Chapter 5

Authority

Directed Deference

Follow an expert.

—Virgil

Not long ago, a South Korean journalist asked me, “Why is behavioral science so hot now?” There are several reasons, but one involves the operation of behavioral-science research divisions in government, business, legal, medical, educational, and nonprofit organizations around the globe. At last count, about six hundred such research units had taken root in less than ten years—each dedicated to testing how behavioral-science principles could be used to solve various real-world problems. The first of these, the British government’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), has been particularly productive.

For instance, to examine how to increase giving to deserving causes, especially among individuals whose financial resources allowed for substantial contributions, BIT researchers compared the success of techniques to motivate investment bankers to donate a full day’s salary to charity. At the London offices of a large international bank, bankers received a request to provide such a donation in support of the bank’s fundraising campaign for a pair of charities (Help a Capital Child and Meningitis Research UK). One set of bankers, in the control group, got the request in a standard letter asking for the financial commitment; it produced 5 percent compliance. A second set got a visit from an admired celebrity who endorsed the program; this liking-based tactic bumped up compliance to 7 percent. A third sample encountered a reciprocity-based appeal; upon entering the building, they were approached by a volunteer who first gave each a packet of sweets and then asked them to participate in the program, which boosted compliance to 11 percent. A fourth group received an appeal that incorporated the principle of authority in the form of a letter from their CEO extolling the importance of the program to the bank as well as the value of the selected charities to society; it generated 12 percent compliance. A final sample got a blend of the reciprocity and authority influence principles—the gift of sweets from a volunteer plus the CEO’s personalized letter. Compliance soared to 17 percent.

It’s evident that the CEO’s letter, both singly and together with another principle of influence, had significant effects on the decision to donate. That was so because the source of the letter possessed two kinds of authority in recipients’ minds. First, he was in authority—a boss who could affect recipients’ outcomes within the organization and who, because his letter was personalized to them, would know whether they complied with his request. In addition, he was an authority on the topic, who had displayed his knowledge of the value of the campaign to the bank as well as the inherent worth of the specified charities. When a requester holds that combination of authority traits, we can expect compliance to be notable. Indeed, it’s a combination that explains one of the most astounding patterns of responding in the history of behavioral science.1

Suppose while leafing through your local newspaper, you notice an ad for volunteers to take part in a “study of memory” being done in the psychology department of a nearby university. Suppose further that finding the idea of such an experiment intriguing, you contact the director of the study, Professor Stanley Milgram, and make arrangements to participate in an hour-long session. When you arrive at the laboratory suite, you meet two men. One is the researcher in charge of the experiment, clearly evidenced by the gray lab coat he wears and the clipboard he carries. The other is a volunteer like yourself who seems quite average in all respects.

After initial greetings and pleasantries are exchanged, the researcher begins to explain the procedures to be followed. He says the experiment is a study of how punishment affects learning and memory. Therefore, one participant will have the task of learning pairs of words in a long list until each pair can be recalled perfectly; this person is to be called the Learner. The other participant’s job will be to test the Learner’s memory and to deliver increasingly strong electric shocks for every mistake; this person will be designated the Teacher.

Naturally, you get a bit nervous at this news. Your apprehension increases when, after drawing lots with your partner, you find that you are assigned the Learner role. You hadn’t expected the possibility of pain as part of the study, so you briefly consider leaving. But, no, you think, there’s plenty of time for that if need be, and, besides, how strong a shock could it be?

After you have had a chance to study the list of word pairs, the researcher straps you into a chair and, with the Teacher looking on, attaches electrodes to your arm. More worried now about the effect of the shock, you inquire into its severity. The researcher’s response is hardly comforting. He says, although the shocks can be extremely painful, they will cause you “no permanent tissue damage.” With that, the researcher and Teacher leave you alone and go to the next room where the Teacher asks you the test questions through an intercom system and delivers electric punishment for every wrong response.

As the test proceeds, you quickly recognize the pattern the Teacher follows: he asks the question and waits for your answer over the intercom. Whenever you err, he announces the voltage of the shock you are about to receive and pulls a lever to deliver the punishment. The most troubling thing is the shock increases by 15 volts with each error you make.

The first part of the test progresses smoothly. The shocks are annoying but tolerable. Later on, though, as you make more mistakes and the shock voltages climb, the punishment begins to hurt enough to disrupt your concentration, which leads to more errors and ever more disruptive shocks. At the 75-, 90-, and 105-volt levels, the pain makes you grunt audibly. At 120 volts, you exclaim into the intercom that the shocks are really starting to hurt. You take one more punishment with a groan and decide that you can’t take much more pain. After the Teacher delivers the 150-volt shock, you shout back into the intercom, “That’s all. Get me out of here. Get me out of here, please. Let me out.”

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Figure 5.1: The Milgram study

The photo shows the Learner (“victim”) being strapped into a chair and fitted with electrodes by the lab-coated experimenter and the true subject, who would become his Teacher.

Credit: Stanley Milgram, 1968; distributed by the Pennsylvania State University Media Sales

Instead of the assurance you expect from the Teacher, that he and the researcher are coming to release you, he merely gives you the next test question to answer. Surprised and confused you mumble the first answer to come into your head. It’s wrong, of course, and the Teacher delivers a 165-volt shock. You scream at the Teacher to stop, to let you out. He responds only with the next test question—and with the next slashing shock—when your frenzied answer is incorrect. You can’t hold down the panic any longer, the shocks are so strong now they make you writhe and shriek. You kick the wall, demand to be released, and beg the Teacher to help you. However, the test questions continue as before and so do the dreaded shocks—in searing jolts of 195, 210, 225, 240, 255, 270, 285, and 300 volts. You realize that you can’t possibly answer the questions correctly now, so you shout to the Teacher you won’t answer his questions anymore. Nothing changes; the Teacher interprets your failure to respond as an incorrect response and sends another bolt. The ordeal continues in this way until, finally, the power of the shocks stuns you into near-paralysis. You can no longer cry out, no longer struggle. You can only feel each terrible electric bite. Perhaps, you think, this total inactivity will cause the Teacher to stop. There can be no reason to continue this experiment, but he proceeds relentlessly, calling out the test questions, announcing the horrid shock levels (above 400 volts now), and pulling the levers. What must this man be like, you wonder in confusion. Why doesn’t he help me? Why won’t he stop?

The Power of Authority Pressure

For most of us, the previous scenario reads like a bad dream. To recognize how nightmarish it is, we should understand, in most respects, it is real. There was such an experiment—actually, a whole series—run by a psychology professor named Milgram in which participants in the Teacher role delivered continued, intense, and dangerous levels of shock to a kicking, screeching, pleading Learner. Only one major aspect of the experiment was not genuine. No real shock was delivered; the Learner, who repeatedly cried out in agony for mercy and release, was not a true subject but an actor who only pretended to be shocked. The actual purpose of Milgram’s study, then, had nothing to do with the effects of punishment on learning and memory. Rather, it involved an entirely different question: When ordered by an authority figure, how much suffering will ordinary people be willing to inflict on an entirely innocent other person?

