Authority-Misinfluence Tendency

The Authority-Misinfluence Tendency is one of the psychological tendencies in Charlie Munger’s Psychology of Human Misjudgment — the human disposition to follow authority figures, often into serious error. Munger’s grounded illustration is Stanley Milgram’s post-WWII obedience experiment, in which a man posing as an authority figure tricked many ordinary people into believing they were administering massive, torturous electric shocks to innocent strangers; Munger reads the result as “contributed to by [Authority-Misinfluence Tendency].” His practical implication, stated in the same talk, is that “a dominant authority figure will often be hard to remove,” so one should “be careful whom you appoint to power.”

Context: In Munger’s framework — drawn from his capstone talk in Poor Charlie’s Almanack — humans are evolutionarily wired to follow leaders, which usually serves the group but produces catastrophic outcomes when the authority is wrong or malign. It overlaps with the social-proof and doubt-avoidance tendencies in his system of biases behind misjudgment.

Where this appears

• Charlie Munger — The Psychology of Human Misjudgment — wikilinked twice as the tendency demonstrated by the Milgram experiment and behind the danger of installing a dominant authority figure.