Cause of misjudgment № 22
Authority-Misinfluence Tendency
People are wired to follow leaders and experts, sometimes obeying authority straight into disaster against their own judgment.
Humans live in hierarchies and are built to defer to authority. Most of the time this is efficient — following a competent leader beats every individual reasoning from scratch. But the deference is partly automatic, and it can override a person’s own perception and common sense, leading them to do things, and believe things, they never would on their own.
Stanley Milgram’s experiments are the chilling demonstration: ordinary volunteers delivered what they believed were dangerous, even lethal, electric shocks to a stranger, simply because a man in a lab coat told them to continue. Munger paired that with a real catastrophe — an airline crash in which the copilot, deferring to a captain who was making a fatal error, failed to correct him forcefully enough, and everyone died. The copilot could see the problem; the pull of authority kept him from acting on it.
The danger sharpens when the authority is wrong, misunderstood, or only apparent — a confident “expert” outside their real competence, or an instruction misinterpreted by subordinates who assume the boss must know best. Munger’s defenses were to evaluate the substance of what authority tells you rather than defer to the office, to be especially wary when an authority’s command conflicts with your own clear judgment, and, as a leader, to actively invite subordinates to push back, since a culture of unquestioning obedience eventually flies the plane into the ground.
