard. In another, as a milkman. In a third, with a sports coat and tie. Bickman found that participants were most likely to obey if the investigator was dressed as a guard than if dressed as a normal civilian or milkman. While this experiment was more ecologically valid than Milgram´s, it has to be noted that orders here were not as unreasonable.
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