The Lucifer Effect: Blind Obedience

In Chapter 12 of The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo describes the test in which a team of doctors and nurses tested obedience in their authority system. They did so by having an anonymous "physician" call each of the twenty-two nurses and tell her to give medication to the patient so that it would be in effect by the time he reached the hospital. The medication was 20 mg of Astrogen although on the bottle, it warned that 10+ mL was the max dosage. The results were terrifying: all but one of the nurses obediently complied. After further investigation, a survey revealed that 46% of nurses "reported that they could recall a time when they had in fact 'carried out a physician's order that you felt could have had harmful consequences to the patient.'"They did so because they felt less responsibility on themselves than on the physician if something went wrong. This is really problematic in hospitals which contain many life-or-death situations. As stated in the chapter, "Thousands of hospitalized patients die needlessly each year due to a variety of staff mistakes..." some which can be attributed to situations similar to the ones demonstrated in the experiment.