The answer is unsettling. Under circumstances mirroring precisely the features of the “bad dream,” the typical Teacher was willing to deliver as much pain as was available to give. Rather than yield to the pleas of the victim, about two-thirds of the subjects in Milgram’s experiment pulled every one of the thirty shock switches in front of them and continued to engage the last switch (450 volts) until the researcher ended the experiment. More unsettling still, almost none of the forty subjects in this study quit his job as Teacher when the victim first began to demand his release, nor later when he began to beg for it, nor even later when his reaction to each shock had become, in Milgram’s words, “definitely an agonized scream.”

These results surprised everyone associated with the project, Milgram included. In fact, before the study began, he asked groups of colleagues, graduate students, and psychology majors at Yale University (where the experiment was performed) to read a copy of the experimental procedures and estimate how many subjects would go all the way to the last (450-volt) shock. Invariably, the answers fell in the 1–2 percent range. A separate group of thirty-nine psychiatrists predicted that only about one person in a thousand would be willing to continue to the end. No one, then, was prepared for the behavior pattern the experiment actually produced.

How can we explain that disturbing pattern? Perhaps, as some have argued, it has to do with the fact that the subjects were all males, who are known as a group for their aggressive tendencies, or that the subjects didn’t recognize the potential harm that such high shock voltages could cause or that the subjects were a freakish collection of moral cretins who enjoyed the chance to inflict misery. There is good evidence against each possibility. First, a later experiment showed subjects’ sex was irrelevant to their willingness to give all the shocks to the victim; female Teachers were just as likely to do so as were the males in Milgram’s initial study.

Another experiment investigated the explanation that subjects weren’t aware of the potential physical danger to the victim. In this experiment, the victim was instructed to announce that he had a heart condition and declare his heart was being affected by the shock: “That’s all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart’s starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out.” The results were the same; 65 percent carried out their duties faithfully through to the maximum shock.

Finally, the explanation that Milgram’s subjects were a sadistic bunch not at all representative of average citizens has proved unsatisfactory as well. The people who answered Milgram’s newspaper ad to participate in his “memory” experiment represented a standard cross section of ages, occupations, and educational levels within our society. What’s more, later on, a battery of personality scales showed these people to be quite normal psychologically, with not a hint of psychosis as a group. They were, in fact, just like you and me; or, as Milgram likes to term it, they are you and me. If he is right that his studies implicate us in their grisly findings, the unanswered question becomes an uncomfortably personal one, “What could make us do such things?”

Milgram was sure he knew the answer. It has to do, he said, with a deep-seated sense of duty to authority. According to Milgram, the real culprit in the experiments was subjects’ inability to defy the wishes of the boss, the lab-coated researcher who urged and, if necessary, directed the subjects to perform their duties, despite the emotional and physical mayhem they were causing.

The evidence supporting Milgram’s obedience-to-authority explanation is strong. First, it is clear that without the researcher’s directives to continue, subjects would have ended the experiment quickly. They hated what they were doing and agonized over their victim’s anguish. They implored the researcher to let them stop. When he refused, they went on, but in the process they trembled, they perspired, they shook, they stammered protests and additional pleas for the victim’s release. Their fingernails dug into their flesh; they bit their lips until they bled; they held their heads in their hands; some fell into fits of uncontrollable nervous laughter. An outside observer to Milgram’s initial experiment described one subject.

I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: “Oh, God, let’s stop it.” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and obeyed to the end.

In addition to these observations, Milgram has provided even more convincing evidence for the obedience-to-authority interpretation of his subjects’ behavior. In a later experiment, he had the researcher and the victim switch scripts so that the researcher told the Teacher to stop delivering shocks to the victim, while the victim insisted bravely that the Teacher continue. The result couldn’t have been clearer; 100 percent of the subjects refused to give one additional shock when it was merely the fellow subject who demanded it. The identical finding appeared in another version in which the researcher and fellow subject switched roles so that it was the researcher who was strapped into the chair and the fellow subject who ordered the Teacher to continue—over the protests of the researcher. Again, not one subject touched another shock lever.

The extreme degree to which subjects in Milgram’s studies obeyed the commands of authority was documented in one more variation of the basic experiments. In this case, the Teacher faced two researchers who issued contradictory instructions; one ordered the Teacher to terminate the shocks when the victim cried out for release, while the other maintained that the experiment should go on. These conflicting directives reliably produced what may have been the project’s only humor: in tragicomic befuddlement and with eyes darting from one researcher to another, subjects would beseech the pair to agree on a single command to follow: “Wait, wait. Which is it going to be? One says stop, one says go. . . . Which is it!?” When the researchers remained at loggerheads, the subjects tried frantically to determine the bigger boss. Failing this route to obedience with “the” authority, every subject followed his better instincts and ended the shocks. As in the other experimental variations, such a result would hardly be expected had subjects’ motivations involved some form of sadism or neurotic aggressiveness.

To Milgram’s mind, evidence of a chilling phenomenon emerged repeatedly from his accumulated data. “It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study.” There are sobering implications of this finding for those concerned about the ability of another form of authority—government—to extract frightening levels of obedience from ordinary citizens. Furthermore, the finding tells us something about the sheer strength of authority pressures in controlling our behavior. After witnessing Milgram’s subjects squirming and sweating and suffering at their task, could anyone doubt the power of the force that held them there?

For those whose doubts remain, the story of S. Brian Willson might prove instructive. On September 1, 1987, to protest US shipments of military equipment to Nicaragua, Mr. Willson and two other men stretched their bodies across the railroad tracks leading out of the Naval Weapons Station in Concord, California. The protesters were confident their act would halt the scheduled train’s progress that day, as they had notified navy and railroad officials of their intent three days before. But the civilian crew, which had been given orders not to stop, never slowed the train, despite being able to see the protesters six hundred feet ahead. Although two of the men managed to scramble out of harm’s way, Mr. Willson was not quick enough to avoid being struck and having both legs severed below the knee. Because navy medical corpsmen at the scene refused to treat him or allow him to be taken to the hospital in their ambulance, onlookers—including Mr. Willson’s wife and son—were left to try to staunch the flow of blood for forty-five minutes until a private ambulance arrived.

Amazingly, Mr. Willson, who served four years in Vietnam, did not blame either the crewmen or the corpsmen for his misfortune; he pointed his finger, instead, at a system that constrained their actions through the pressure to obey. “They were just doing what I did in ’Nam. They were following orders that are part of an insane policy. They’re the fall guys.” Although the crew members shared Mr. Willson’s assessment of them as victims, they did not share his magnanimity. In what is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the incident, the train crew filed a legal suit against him, requesting punitive damages for the “humiliation, mental anguish, and physical stress” they suffered because he hadn’t allowed them to carry out their orders without cutting off his legs. To the credit of the US judicial system, the suit was swiftly dismissed.2

The Allures and Dangers of Blind Obedience

Whenever we are faced with a potent motivator of human action, it is natural to expect that good reasons exist for the motivation. In the case of obedience to authority, even a brief consideration of human social organization offers justification aplenty. A multilayered and widely accepted system of authority confers an immense advantage upon a society. It allows the development of sophisticated structures for production of resources, trade, defense, expansion, and social control that would otherwise be impossible. At the opposite end, the alternative is anarchy, a state hardly known for its beneficial effects on cultural groups and one that social philosopher Thomas Hobbes assures us would render life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Consequently, we are trained from birth to believe that obedience to proper authority is right and disobedience is wrong. The message fills the parental lessons, schoolhouse rhymes, stories, and songs of our childhood and is carried forward in the legal, military, and political systems we encounter as adults. Notions of submission and loyalty to legitimate rule are accorded much value in each.

