Why do we react to authority figures?

Dr Robert Cialdini wrote a famous book which is often referred to by top marketers and sales people.

Robert Cialdini’s book is about the pyschological tactics that marketers, governments and any manipulator uses to persuade other people, and how to avoid them.

Almost every human being alive today has an emotional anchor to authority.

What this means is this:

If you percieve somebody as an authority, they can trigger and automatic reaction in you which will cause you to do what they say without question.

Various people can have various levels of stimulus-response to authority.

Some people will do more without question than others.

The emotional anchor to authority begins at a young age as children become emotionally anchored to the authority figure of their parents.

This anchoring to authortarian figures from early age later sets the stage to conforming to other authority figures such as teachers and doctors, and other persons such as governments etc.

A classic experiment involving an authority figure was done with people who were ordered to electrecute people in a booth.

Here’s how it worked:

Actors were put in a booth and hooked up to a pretend electrical shock machine.

Subjects were bought into another room where they could see the person in the booth hooked up to the fake electric shock device.

They were ordered by a an expert, an authority to deliver shocks to the patient at various voltages.

The authority was dressed in a lab coat and was referred to as Dr So in So. (Even though he wasn’t a doctor and was just an actor too)

The authority figure always insisted that the person who was connected to the fake electric shock advice was fine and could handle the pain.

The subjects of the experience kept delivering more and more painful shocks to the actors even though the actors got to the stage of screaming in excrutiating pain and begging for them to stop.

Why did the subjects of the experience keep delivering the shocks?

Because the authority Dr figure said they were fine and insisted that they do it.

Some of the subjects would question the authority but would then relent and continue with the fake shocks.

Authority can be reflected in clothes, titles and even automobiles.

Example: A doctors coat and the title Dr. People will often accept the advice of a doctor without question because they have the special white coat and they have the special Dr Title as well as the special certificate.

There are other more subtle forms of submitting to authority.

You can submit to somebodies influence if they act like the angry parent that you submitted to when you were a child.

Thats why so many people take so much crap from their bosses.

This is also one aspect of manipulation that cult leaders use against their followers also.

A lot of politians like John Howard, Helen Clark and George W Bush portray themselves as parental type figures so that you accept and react to their authority.

Some people get really upset with this and it triggers another anchored emotional response inside them which forces them to feel like they need to rebel against a politian.

Often its not the actual political position they are fighting for but its because of the strong emotional trigger to rebel against an authority figure was created in their youth.

Of course it doesn’t work like this for everyone but it does work on a lot of people.