Explain The Factors Which Might Contribute To Obedience?

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Explain the factors which might contribute to Obedience?
By Lauren Stevenson

Obedience: A form of Human behavior from social influence in which a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure.

Many Factors contribute on how obedient a person is willing to be and many psychologists have ran several studies on Obedience to test this: - Stanley Milgram’s (1963): Germans are different Hypothesis, Hofling et al (1966): Obedient nurses and Rank and Jacobson (1977): Not so obedient nurses. Some factors which might contribute to the obedience levels of a person are: situational factors, individual factors and the psychological processes.

In Milgram’s experiment: German’s are Different Hypothesis, 40 white male candidates
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Done 11 years apart we can see how the different factors affect the outcome of each experiment. In 1966 Hofling et al ran the experiment; the obedient nurse, where 22 real night shift unknowingly underwent an obedience experiment. The nurses were working a night shift and were phoned individually by ‘doctor smith’ and stated to give ‘Mr. Jones’ 20 mg of Astrotren (this wasn’t a known drug to the nursing staff at this point the dose was fatal) 95% of these nurses went to give the fatal injection. Of course it must be taken into consideration the Hofling’s experiments was ran in the 60’s where almost all nursing staff would be female meaning there was a lot of gender roles to maintain as males where mainly male they would obey not only because of their role at work but because of their role in general another reason they would of obeyed might have been down to confidence as they never knew the drug they were working with as well as the agentic shift in thinking “ the doctor had told me to they know best, and if not they are to blame.” . However in 1977 when Rank and Jacobson ran their not so obedient nurse experiment the results were drastically different. Similar yet different the experiment again ran with 18 real nurses unaware of the experiment this time when the phone call was made the doctor who was telling them to give their fatal dose was known to the staff,