Religious instruction contributes as well. The first book of the Bible describes how failure to obey the ultimate authority resulted in the loss of paradise for Adam, Eve, and the rest of the human race. Should that particular metaphor prove too subtle, just a bit further into the Old Testament, we can read—in what might be the closest biblical representation of the Milgram experiment—the respectful account of Abraham’s willingness to plunge a dagger through the heart of his young son because God, without any explanation, ordered it. We learn in this story that the correctness of an action is to be judged not by such considerations as apparent senselessness, harmfulness, injustice, or traditional moral standards but by the mere command of a higher authority. Abraham’s tormented ordeal was a test of obedience, and he—like Milgram’s subjects, who perhaps had learned an early lesson from him—passed.

Stories such as those of Abraham and Milgram’s subjects can tell us a great deal about obedience’s power and value in our culture. In another sense, however, the stories may be misleading. We rarely agonize to such a degree over the pros and cons of authority demands. In fact, our obedience frequently takes place in a click, run fashion with little or no conscious deliberation. Information from a recognized authority can provide us a valuable shortcut for deciding how to act in a situation.

After all, as Milgram suggested, conforming to the dictates of authority figures has always had genuine practical advantages for us. From the start, these people (parents, teachers) knew more than we did, and we found taking their advice beneficial—partly because of their greater wisdom and partly because they controlled our rewards and punishments. As adults, the same benefits persist for the same reasons, though the authority figures are now employers, judges, and government leaders. Because their positions speak of greater access to information and power, it makes sense to comply with the wishes of properly constituted authorities. It makes so much sense that we often do so when it makes no sense at all.

This paradox is, of course, the same one that attends all major levers of influence. In this instance, once we realize that obedience to authority is mostly rewarding, it is easy to allow ourselves the convenience of automatic obedience. The simultaneous blessing and curse of such blind obedience is its mechanical character. We don’t have to think, therefore we don’t. Although such mindless obedience leads us to appropriate action most of the time, there will be conspicuous exceptions because we are reacting, not thinking.

Let’s take an example from one facet of our lives in which authority pressures are visible and strong: medicine. Health is enormously important to us. Thus, physicians, who possess great knowledge and influence in this vital area, hold the position of respected authorities. In addition, the medical establishment has a clearly terraced power-and-prestige structure. The various kinds of health workers well understand the level of their jobs in this structure, and they well understand, too, that MDs sit at the top. No one may overrule a doctor’s judgment in a case, except, perhaps, another doctor of higher rank. Consequently, a long-established tradition of automatic obedience to doctors’ orders has developed among healthcare staffs.

The worrisome possibility arises that when a physician makes a clear error, no one lower in the hierarchy will think to question it—precisely because once a legitimate authority has given an order, subordinates stop thinking in the situation and start reacting. Mix this kind of click, run response into a complex hospital environment and mistakes are inevitable. Indeed, according to the Institute of Medicine, which advises the US Congress on health policy, hospitalized patients can expect to experience at least one medication error per day. Other statistics are equally frightening: Annual deaths in the United States from medical errors exceed those of all accidents, and, worldwide, 40 percent of primary- and outpatient-care patients are harmed by medical errors each year.

Errors in the medicine patients receive can occur for a variety of reasons. However, in their book Medication Errors: Causes and Prevention, Temple University professors of pharmacy Michael Cohen and Neil Davis attribute much of the problem to the mindless deference given to the “boss” of a patient’s case: the attending physician. According to Cohen, “In case after case, patients, nurses, pharmacists, and other physicians do not question the prescription.” Take, for example, the classic case of the “rectal earache” reported by Cohen and Davis in an interview. A physician ordered ear drops to be administered to the right ear of a patient suffering pain and infection there. Instead of writing out completely the location “Right ear” on the prescription, the doctor abbreviated it so that the instructions read “place in R ear.” Upon receiving the prescription, the duty nurse promptly put the required number of ear drops into the patient’s anus.

Obviously, rectal treatment of an earache made no sense, but neither the nurse nor the patient questioned it. The important lesson of this story is that in many situations in which a legitimate authority has spoken, what would otherwise make sense is irrelevant. In these instances, we don’t consider the situation as a whole but attend and respond to only one aspect of it.3

READER’S REPORT 5.1

From a Texas-based university professor

I grew up in an Italian ghetto in Warren, Pennsylvania. I occasionally return home to visit family and the like. As in most places these days, most of the small Italian specialty stores are gone, having been replaced by larger supermarkets. My mother sent me supermarket shopping during a visit for a load of canned tomatoes, and I noticed that nearly all the cans of Furmano Italian diced tomatoes were sold out. Searching a bit on the shelf immediately beneath the almost empty shelf, I found a full shelf (loaded, even!) of Furman brand diced tomatoes. Looking closely at the labels, I realized that Furmano is Furman. The company had just added an “o” to its name when distributing some of its products. I guess it must be because, when selling Italian-style foods, you’re perceived as more of an authority if your name ends in a vowel.

Author’s note: The man who wrote this report also commented that the added letter o was doing double duty as an influence trigger in that store. The o not only lent authority to the manufacturer, in an “Italian ghetto,” but also engaged the liking principle by making the company appear similar to its customers.

Whenever our behaviors are governed in such an unthinking manner, we can be confident there will be compliance professionals trying to take advantage. Returning to the field of medicine, we can see that advertisers have frequently commissioned the respect accorded doctors in our culture by hiring actors to play the roles of doctors speaking on behalf of a product. My favorite example is a TV commercial for Vicks Formula 44 cough medicine featuring the actor Chris Robinson, who had a key role as Dr. Rick Webber in the popular daytime TV drama General Hospital during the 1980s. The commercial, which began with the line “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” and then offered Robinson’s advice to a young mother regarding the benefits of Vicks Formula 44, was very successful, lifting sales substantially.

Why should the ad prove so effective? Why on earth would we take the actor Chris Robinson’s word for the health benefits of a cough suppressant? Because—as the advertising agency that hired him knew—he was associated in the minds of viewers with Dr. Rick Webber, the role he had long played in a highly rated TV series. Objectively, it doesn’t make sense to be swayed by the comments of a man we know to be just an actor who played a doctor; but, practically, because of an unthinking response to felt authority, that man moved the cough syrup.

As a testament to the effectiveness of the ad, in 1986, when Chris Robinson was imprisoned for tax evasion, rather than end its run, the Vicks brand simply recast the ad with another famous daytime TV actor (Peter Bergman), who played a physician on the All My Children series. Except for the switch of TV doctors, the ad was a near duplicate of the earlier version. It’s notable that, despite his criminal conviction, Chris Robinson was allowed to continue his role on General Hospital under a prison work-release program. How can we account for the grace he was afforded that would have been denied almost any other actor serving a prison sentence? Perhaps it was that he played a doctor on TV.

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Figure 5.2: I’m not a doctor, but I play one in medication ads.

Photos such as this of actors impersonating doctors appear regularly in ads for medications that treat headaches, allergies, colds, and other everyday health problems. The depictions, which display many of the accessories of physicians—lab coat, stethoscope, and the like—are permitted as long as the ad doesn’t explicitly proclaim the actor to be a doctor.

