A failure to predict: The losses of excluding predictive measures in obedience to authority research

Abstract

Several early obedience to authority studies also included prediction surveys to consider how contextual opinions of obedience could vary by population and context. These predictions were always inaccurate, leading to a dissonance between predicted behavior and research results that shed light on external validity in obedience studies and allowed for interdisciplinary commentary. As predictive and self-report measures have publications, these possibilities have been limited. By reintroducing predictive and self-report measures to obedience domain methodology, the discipline can expand to these implications without significant changes to the methods of behavioral observations.