by Cohen and Davis. A physician ordered ear drops to be administered
to the right ear of a patient suffering pain and infection there. But 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 re-
quired number of ear drops into the patient’s anus.
Obviously, rectal treatment of an earache made no sense. Yet neither
the patient nor the nurse questioned it. The important lesson of this
story is that in many situations where 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.^4
Wherever our behaviors are governed in such an unthinking manner,
we can be confident that there will be compliance professionals trying
to take advantage. We can stay within the field of medicine and see that
advertisers have frequently harnessed the respect accorded to doctors
in our culture by hiring actors to play the roles of doctors speaking on
behalf of the product. My favorite example is a TV commercial featuring
actor Robert Young counseling people against the dangers of caffeine
and recommending caffeine-free Sanka Brand coffee. The commercial
was highly successful, selling so much coffee that it was played for
years in several versions. But why should this commercial prove so ef-
fective? Why on earth would we take Robert Young’s word for the
health consequences of decaffeinated coffee? Because—as the advertising
agency that hired him knew perfectly well—he is associated in the
minds of the American public with Marcus Welby, M.D., the role he
played in an earlier long-running television series. Objectively it doesn’t
make sense to be swayed by the comments of a man we know to be just
an actor who used to play a doctor. But, as a practical matter, that man
moved the Sanka.
CONNOTATION, NOT CONTENT
From the first time I saw it, the most intriguing feature for me in the
Robert Young Sanka commercial was its ability to use the influence of
the authority principle without ever providing a real authority. The
appearance of authority was enough. This tells us something important
about unthinking reactions to authority figures. When in a click, whirr
mode, we are often as vulnerable to the symbols of authority as to the
substance.
There are several kinds of symbols that can reliably trigger our com-
pliance in the absence of the genuine substance of authority. Con-
sequently, they are employed extensively by those compliance profes-
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 165