Credit: iStockphoto

Connotation, Not Content

From the time I first saw it, the most intriguing feature of the Vicks Formula 44 ad for me was its ability to use the authority principle without providing a real authority. The veneer was enough, which tells us something important about our unthinking reactions to authorities. When in a click, run mode, we are often as vulnerable to the symbols of authority as to its substance.

Several of these symbols reliably trigger our compliance. Consequently, they are employed widely by compliance professionals who are short on substance. Con artists, for example, drape themselves with the titles, clothing, and trappings of authority. They love nothing more than to emerge elegantly dressed from a fine automobile and introduce themselves to their prospective “marks” as Doctor or Judge or Professor or Commissioner Someone. They understand that when so adorned, their chances for compliance are greatly increased. Each of these three symbols of authority—titles, clothes, and trappings—has its own story and is worth a separate look.

Titles

Titles are simultaneously the most difficult and the easiest symbols of authority to acquire. To earn a title normally takes years of work and achievement. Yet it is possible for somebody who has put in none of the effort to adopt the mere label and receive automatic deference. As we have seen, actors in TV commercials and con artists do it successfully all the time.

I recently talked with a friend—a faculty member at a well-known eastern university—who provided a telling illustration of the way our actions are frequently more influenced by the title than by the essence of the person claiming it. My friend travels quite a bit and often finds himself chatting with strangers in bars, restaurants, and airports. He says he has learned through much experience during these conversations never to use the title of professor. When he does, he finds that the tenor of the interaction changes immediately. People who have been spontaneous and interesting conversation partners until that moment become respectful, accepting, and dull. His opinions that before might have produced a lively exchange now generate extended (and highly grammatical) statements of accord. Annoyed and slightly bewildered by the phenomenon—because, as he says, “I’m still the same guy they’ve been talking to for the last thirty minutes”—my friend now regularly lies about his occupation in such situations.

What an eccentric shift from the typical pattern in which certain compliance practitioners lie about titles they don’t truly have. Either way, such practiced dishonesty makes the same point about the ability of a symbol of authority to influence behavior. I wonder whether my professor friend—who is somewhat short—would be so eager to hide his title if he knew that besides making strangers more accommodating, it also makes them see him as taller. Studies investigating the way authority status affects perceptions of size have found that prestigious titles lead to height distortions. In one experiment conducted on five classes of Australian college students, a man was introduced as a visitor from Cambridge University in England. However, his status at Cambridge was represented differently in each of the classes. To one class, he was presented as a student; to a second class, a demonstrator; to another, a lecturer; to yet another, a senior lecturer; to a fifth, a professor. After he left the room, the class was asked to estimate his height. With each increase in status, the same man grew in perceived height by an average of a half-inch, so that he was seen as two and a half inches taller as the “professor” than as the “student.” Other studies found both that after winning an election, politicians became taller in the eyes of the citizenry and that after being assigned the high-status role of “manager” (versus “employee”) on a task, college students rated themselves as taller.

Because we see size and status as related, it is possible for certain individuals to benefit by substituting the former for the latter. In some animal societies, in which the status of an animal is assigned on the basis of dominance, size is an important factor in determining which animal will achieve which status level in the group. Usually, in combat with a rival, the larger and more powerful animal wins. To avoid the harmful effects to the group of such physical conflict, many species employ methods that frequently involve form more than fight. The two rivals confront each other with showy aggression displays that invariably include size-enhancing tricks. Various mammals arch their backs and bristle their coats; fish extend their fins and puff themselves up; birds unfurl and flutter their wings. Often this exhibition alone is enough to send one of the histrionic warriors into retreat, leaving the contested status position to the seemingly larger and stronger rival.

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Figure 5.3: High expectations

Cartoonist Scott Adams’s depiction is not so far-fetched. Research indicates that tall men earn more than their shorter contemporaries and are more likely to rise to positions of leadership (Chaiken, 1986; Judge & Cable, 2004). And although there are no data directly to the point, I’d guess Adams is right about silver hair too.

Dilbert: Scott Adams. Distributed by United Features Syndicate, Inc.

Fur, fins, and feathers. Isn’t it interesting how these most delicate parts can be exploited to give the impression of substance and weight? There are two lessons here. One is specific to the association between size and status: The connection of those features can be profitably employed by individuals who are able to fake the first to gain the appearance of the second. This is precisely why con artists, even those of average or slightly above-average height, commonly wear lifts in their shoes. The other lesson is more general: The outward signs of power and authority may be counterfeited with the flimsiest of materials. Let’s return to the realm of titles for an example—one that involves what, in several ways, is the scariest experiment I know.

A group of researchers, composed of doctors and nurses with connections to three midwestern hospitals in the United States, became increasingly concerned with the extent of mechanical obedience to doctors’ orders on the part of nurses. It seemed to the researchers that even highly trained and skilled nurses were not using that training or skill sufficiently to check on a doctor’s judgment; instead, when confronted with a physician’s directives, they would simply defer.

We saw how this process accounted for rectally administered ear drops, but the midwestern researchers took things several steps further. First, they wanted to find out whether such cases were isolated incidents or representative of a widespread phenomenon. Second, they wanted to examine the problem in the context of a serious treatment error: the gross overprescription of an unauthorized drug to a hospital patient. Finally, they wanted to see what would happen if they physically removed the authority figure from the situation and substituted an unfamiliar voice on the phone, offering only the weakest evidence of authority—the claimed title “doctor.”

One of the researchers made an identical phone call to twenty-two separate nurses’ stations on various surgical, medical, pediatric, and psychiatric wards. He identified himself as a hospital physician and directed the answering nurse to give twenty milligrams of a drug (Astrogen) to a specific ward patient. There were four excellent reasons for the nurse’s caution in response to this order: (1) the prescription was transmitted by phone, in direct violation of hospital policy; (2) the medication itself was unauthorized (Astrogen had been neither cleared for use nor placed on the ward’s stock list); (3) the prescribed dosage was obviously and dangerously excessive (the medication containers clearly stated that the “maximum daily dose” was only ten milligrams, half of what had been ordered); and (4) the directive was given by a man the nurse had never met, seen, or even talked with on the phone before. Yet after 95 percent of the calls, the nurses went straight to the ward’s medicine cabinet, where they secured the ordered dosage of Astrogen, and then started walking to the patient’s room to administer the drug. At this point, they were stopped by a secret observer, who revealed the nature of the experiment.

The results are frightening indeed. That 95 percent of regular staff nurses complied unhesitatingly with a patently improper instruction of this sort must give us all as potential hospital patients great reason for concern. The midwestern study showed that mistakes are hardly limited to trivial slips in the administration of harmless ear drops or the like but, rather, extend to grave and dangerous blunders.

In interpreting their unsettling findings, the researchers came to an instructive conclusion:

In a real-life situation corresponding to the experimental one, there would, in theory, be two professional intelligences, the doctor’s and the nurse’s, working to ensure that a given procedure be undertaken in a manner beneficial to the patient or, at the very least, not detrimental to him [or her]. The experiment strongly suggests, however, that one of these intelligences is, for all practical purposes, nonfunctioning.

