Bias Binge #9 - Whatever you say

The Authority Bias is our natural tendency to follow the leader. Normally, trusting a known authority figure in their chosen area of expertise is for the best. Doctors, teachers, or other such specialists generally know what they are talking about. It’s a valuable bias to save time and make better decisions.

Now when I was deciding the clip to bring out this bias I decided to also follow the advice I received from a person of authority on the subject. I received a comment on my last post in this series, that I was probably painting biases as bad. While that was not my intention - I thought it was the perfect chance to use the last two posts in my Bias Binge series to show how biases can also be really good.

To quote from the comment I received...Biases can protect us from making bad or even dangerous decisions, but they can cause us to make mistakes and arrive at incorrect conclusions as well.

Today's clip is about the former role that biases play. How when an authoritarian figure decides to step in and question what is happening, those in a position to decide are forced to take notice and follow his lead.

The movie is once again a classic - 'Scent of a Women' and the clip that I’ve selected is one where Al Pacino shows a mirror to the headmaster of a school, when young Charlie refuses to snitch on his mates and is almost about to get expelled because of that. Take a look at the clip and then at the second one to see what happened as a result of it (sorry couldn't get a shorter link - you can stop watching it once they leave the school building)

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT. SOME CLIPS MAY HAVE DISTURBING CONTENT. VIEW AT YOUR DISCRETION. NOT FOR KIDS. 

So while in this clip we saw how the authority bias helped the student-faculty body reach a decision which at least to me was a better one, in the next and last post of this series I will look at how a bias can help us make better decisions in our own lives as well...

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