5.4: Who Do We Listen To?

We are more likely to believe someone we regard as an expert than someone we don’t. In numerous studies, people have been given a passage containing claims or arguments. Some of them are told that the passage is by someone they are likely to regard as an expert, e.g., a medical doctor writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, or a professor doing biological research at Harvard University.

Other subjects are told that the very same passage was from a source they are not likely to regard as an expert, e.g., that it’s a translation from Pravda or the latest offering on Wilbur’s Home Page. People are much more likely to accept the claims and arguments when they are attributed to the more credible source.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. But this very sensible phenomenon creates an opening for people who want to influence or manipulate us. We can’t usually identify an expert solely by what they say—if we knew enough to do this, we probably wouldn’t need an expert in the first place. We have no recourse but to rely on characteristics that often accompany expertise—characteristics like title and the recommendations of others—that are good indicators of expertise. And so, someone who appears to have these characteristics can pass themselves off as an expert even when they really aren’t.

Faking Expertise: The Aura of Authority

Halo Effects

When a person seems to have one positive characteristic or trait, we often assume that they have other positive characteristics or traits. This is called the halo effect. One positive trait seems to set up a positive aura or halo of other positive characteristics around the person (we will study halo effects in more detail in Chapter 15). It is legitimate to infer the presence of one positive feature based on other positive features only if there is a strong, objective connection between the two traits (we will see later that such a connection is called a correlation. Some traits, like a person’s title and or institutional affiliation, do correlate well with expertise. But the correlation isn’t perfect, and sometimes people with an impressive title or prestigious job are not experts at all. Moreover, some people will pretend to have characteristics that are good indicators of expertise as a way of taking advantage of us.

Titles

Medical doctors, lawyers, professors and so on have titles that often do signal expertise. Such titles also create such a strong halo that it extends to completely irrelevant matters. In an experiment conducted in Australia, a man was introduced to five different college classes as a visitor from Cambridge University, but different titles were attributed to him in the various classes. The titles were ones common in British and Australian universities. In the first class, he was introduced as a student, in the second as a demonstrator, in the third a lecturer, in the fourth as a senior lecturer, and in the fifth as a professor.

When he left, the students were asked to estimate his height. With each step up the ladder of status, he gained about half an inch, so that when he was a professor, he seemed to be two and a half inches taller than when he was a student. Since titles can create a halo that involves quite irrelevant factors like height, it is not surprising that they can create a halo that extends to expertise and, perhaps, even to traits like honesty. But unfortunately, although years of training often lead to expertise, they don’t always lead to personal reliability. Late-night television is full of infomercials in which real doctors hawk quick fixes to help you lose weight, quit smoking, or get off the sauce. It is also possible to fake having a title. Con artists do it all the time. So, when someone claiming an impressive title offers us advice, it is always worth asking ourselves whether they really do have the training they claim to have and, if so, whether there are reasons why they might be biased or mistaken in the current situation.

Additional Indicators of Expertise

There are also institutional halos. We tend to think that members of prestigious institutions, e.g., Ivy League universities, are likely to be experts because of their affiliation. This is usually very reasonable, because institutional affiliation often is a sign of expertise. As with titles, however, it can be exploited by people with affiliations looking to make a fast buck, and it can even be faked by those who are skilled (and unscrupulous) enough to do so.

Self-assurance and confidence can also make a person’s claims seem more credible. President Lyndon Johnson used to say, “Nothing convinces like conviction,” and studies show that the more confident and certain a witness in a courtroom appears, the more believable others find her (though there is little correlation between confidence and accuracy). This seems to extend to experts in general. It is very easy, even natural, to think to ourselves: “That person wouldn’t be sounding so sure of things unless they really knew, so…”. But as we will see, the correlation between confidence and accuracy is far from perfect.