It seems, in the face of a physician’s directives, the nurses unhooked their “professional intelligences” and moved to a click, run form of responding. None of their considerable medical training or knowledge was engaged in the decision of what to do. Instead, because obedience to legitimate authority had always been the most preferred and efficient action in their work setting, they were willing to err on the side of automatic obedience. Moreover, they had traveled so far in this direction that their error came in response not to genuine authority but to its most easily falsified symbol—a bare title.4

EBOX 5.1

For five years, a team of security-system hackers launched concerted attacks on the computer networks of nearly one thousand local banks and credit unions in the United States. Their hit rate was spectacular. In 963 of the cases, they were able to pierce the banks’ security systems and come away with such items as protected internal documents, loan applications, and customer databases. How did they manage to succeed 96 percent of the time, when banks are intensely on guard with their own sophisticated technological software to detect and prevent digital incursions? The answer is as basic as the method the hackers employed. They didn’t penetrate the banks’ advanced digital-security-system technology with even more advanced digital technology. In fact, they didn’t use digital technology at all. They used human psychology, embodied in the principle of authority.

Because the hackers had no criminal intent—they had been hired by the banks to try to defeat the security systems—we know how they maneuvered to be so effective. Equipping themselves with the accoutrement (uniforms, badges, logos) of fire inspectors, government safety monitors, and pest exterminators, they were admitted to the facilities without appointments, escorted to restricted-access sectors, and left to do their work. However, it wasn’t the “work” bank personnel expected. Instead, it involved downloading sensitive programs and data from unattended computers and sometimes carrying data disks, laptops, and even big computer servers out the door as they left. In a newspaper account of the project (Robinson, 2008), Jim Stickley, the hacking team’s boss, provided an enlightening lesson, “[This] illustrates something provocative about the way security has changed with the rise of the Internet, which has shifted attention and dollars spent on security toward computer networks and threats from hackers. They’ve kind of forgotten the basics.” In the compliance arena, there’s little as basic as deference to authority.

Author’s note: Among the authorities allowed admittance to bank facilities were not just the sort who could be considered in authority, such as fire inspectors or government safety monitors, but also the sort who could only be considered an authority, such as pest-control experts. It’s instructive that both forms of authority worked.

Clothes

A second kind of authority symbol that can trigger our mechanical compliance is clothing. Though more tangible than a title, the cloak of authority is every bit as fakeable. Police files bulge with records of con artists whose methods include the quick change. In chameleon style, they adopt the hospital white, priestly black, army green, or police blue the situation requires for maximum advantage. Only too late do their victims realize the garb of authority is hardly its guarantee.

A series of studies by social psychologist Leonard Bickman indicates how difficult it can be to resist requests from figures in authority attire. Bickman’s basic procedure was to ask passersby on the street to comply with some odd request (for example, to pick up a discarded paper bag or stand on the other side of a bus-stop sign). In half of the instances, the requester, a young man, was dressed in ordinary street clothes; in the rest, he wore a security guard’s uniform. Regardless of the type of request, many more people obeyed the requester when he was wearing the guard costume. Similar results were obtained when the requester was female.

In one especially revealing version, the requester stopped pedestrians and pointed to a man standing by a parking meter fifty feet away. The requester, whether dressed normally or as a security guard, always said the same thing to the pedestrian: “You see that guy over there by the meter? He’s overparked but doesn’t have any change. Give him a dime!” The requester then turned a corner and walked away so that by the time the pedestrian reached the meter, the requester was out of sight. Nonetheless, the power of his uniform lasted, even after he was long gone. Nearly all the pedestrians complied with his directive when he wore the guard costume, but fewer than half did so when he was dressed normally.

It is interesting that, later on, Bickman found college students guessed with some accuracy the percentage of compliance that occurred in the experiment when the requester wore street clothes (50 percent versus the actual 42 percent); yet the students greatly underestimated the percentage of compliance when he was in uniform, 63 percent versus the actual 92 percent.

Less blatant in its connotation than a uniform, but still effective, is another kind of attire that has traditionally indicated authority status in our culture: the business suit. It, too, can evoke a telling form of deference from total strangers. In a study conducted in Texas, researchers arranged for a thirty-one-year-old man to cross the street against the light, against the traffic, and against the law on a variety of occasions. In half of the cases, he was dressed in a freshly pressed business suit and tie; on the other occasions, he wore a work shirt and trousers. The researchers watched from a distance and counted the number of pedestrians who followed the man across the street; three-and-a-half times as many people swept into traffic behind the suited jaywalker.

Noteworthy is that the two types of authority apparel shown by these studies to be influential, the guard uniform and the business suit, are combined deftly by con artists in a fraud called the bank examiner scheme. The target of the swindle can be anyone, but elderly persons living alone are preferred. The con begins when a man dressed in a properly conservative business suit appears at the door of a likely victim. Everything about the con man’s clothing speaks of propriety and respectability. His white shirt is starched, wingtip shoes glow darkly, and suit is classic. The lapels are three inches wide, no more, no less; the cloth is heavy and substantial, even in July; the tones are muted—business blue, business grey, business black.

He explains to his intended victim—perhaps a widow he secretly followed home from the bank a day or two earlier—that he is a professional bank examiner who, in the course of auditing the books of her bank, has found some irregularities. He thinks he has spotted the culprit, a bank officer who is regularly doctoring reports of transactions in certain accounts. He says that the widow’s account may be one of these, but he can’t be sure until he has hard evidence; therefore, he has come to ask for her cooperation. Would she help by withdrawing her savings so a team of examiners and responsible bank officials can trace the record of the transaction as it passes across the suspect’s desk?

Often the appearance and presentation of “bank examiner” are so impressive that the victim never thinks to check on their validity with even a simple phone call. Instead, she drives to the bank, withdraws all her money, and returns home with it to wait with the examiner for word on the trap’s success. When the message comes, it is delivered by a uniformed “bank guard” who arrives after closing hours to announce that all is well—apparently the widow’s account was not one of those being tampered with. Greatly relieved, the examiner offers gracious thanks and, because the bank is now closed, instructs the guard to return the widow’s money to the vault, to save her the trouble of doing so the next day. With smiles and handshakes all around, the guard leaves with the funds while the examiner expresses a few more thanks before he, too, exits. Naturally, as the victim eventually discovers, the “guard” is no more a guard than the “examiner” is an examiner. What they are is a pair of bunco artists who have recognized the capacity of carefully counterfeited uniforms to click us into mesmerized compliance with “authority.”

READER’S REPORT 5.2

From a Florida-based physician

The title MD carries significantly more authority when placed in the visual context of a white coat. At first, I hated to wear white coats but later in my career came to understand that the garment carries power. On multiple occasions when I started work in a new hospital rotation, I made it a point to wear the white coat. Without fail my transition went smoothly. Interestingly, physicians are highly aware of this and have even created a pecking order assigning medical students the shortest white coats, while residents in training get medium length coats, and attending physicians have the longest white coats. In hospitals where nurses are aware of this hierarchy, they rarely question the orders of “long coats”; but when interacting with “short coats,” hospital staffers make alternative medical diagnosis and therapy suggestions openly—and sometimes rudely.

Author’s note: This report makes an important point: in hierarchical organizations, not only are those with authority status treated respectfully, but those without such status are often treated disrespectfully. As we saw in the reader’s account, and as we will see in the next section, the symbols of status one displays can signal to others which form of treatment seems appropriate.

