How many believe a judgement or point of view simply because it comes from a professional or from someone endowed with intellectual or political (in its widest sense) authority?
If you are told that someone is a Doctor of Medicine for example do you immediately without checking believe what they say? A religious authority must be good?
Charles K. Hofling in 1966 conducted an experiment in simple heuristics based on authority, employing Dr. as the cue word, with almost calamitous results.
Although the appeal to authority is considered one of the great sins in academic writing, the views originated and introduced by professionals and intellectual sources inadvertently influence most of us. Notably, insisting that a claim is true because a valid authority or expert on the issue said it was true, without any other supporting evidence offered is regarded as one of the logical fallacies called argumentum ad verecundiam ( appeal to authority). However, the appeal to authority is more about intellectual statements in arguments requiring some strong evidential basis to prove their truth.
hi. nowadays , in terms of subjects, it is common to refer to authority heuristics not innovative ideas of less famous but knowledgeable people. to verify our views, we refer to respected people in the field to prove our claims. it leads to copies of copies of ideas expressed differently. less place for innovative wonderful comments able to change the situations efficiently.
Reza the example offered was of an experiment in a hospital. Nurses were phoned up by someone calling their self dr, this or that, and demanding that they give particular patients double the amount of drugs they were normally prescribed. Such doses would have proved lethal. In the vast majority of cases the nurses agreed-but obviously were stopped along the way.
I contend that most people accept medical ideas for example because of the authority of doctors along with the much-vocalised connection, if sometimes questionable, of the profession to science.
I have always been concerned and interested in people's general trusting and unthinking approach to the medical profession. This is another issue but on here I found papers on depression in three year olds, how to detect it, etc. Also quite a few on depression as existing within a range from A-D. For each range in the latter we would have a large number of people with expertise, a large amount of work and status for them. As with the terrifying expansion of mental health tropes into children as young as three, jobs for the boys, but science-not very likely. Such is the power and influence of this group, people put aside qualms and believe. Emperor has no clothes conundrum? I'm afraid so. But this is another, if worrying issue.
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