Rectal Earache (Authority Principle)

We (humans) are so crazy. I had to laugh reading in Influence by Robert Cialdini, in the chapter about the Authority Principle - The Allures and Dangers of Blind Obedience:

Take, for example, the classic case of the “rectal earache” reported by Cohen and Davis in an interview. A physician ordered ear drops to be administered to the right ear of a patient suffering pain and infection there. Instead of writing out completely the location “Right ear” on the prescription, the doctor abbreviated it so that the instructions read “place in R ear.” Upon receiving the prescription, the duty nurse promptly put the required number of ear drops into the patient’s anus.

Obviously, rectal treatment of an earache made no sense, but neither the nurse nor the patient questioned it. The important lesson of this story is that in many situations in which a legitimate authority has spoken, what would otherwise make sense is irrelevant. In these instances, we don’t consider the situation as a whole but attend and respond to only one aspect of it.