Trappings

Aside from its function in uniforms, clothing can symbolize another type of status. Finely styled and expensive clothes carry an aura of economic standing and position. Mall shoppers were more willing to comply with a request to participate in an unpaid survey, homeowners contributed more donations to a charity solicitor at their door, and job evaluators gave higher suitability ratings and starting salaries to an applicant if the individual involved was wearing a shirt or sweater showing a prestige designer label. What’s more, the differences were strikingly large: 79 percent more compliance with the survey request, 400 percent more frequent donations to charity, and a nearly 10 percent higher starting wage for a job candidate. A separate set of studies offers a reason for the employment-interview results. People judge those dressed in higher quality apparel, even higher quality T-shirts, as more competent than those in lesser quality attire—and the judgments occur automatically, in less than a second.

Other examples of trappings, such as high-priced jewelry and cars, can have similar effects. The car as a status symbol is particularly relevant in the United States, where “the American love affair with the automobile” gives it unusual significance. According to a study done in the San Francisco Bay area, owners of prestige autos receive a special kind of deference from others. The experimenters discovered motorists would wait significantly longer before honking their horns at a new luxury car stopped in front of a green traffic light than at an older economy model. The motorists had little patience with the economy-car driver. Nearly all sounded their horns, and the majority of these did so more than once; two simply rammed into the rear bumper. So intimidating was the aura of the prestige automobile, however, that 50 percent of the motorists waited respectfully behind it, never touching their horns until it moved on after fifteen seconds.

Later the researchers asked college students what they would have done in such situations. Compared to the true findings of the experiment, the students consistently underestimated the time to honk at the luxury car. The male students were especially inaccurate, feeling that they would honk faster at the prestige-than at the economy-car driver; of course, the study itself showed just the opposite. Note the similarity of pattern to many other studies on authority pressures. As in Milgram’s research, the midwestern hospital nurses’ study, and the security-guard-uniform experiment, people were unable to predict correctly how they or others would react to authority influence. In each instance, the effect of the influence was grossly underestimated. This property of authority status may account for much of its success as a compliance device. Authority influence not only works forcefully on us but does so without our awareness.5

READER’S REPORT 5.3

From a financial adviser in Michigan

A big problem in my business is getting clients to change their long-held financial goals and strategies when turns in conditions, like in their personal situations or in the economy, make those moves the right thing to do. After reading the chapter on Authority in your book I switched from just basing my advice to these clients on my own opinion to including the stated opinion of a financial expert on the subject. A lot of times this would be the chief economist of my company which is a big brokerage firm with hundreds of offices around the country. But sometimes it would be a TV expert from one of the financial channels like Bloomberg and CNBC or the author of a published article on the subject. That worked, getting me about 15 percent to 20 percent more agreement than before. But honestly from what I read in your chapter I expected better results. Am I doing something wrong that if corrected would give me stronger results?

Author’s note: This is an unusual Reader’s Report. For multiple reasons, I rarely respond to appeals for personal advice, which can range from assistance on a college student’s influence-related homework to counsel on how to persuade a wayward spouse to end an affair “once and for all.” But this reader’s request is different, principally because it makes contact with a pair of issues of general relevance to other readers. First, when people such as those the reader is trying to change have a long-standing commitment to particular goals and approaches, it’s difficult to get any movement from them at all, so a 15–20 percent improvement in compliance strikes me as pretty good. There will be more to say about this in chapter 7, on commitment and consistency. Second, there is something I can recommend to enhance the impact of an expert’s advice—multiply it. Audiences trust and follow the advice of a set of experts more than that of any one of them (Mannes, Soll, & Larrick, 2014). Thus, a communicator who does the work of collecting and then pointing to support from multiple experts will be more successful than a communicator who settles for claiming the support of just one.

The Credible Authority

So far, we’ve seen that being viewed as either in authority or an authority leads to increased compliance. But the first of these types, merely being in charge, has its problems. As a rule, people don’t like being ordered to do things. It often generates resistance and resentment. For this reason, most business schools teach prospective managers to avoid “command and control” approaches to leadership and embrace approaches designed to promote willing cooperation. It’s in this latter respect that the second type of authority, being viewed as highly informed, is so useful. People are usually happy, even eager, to go along with the recommendations of someone who knows more than they do on the matter at hand.

The potent propensity to follow the lead of an expert is aptly illustrated in a story told by modern-art specialist Michel Strauss of being caught in a bidding war at an auction of a painting by Egon Schiele, a renowned Expressionist. Although the painting was originally estimated to bring between $200,000 and $250,000, Mr. Strauss found himself bidding far above that figure against a well-known Schiele expert, thinking the man knew something he didn’t. Finally, at $620,000, Strauss dropped out. When he later asked his rival about the painting, the man confessed he had bid so high only because he thought Strauss knew something he didn’t. Let’s focus, then, on the methods and outcomes of being perceived as an authority.

Expertise

Research distinguishes a particularly convincing such authority, the credible one. A credible authority possesses two distinct features in the minds of an audience: expertise and trustworthiness. Because we have already chronicled the ability of expertise to exert significant influence, it’s not necessary to review the point extensively. Still, to ensure this first pillar of credibility is given its due, we can register some instructive additional evidence. For example, expertise appears to create a halo effect for those who possess it; a therapist’s office with multiple diplomas and professional certifications on the wall produces higher ratings not only of the therapist’s proficiency but also of his or her kindness, friendliness, and interest in clients. And just one newspaper Op-Ed piece written by an expert has large and lasting influence over readers’ opinions—lifting agreement with the expert’s opinion among general readers by 20 percentage points in one set of studies; moreover, this was the case irrespective of the sex, age, and political leanings of all readers.

image

Figure 5.4: Outsourced credibility

The persuasive elements of this ad come entirely from (1) authorities on the topic, thereby affirming their knowledge, (2) who have no allegiance to the company, thereby establishing the trustworthiness of their comments.

Courtesy of Bose Corporation USA

Trustworthiness

Besides wanting our authorities to give us expert information, we want them to be trustworthy sources of the information. We want to believe they are offering their expert advice in an honest and impartial fashion—that is, attempting to depict reality accurately rather than to serve their self-interests.

Whenever I’ve attended programs designed to teach influence skills, they’ve stressed that being perceived as trustworthy is an effective way to increase one’s influence and that it takes time for that perception to develop. Although the first of these claims remains verified by research, a separate body of research indicates that there is a noteworthy exception to the second. It turns out a communicator can rapidly acquire perceived trustworthiness by employing a clever strategy. Rather than succumbing to the tendency to describe all the most favorable features of a case upfront and reserving mention of any drawbacks until the end of the presentation (or never), a communicator who references a weakness early on is seen as more honest. The advantage of this sequence is that, with perceived truthfulness already in place, when the major strengths of the case are then advanced, the audience is more likely to believe them. After all, they’ve been conveyed by a trustworthy source, one whose honesty has been established by a willingness to point at not just positive aspects but negative ones as well.

The effectiveness of this approach has been documented in (1) legal settings, where a trial attorney who admits a weakness before the rival attorney points it out is viewed as more credible and wins more often; (2) political campaigns, where a candidate who begins with something positive to say about a rival (such as, “I am sure my opponent has the best of intentions with that proposal, but . . .”) gains trustworthiness and voting preferences; and (3) advertising messages, where merchandisers who acknowledge a drawback before highlighting strengths often see large increases in sales. After Domino’s “NEW DOMINO’S” campaign of 2009 admitting to the past poor quality of its pizza, sales went sky high; as a consequence, so did Domino’s stock price.

