Toward a definition of authority

Obedience to authority is classically demonstrated in a more famous series of social psychology experiments performed by Stanley Milgram. He was a social psychology professor at Yale who was influenced by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal. Eichmann’s defense for the atrocities he committed was that he was “just following orders.”

According to obedience research, we may harm others under the forceful pressures of an authority figure (Milgram, 1974). How about if the inappropriate orders were delivered with less force? The increasing interdependence between nurses and physicians compelled Hofling and his colleagues to explore nurses’ reactions to a potentially harmful medical request made by the perceived authority figure, the doctor (Hofling, Brotzman, Dalrymple, Graves, & Pierce, 1966). In this situation,...

Behavior is a product of both the situation (e.g., cultural influences, social roles, and the presence of bystanders) and of the person (e.g., personality characteristics). Subfields of psychology tend to focus on one influence or behavior over others. Situationism is the view that our behavior and actions are determined by our immediate environment and surroundings. In contrast, dispositionism holds that our behavior is determined by internal factors (Heider, 1958).

Conformity is the change in a person’s behavior to go along with the group, even if that person does not agree with the group.

Nurses bear specific legal responsibilities under several federal statutes, including:

Correspondent inference theory, proposed by Jones and Davis in 1965, seeks to explain how individuals infer stable personality traits from observed behaviors. It suggests that people attribute actions to underlying dispositions rather than external circumstances, particularly when the behavior appears intentional and socially significant.Voluntary Behavior and Dispositional AttributionAccording to this theory, individuals are more likely to attribute behavior to personal traits when it appears...