sionals who are short on substance. Con artists, for example, drape
themselves with the titles, clothes, and trappings of authority. They
love nothing more than to emerge elegantly dressed from a fine auto-
mobile and to introduce themselves to their prospective “mark” as
Doctor or Judge or Professor or Commissioner Someone. They under-
stand that when they are so equipped, their chances for compliance are
greatly increased. Each of these three types of symbols of authority has
its own story and is worth a separate look.
Titles
Titles are simultaneously the most difficult and the easiest symbols of
authority to acquire. To earn one normally takes years of work and
achievement. Yet it is possible for somebody who has put in none of
this effort to adopt the mere label and receive a kind of automatic defer-
ence. As we have seen, TV-commercial actors and con artists do it suc-
cessfully all the time.
I recently talked with a friend—a faculty member at a well-known
eastern university—who provided a telling illustration of how our ac-
tions are frequently more influenced by a title than by the nature of the
person claiming it. My friend travels quite a bit and often finds himself
chatting with strangers in bars, restaurants, and airports. He says that
he has learned through much experience never to use his title—profess-
or—during these conversations. When he does, he reports, the tenor of
the interaction changes immediately. People who have been spontaneous
and interesting conversation partners for the prior half hour become
respectful, accepting, and dull. His opinions that earlier might have
produced a lively exchange now usually generate extended (and highly
grammatical) statements of accord. Annoyed and slightly bewildered
by the phenomenon—because, as he says, “I’m still the same guy they’ve
been talking to for the past thirty minutes, right?”—my friend now
regularly lies about his occupation in such situations.
What a refreshing shift from the more typical pattern in which certain
compliance practitioners lie about titles they don’t truly have. In either
direction, however, such practiced dishonesty makes the same point
about the sufficiency of a mere symbol of authority to influence behavi-
or.
I wonder whether my professor friend—who is physically somewhat
short—would be so eager to hide his title if he knew that, besides
making strangers more accommodating, it also makes them see him as
taller. Studies investigating the way in which authority status affects
perceptions of size have found that prestigious titles lead to height
distortions. In one experiment conducted on five classes of Australian
166 / Influence