The tactic can be particularly successful when the audience is already aware of the weakness; thus, when a communicator mentions it, little additional damage is done, as no new information is added—except, crucially, that the communicator is an honest individual. A job candidate might say to an interviewer holding her résumé, “Although I am not experienced in this field, I am a very fast learner.” Or an information-systems salesperson might say to an experienced buyer, “While our setup costs are not the lowest, you’ll soon recoup them because of our superior efficiencies.”

Warren Buffett, who with his partner Charlie Munger has led the Berkshire Hathaway investment company to astounding levels of growth and worth, is widely recognized as the greatest financial investor of our time. Not content to rest on his expertise laurels, Buffett consistently reminds current and potential stockholders of the other component of credibility he possesses: trustworthiness. Near the start of his annual reports, usually in the first page or two of text, he describes a mistake he’s made or a problem the company has encountered during the past year and examines the implications for future outcomes. Rather than burying, minimizing, or papering over difficulties, which seems to be the tack taken all too frequently in other annual reports, Buffett demonstrates that he is, first, fully aware of problems inside the company and, second, fully willing to reveal them. The emergent advantage is that when he then describes the formidable strengths of Berkshire Hathaway, readers are ready to trust in them more deeply than before—because they are coming from a manifestly trustworthy communicator.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of Buffett’s zeal for demonstrating his transparency by admitting his shortcomings appeared in his annual report of 2016, a banner year in which his company’s share-price increase doubled that of the S&P 500 and in which there were no investing missteps to report. What did Buffett do to ensure that evidence of his openness and honesty would remain at top of mind for shareholders? On the report’s second page of text, he noted a previous year’s investing mistake that he described as the “particularly egregious error of acquiring Dexter Shoe for $434 million in 1993. Dexter’s value promptly went to zero.” Immediately thereafter, he detailed what he’d learned from the fiasco: he had not only misjudged the future worth of Dexter but made the mistake of paying with Berkshire Hathaway stock, something he promised shareholders he would never do again: “Today, I’d rather prep for a colonoscopy than issue Berkshire shares.” It’s clear to me that Buffett knows more than how to be an impressively successful investor; he knows how to communicate impressively about being an impressively successful investor.6

EBOX 5.2

The persuasiveness of online reviews is also influenced by perceived trustworthiness. The Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern University, which provides information about the effectiveness of marketing communications, published a summary of evidence of the power of online reviews to shape customer behavior (https://spiegel.medill.northwestern.edu/online-reviews/). Among their findings were three directly related to perceived trustworthiness:

Author’s note: In addition to insights from the Spiegel Research Center, a separate set of researchers (Reich & Maglio, 2020) supported an online reviewer version of Warren Buffett’s “mention a prior error” practice. If a reviewer confessed to making a previous mistake in his or her purchasing history, customers were more likely to buy a product recommended by the reviewer.

It is important to recognize what I am not suggesting here—that at the start, a marketer or salesperson state, “Before we begin, let me tell you all the things that are wrong with me, my organization, and our products and services.” Rather, I am suggesting two things. First, if there is a drawback to be acknowledged, it should be presented relatively early in a message so the credibility it provides will color the rest of the appeal. Second, within a persuasive communication, there is an ideal place for one’s strongest argument or feature, which can undercut or overwhelm the downside. It is in the moment immediately following the admission of a shortcoming of one’s case when, bolstered by resulting source credibility, the highly favorable element is likely to be processed most deeply and accepted most fully.

Defense

One protective tactic we can use against authority status is to remove its element of surprise. Because we typically misperceive the profound impact of authority (and its symbols) on our actions, we become insufficiently cautious about its presence in compliance situations. A fundamental form of defense against the problem, therefore, is a heightened awareness of authority power. When this awareness is coupled with a recognition of how easily authority symbols can be faked, the benefit is a properly guarded approach to authority-influence attempts.

Sounds simple, right? And in a way it is. A better understanding of the workings of authority influence should help us resist it. Yet there is a perverse complication—the familiar one inherent in all levers of influence. We shouldn’t want to resist authority altogether or even most of the time. Generally, authority figures know what they are talking about. Physicians, judges, corporate executives, and the like have typically gained their positions through superior knowledge and judgment. As a rule, their directives offer excellent counsel.

Authorities are frequently experts. In most cases, it would be foolish to try to substitute our less informed judgments for those of an expert, an authority. At the same time, we have seen in settings ranging from street corners to hospitals that it would be foolish to rely on authority direction in all cases. The trick is to recognize without much strain or vigilance when authority directives are best followed and when they are not. Using the twin components of a credible authority—expertise and trustworthiness—as a guide, posing two questions to ourselves can help determine when authority directives should and should not be followed.

Authoritativeness

The first question to ask when confronted with an authority figure’s influence attempt is, Is this authority truly an expert? The question focuses our attention on two crucial pieces of information: the authority’s credentials and the relevance of those credentials to the topic at hand. By turning to the evidence for authority status in this simple way, we avoid the major pitfalls of automatic deference.

Let’s reexamine the highly successful Vicks Formula 44 commercial in this light. If, rather than responding to his TV MD association, people had focused on the actor’s actual status as an authority, I am confident the commercial would not have had so long and productive a run. Obviously, the TV doctor did not possess a physician’s training or knowledge. What he did possess was a physician’s title, MD. Plainly, it was an empty title, connected to him in viewers’ minds through the device of playacting. Everyone knew that; but isn’t it fascinating how, when streaming along, what is obvious often doesn’t matter unless we pay specific attention to it?

That is why the “Is this authority truly an expert?” question can be so valuable. It moves us effortlessly away from a focus on possibly meaningless symbols toward a consideration of genuine authority credentials. What’s more, it forces us to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant authorities. The distinction is easy to forget when the push of authority pressure is combined with the rush of modern life. The Texas pedestrians who bustled into city traffic behind a business-suited jaywalker are prime examples. Even if the man were the business authority his clothes suggested he might be, he was no more an authority on crossing the street than were those who followed him into traffic.

Still, they did follow, as if his classification, authority, overwhelmed the difference between relevant and irrelevant forms. Had they asked themselves whether he represented a true expert in the situation, someone whose actions indicated superior knowledge, I expect the result would have been far different. The same process applies to the TV doctors in the Vicks ads, who were not without expertise. They had long careers with many achievements in a difficult business. But their skills and knowledge were those of actors, not doctors. If, when viewing the famous commercial, we focused on the actor’s true credentials, we’d quickly realize he should be no more believed than any other actor claiming that Vicks Formula 44 is an excellent cough suppressant.

In one research project, my colleagues and I demonstrated that training participants to focus on the true credentials of a spokesperson in an ad did, in fact, make them better evaluators of ads they experienced much later. They became not only less persuaded by subsequent ads featuring spokespeople with no relevant credentials (an actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, promoting a type of internet technology, and a game-show host, Alex Trebek, touting the health properties of milk) but also more persuaded by spokespeople with relevant credentials (an MD director of a pain institute, recommending a pain reliever, and a CEO, describing his company’s years of good experience with a brand of business insurance).

