human behavior

Obedience, in human behavior, is the quality of being obedient, which describes the act of carrying out commands, or being actuated. Obedience differs from compliance, which is behavior influenced by peers, and from conformity, which is behavior intended to match that of the majority.

Humans have been shown to be surprisingly obedient in the presence of perceived legitimate authority figures, as demonstrated by the Milgram experiment in the 1960s, which was carried out by Stanley Milgram to discover how the Nazis managed to get ordinary people to take part in the mass murders of the Holocaust. The experiment showed that obedience to authority was the norm, not the exception. A similar conclusion was reached in the Stanford prison experiment.

Unlike the Milgram experiment, which studied the obedience of individuals, the 1971 Stanford prison experiment studied the behavior of people in groups, and in particular the willingness of people to obey orders and adopt abusive roles in a situation where they were placed in the position of being submissive or dominant by a higher authority. In the experiment, a group of volunteers was divided into two groups and placed in a "prison," with one group in the position of playing prison guards, and other group in the position of "prisoners."

In this case, the experimenters acted as authority figures at the start of the experiment, but then delegated responsibility to the "guards," who enthusiastically followed the experimenters' instructions, and in turn assumed the roles of abusive authority figures, eventually going far beyond the experimenters' original instruction in their efforts to dominate and brutalize the "prisoners." At the same time, the prisoners adopted a submissive role with regard to their tormentors, even though they knew that they were in an experiment, and that their "captors" were other volunteers, with no actual authority other than that being role-played in the experiment.

The Stanford experiment demonstrated not only obedience (of the "guards" to the experimenters, and the "prisoners" to both the guards and experimenters), but also high levels of compliance and conformity.

The Hofling hospital experiment

Both the Milgram and Stanford experiments were conducted in experimental circumstances. In 1966, psychiatrist Charles K. Hofling published the results of a field experiment on obedience in the nurse-physician relationship in its natural hospital setting. Nurses, unaware they were taking part in an experiment, were ordered by unknown doctors to administer dangerous doses of a (fictional) drug to their patients. Although several hospital rules disallowed administering the drug under the circumstances, 21 out of the 22 nurses would have given the patient an overdose of medicine.

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