Clothes, jargon, non-verbal cues (e.g., “body language”) and other image-enhancing devices can also be used to create an aura of expertise. The clothes we wear serve as indicators of status, which we in turn use as an indicator of expertise. One high-status “uniform” in our society is the business suit. In one study, it was found that people were over three times as likely to follow a jaywalker across a busy street if it was a man in a business suit.

It is no accident that people in commercials and ads often wear a white lab coat and sit in a book-lined study or an impressive looking lab. Such props create an atmosphere of expertise, and this can lead us to suspend careful and critical examination of their claims.

Intimidation

A fake expert can sometimes do a snow job by using a lot of technical jargon. Indeed, even genuine, well-meaning experts sometimes intimidate us with a barrage of technical terms. We are frequently reluctant to ask for an explanation that we can understand because we don’t want to look ignorant or stupid. You may have experienced this on a visit to a doctor. They quickly describe what is wrong, often in words you don’t understand, then confidently tell you what to do, while hurrying off to see their next patient.

In cases like this, it is important to stick to your guns. There is no reason why we should understand the jargon it took experts years to master. You are the one paying the expert, so you have a right to hear their opinion in terms you can understand, as well as to hear the reasoning behind their recommendations. Some people find it easier to do this if they write out a series of questions in advance. And if it turns out that the expert isn’t genuine (an unlikely event in the case of most doctors), having to explain their terms may expose their lack of knowledge. Keep in mind if you are talking with an expert who is committed to you understanding, they will not be annoyed by your asking questions, because they want you to understand. Furthermore, truly committed experts are already trying to avoid jargon whenever possible when talking with lay people.

Stereotypes

Many people harbor stereotypes and prejudices which lead them to see members of certain groups as more likely to be experts than members of other groups. In our society, other things being equal, women are less likely to be viewed as competent experts than men. For example, male and female groups are more likely to adopt a suggestion if it is presented by a man, as opposed to the exact same suggestion, presented by a woman. Stereotypes can lead people to see members of certain racial or ethnic groups, people with regional accents, and even people with physical disabilities as less likely to have genuine expertise. (We will talk about biases in more detail in Chapter 17).

Appearing to Go Against Self-interest

We all know that if someone stands to profit when we take their advice, we should think twice before taking it. But it is possible to exploit the fact that people without a vested interested are viewed as more objective authorities. The trick is to appear not to be acting from self-interest while really doing just that.

Not long ago, a friend went shopping for a new television. The salesperson began by telling them that the Mitsubishi was the most expensive television the store carried, and that it was what the boss wanted pushed. Then, after looking around conspiratorially to make sure the boss wasn’t within earshot, they confided that the Mitsubishi wasn’t as good a bargain as a slightly cheaper model by Sony.

Although we can’t know for certain what the salesperson’s motives were, the claim seemed well-calculated to show that they were honest and had only the customer’s best interests at heart. After all, if they were simply out to make a fast buck, they wouldn’t have mentioned the defects of the Mitsubishi. But of course, the commission wouldn’t have been much less for the Sony (which turned out to be the second most expensive model on the floor).

The psychologist Robert Cialdini took a job in a restaurant to study the techniques waiters used to maximize their tips. He found that the most successful waiter often used this sort of strategy. A large group would be seated. Then the waiter would tell the first person who ordered that the dish they asked for hadn’t turned out very well that evening and would recommend something slightly cheaper. This would ingratiate them to the customers, sending the message that they were looking out for the table’s interests, even at the cost of a larger tip. But it turned out that these waiter’s tips were higher on average than the servers who did not do this.

A credible expert needs to have factual reliability and personal reliability. It is often possible to simulate the appearance of both, and many people make their living doing exactly that. In later chapters, we will see how easy it is to do this, but if you think about it you can find plenty of examples in your own experience. The less we think about the things we hear, the easier it is to be a patsy. As always, the moral is to think; the more tuned in we are, the easier it will be to think critically about what an alleged expert is telling us, and the better we will be able to evaluate it.