Some of the misinfluences are amusing, as in a case described by Cialdini. A

physician left a written order for a nurse treating an earache, as follows: “Two

drops, twice a day, ‘r. ear.’” The nurse then directed the patient to turn over

and put the eardrops in his anus.

 

Other versions of confused instructions from authority figures are tragic. In

World War II, a new pilot for a general, who sat beside him in the copilot’s

seat, was so anxious to please his boss that he misinterpreted some minor shift

in the general’s position as a direction to do some foolish thing. The pilot

crashed the plane and became a paraplegic.

 

Well, naturally, cases like this one get the attention of careful thinkers like

Boss Buffett, who always acts like an overquiet mouse around his pilots.

 

Such cases are also given attention in the simulator training of copilots who

have to learn to ignore certain really foolish orders from boss pilots because

boss pilots will sometimes err disastrously. Even after going through such a

training regime, however, copilots in simulator exercises will too often allow

the simulated plane to crash because of some extreme and perfectly obvious

simulated error of the chief pilot.

 

After Corporal Hitler had risen to dominate Germany, leading a bunch of

believing Lutherans and Catholics into orgies of genocide and other mass

destruction, one clever psychology professor, Stanley Milgram, decided to do an

experiment to determine exactly how far authority figures could lead ordinary