Charles K. Hofling

Charles K. Hofling, a psychiatrist, was the author of a field experiment that measured the concept of obedience in doctor/nurse relationships in 1966.

In the experiment nurses (unaware they were in an experiment) were given orders, by doctors that they didn't know, to administer "fatal" doses of a fictional drug to patients. In this experiment 21 out of 22 nurses obeyed the doctors' order to administer these drugs even though they intellectually knew that the dosage was wrong. This experiment was focused on obedience to authority figures and, compounding on the work of Stanley Milgram in 1963, shows that many individuals will blindly obey authority figures even though they intellectually know they may be harming another person.