What is the purpose of encapsulation in OOP?

Encapsulation in Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) serves the purpose of hiding the internal state of an object. This is achieved by restricting direct access to some of the object's components and only allowing interaction through publicly exposed methods. By doing this, encapsulation helps protect the integrity of the data within the object, ensuring that it can only be modified in controlled ways. This means that the internal representation of the object can be changed without affecting the code that uses it, as long as the public interface remains the same. Encapsulation promotes better organization, reduces code complexity, and enhances maintainability by providing a clear separation between an object's interface and its implementation details.

The other choices do not accurately capture the essence of encapsulation: unrestricted access to class members contradicts the principle of encapsulation, multiple inheritance relates to class hierarchies rather than data hiding, and method overloads pertain to function signatures rather than the concept of encapsulation.