Authority

We're trained from childhood to defer to authority figures, and the training transfers far beyond its original target. People follow instructions from someone in a lab coat further than they thought they would — Stanley Milgram's experiments showed this uncomfortably. The symbols of authority — titles, uniforms, credentials, expensive cars — carry the deference even when there's no actual authority behind the symbol.

The honest application of authority is to actually have it. Real expertise, transparently demonstrated, is the most ethical version of this lever. The dishonest version is using authority's symbols to bypass scrutiny — and once spotted, it collapses trust in everything else you say.

Cialdini recommends two questions when authority is being invoked: is this person actually a relevant expert on this question, and how honest can we expect this expert to be? Most deference we extend to authority figures fails at least one of those tests on inspection.

The principle is real and useful. Like all the others in this book, it's also exploited the moment people stop looking. Earn authority, signal it accurately, and audit the authorities that signal at you.

The chapter's foundation is Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment, in which ordinary people, urged on by an experimenter in a lab coat, administered what they believed were dangerous, even lethal, electric shocks to a protesting stranger. A clear majority went all the way to the maximum voltage, not because they were cruel but because a legitimate-seeming authority told them to, and they ceded their own judgment. Cialdini's point is that the deference is to the symbols of authority as much as to its substance.

He catalogs three such symbols. Titles are the easiest to fake and the most powerful (an actor who plays a doctor on television is trusted to endorse real medicine). Clothing carries the trappings of authority, demonstrated by studies in which far more pedestrians followed a jaywalker dressed in a business suit than the same man in casual clothes. And luxury trappings work too: drivers honked far more readily at an economy car blocking a green light than at a luxury car, deferring to the status the vehicle implied.

Because the symbols can be counterfeited so cheaply, Cialdini's defense is two questions. First, is this authority truly an expert in the matter at hand, or merely wearing the costume of one? Second, how truthful can we expect this expert to be here, given what they stand to gain from our compliance? A genuine expert with no stake in your decision is worth deferring to; the same credentials attached to a salesperson are not.