The lesson? To defend ourselves against misleading appeals containing ersatz authorities, we should always ask, Is this authority truly an expert? We shouldn’t presume we are too smart to be tricked by mere symbols of authority. Those symbols operate automatically on us. In my team’s research, it was only the participants who, recognizing their susceptibility to this automatic process, were able to disrupt it by questioning communicators’ relevant expertise. And it was only those participants who weren’t fooled.

Sly Sincerity

Suppose, though, we are confronted with an authority whom we determine is a relevant expert. Before submitting to authority influence, we should ask a second simple question: How truthful can I expect the expert to be? Authorities, even the best informed, may not present their information honestly to us; therefore, we need to consider their trustworthiness in the situation. Most of the time we do. We allow ourselves to be swayed more by experts who seem to be impartial than by those who have something to gain by convincing us; research has shown this to be true around the world and in children as young as second-graders. By wondering how an expert stands to benefit from our compliance, we give ourselves another shield against undue and automatic influence. Even knowledgeable authorities in a field will not persuade us until we are satisfied their messages represent the facts faithfully.

When asking ourselves about an authority’s trustworthiness, we should keep in mind the tactic compliance practitioners often use to assure us of their sincerity: they argue somewhat against their own interests. Correctly practiced, this approach can be a subtle yet effective device for “proving” their honesty. Perhaps they will mention a small shortcoming in their position or product. Invariably though, the drawback will be a secondary one that is easily overcome by more significant advantages—Avis: “We’re #2. We try harder”; L’Oréal: “We’re more expensive, and you’re worth it.” By establishing their basic truthfulness on relatively minor issues, the compliance professionals who use this practice can then be more believable when stressing the important aspects of their argument.

It’s crucial to distinguish between honest and dishonest versions of the practice. There is nothing inherently wrong with a communicator revealing a shortcoming or prior mistake at an early point of the message to reap the rewards of demonstrated truthfulness. Want to turn lemons into lemonade? This is one way. Recall how Warren Buffett, a man of scrupulous integrity, does precisely that near the beginning of his annual reports. Regularly exposing his readers to his authenticity upfront doesn’t strike me as a form of trickery. Rather, I see it as illustrating how trustworthy communicators can also be socially intelligent enough to cue warranted trust through prompt, truthful disclosures.

It is against the deceptive use of the practice that we have to be on guard. I have seen one devious version of the maneuver employed to remarkable effect in a place few of us recognize as a compliance setting, a restaurant. It is no secret that because of shamelessly low wages, servers in restaurants must supplement their earnings with tips. Leaving the sine qua non of good service aside, the most successful waiters and waitresses know certain tricks for increasing tips. They also know that the larger a customer’s bill, the larger the amount of money they are likely to receive in a gratuity. In these two regards, then—building the size of the customer’s charge and building the percentage of that charge given as a tip—servers regularly act as compliance agents.

image

Figure 5.5: A spoonful of medicine makes the sugar go down.

Besides its capacity to combat the perception of grade inflation, a weakness can become a strength in a variety of other situations. For example, one study found that letters of recommendation sent to the personnel directors of major corporations produced the most favorable results for job candidates when the letters contained one unflattering comment about the candidate in an otherwise wholly positive set of remarks (Knouse, 1983).

Doonesbury 1994 G. B. Trudeau. Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved.

Hoping to find out how they operate, years ago I applied for a position as a waiter at several fairly expensive restaurants. Without experience, though, the best I could do was to land a busboy job that, as things turned out, provided me a propitious vantage point from which to watch and analyze the action. Before long, I realized what the other employees already knew: the most successful waiter in the place was Vincent, who somehow arranged for patrons to order more and tip higher. The other servers were not even close to him in weekly earnings.

I began to linger in my duties around Vincent’s tables to observe his technique. I quickly learned his style was to have no single style. He had a repertoire of approaches, each ready for the appropriate circumstances. With a family, he was effervescent, even slightly clownish, directing his remarks as often to the children as to the adults. With a young couple on a date, he became formal and a bit imperious in an attempt to intimidate the young man into ordering and tipping extravagantly. With an older married couple, he retained the formality but dropped the superior air in favor of a respectful orientation to both members of the couple. Should the patron be dining alone, he selected a friendly demeanor—cordial, conversational, and warm.

Vincent reserved the trick of seeming to argue against his own interests for large parties of eight to twelve people. His technique was veined with genius. When it was time for the first person, normally a woman, to order, he went into his act. No matter what she picked, Vincent reacted identically: his brow furrowed, his hand hovered above his order pad, and after looking quickly over his shoulder for the manager, he leaned conspiratorially toward the table to report in hushed tones for all to hear: “I’m afraid that is not as good tonight as it normally is. Might I recommend, instead, the . . . or the . . . ?” (At this point, Vincent suggested a pair of menu items that were slightly less expensive than the dish the patron had selected.) “They are both excellent tonight.”

With this single maneuver, Vincent engaged several important principles of influence. First, even those who did not take his suggestions felt Vincent had done them a favor by offering valuable information to help them order. Everyone felt grateful, and consequently, the rule of of reciprocation worked in his favor when it came time to decide on his gratuity.

Besides hiking up the percentage of his tip, Vincent’s ploy also placed him in a position to increase the size of the party’s order. It established him as an authority on the current stores of the house: he clearly knew what was and wasn’t good that night. Moreover—and here is where seeming to argue against his own interests comes in—it proved him to be a trustworthy informant because he recommended dishes slightly less expensive than the one originally ordered. Rather than having appeared to try to line his own pockets, he seemed to have the customers’ best interests at heart.

To all appearances, Vincent was at once knowledgeable and honest, a combination that gave him great credibility. He was quick to exploit the advantage. When the party had finished giving their food orders, he would say, “Very well, and would you like me to suggest or select wines to go with your meals?” As I watched the scene repeated almost nightly, there was a notable consistency to the customer’s reaction—smiles, nods, and, for the most part, general assent.

Even from my vantage point, I could read their thoughts from their faces. “Sure,” the customers seemed to say, “You know what’s good here, and you’re obviously on our side. Tell us what to get.” Looking pleased, Vincent, who did know his vintages, would respond with some excellent (and costly) choices. He was similarly persuasive when it came time for dessert decisions. Patrons who otherwise would have passed up the dessert course or shared with a friend were swayed to partake fully by Vincent’s rapturous descriptions of the baked Alaska and chocolate mousse. Who, after all, is more believable than a demonstrated expert of proven sincerity?

READER’S REPORT 5.4

From a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company

In a business school class I developed for aspiring CEOs, I teach the practice of acknowledging failure as a way to advance one’s career. One of my former students has taken the lesson to heart by making his role in a high tech company’s failure a prominent part of his résumé—detailing on paper what he learned from the experience. Before, he tried to bury the failure, which generated no real career success. Since, he has been selected for multiple prestigious positions.

Author’s note: The strategy of taking due responsibility for a failure doesn’t just work for individuals. It appears to work for organizations too. Companies that take blame for poor outcomes in annual reports have higher stock prices one year later than companies that don’t take the blame have (Lee, Peterson, & Tiedens, 2004).

By combining the factors of reciprocity and credible authority into a single, elegant maneuver, Vincent inflated substantially both the percentage of his tip and the base charge on which it was figured. His proceeds from this ploy were handsome indeed. Notice, though, that much of his profit came from an apparent lack of concern for personal profit. Seeming to argue against his financial interests served those interests extremely well.7

SUMMARY