Wednesday, May 18, 2016
The Lucifer Effect: Nurses
In chapter twelve, an experiment was performed with nurses and their patients. Twenty-two nurses received a phone call from a staff doctor. The doctor ordered these nurses to give the patients twenty milligrams of the drug "Astrogen", even though five milligrams was the norm, and ten was considered the maximum dose. When this scenario was explained to twelve nurses, ten insisted they would disobey the doctor's orders. However, during the real experiment, twenty-one of the twenty-two nurses listened to the doctor and were ready to give their patient twenty milligrams even though the bottle clearly stated against that. This experiment is a great example of how people respond to authority. I believe this relates to the strip search experiment. In both situations, people do things they know are not right just because a person possessing power told them to. What are your thoughts on this experiment?
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I agree that this experiment is a great example of how people respond to authority. The nurses are not aware of giving their power away, which makes it even more difficult to make a different choice. I also think that since the doctors have a better "title", the nurses think that the doctors are more experienced and smarter than them. Because of that they just do what they are told.
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ReplyDeleteYeah, this experiment is a good example of how we all answer to some authority. As humans we are designed to follow an authority figure we respect. You brought up the strip search in the fast food chain and that really shows how we must be careful who we give our respect to. And it was dangerous for the nurses to give their respect to the doctors that they had little knowledge about and should not have trusted.
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