Hofling

• Procedure


  Nurses working in both public and private hospitals were telephoned by either an unknown doctor or an unknown nurse and asked to give a dangerous dose of an unfamiliar drug, Astroten, to a patient. This broke hospital rules because nurses need to gain signed authorisation from a known doctor before giving any drug.
• Findings


  21 out of 22 nurses obeyed the order to administer the dangerous dose of the drug given by the unknown doctor. No nurses obeyed the order from the unknown nurse.
• Conclusions


  People show very strong levels of obedience, even in everyday settings with high mundane realism. Obedience is only likely to an authority figure, as participants in this experiment only obeyed a doctor and not a nurse.
• Strength

  • High external validity due to its high mundane realism - procedure seems like real life - nurses were in their own work environment - easy to generalise the findings to an everyday real life situation.
• Strength

  • High control over variables meaning the study is high in reliability - easily replicated and consistently produce the same findings - standardised script for the phone calls and drug administered - study can be easily replicated and is therefore reliable.