Manipulative Surgeon

A friend of mine recently went into surgery for shoulder reconstruction. The doctor told him that he did not perform that exact operation in the past, placing the plate where it needs to go.

The doctor proceeded to ask if my friend would prefer to do the surgery privately, which would cost him 1500 USD, or at the hospital which will cost him nothing. Although my friend's insurance covers all the costs, my friend chose the hospital.

What the doctor's intentions were is difficult to guess, but it seems to me (guessing here) he already gets paid pretty well, and that in the hospital he gets more support than he would in a private operating theater--especially due to his lack of experience.

This offer of apparent monetary loss by the doctor in favor of my friend made my friend trust him and believe he is on his side--his friend. Aside to that, my friend speaks with a lot of respect when mentioning the doctor "he is a doctor, after all."

This is not to say that medical doctors do not deserve respect, but rather that my friend was manipulated into complete trust in the doctor, as he is his friend, with his interests in mind and then, he is an authority to be trusted and imitated, despite of his apparent lack of experience.

"He is a cool guy," my friend would say. He probably is, but not as much as my friend seems to think.

I would have thought myself paranoid and put the affair out of my mind until I heard what happened when my friend bought the surgeon a relatively expensive gift following the operation. I think it was a nice thing to do, regardless of the following story.

The surgeon naturally refused the gift at first, calling him crazy in a very "down to earth, from the neighborhood" way. Then he thanked my friend graciously.

My friend was convinced he was completely healed and that the msucle tiisue is completely regenerated. The doctor replied that in the arms, maybe--but not in the shouldr. He asked my friend to put his arms up straight in front of him, put his own arms on top of my friend's and asked him to push up with all the strength he can muster. Then without a problem pushed my friend's hands down.

Now, while my friend's left arm was indeed weaker, and it seems obvious that any arms sitting on top of his have far more power in them to push down, my friend was convinced he must be more careful with his health and that he is not fully recovered.

Visualization at work.

This doctor, while I do believe is a very nice person, is a compliance and persuasion expert.

Pinky.

The Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments

Dr. Robert Cialdini mentioned in his book Influence a couple of psychological experiments conducted earlier in the previous century.

The purpose of these experiments aside, it shows how humans can be pushed, as well as made to do things they don't want to at an extreme level. You can skip to the movies linked to below if you like.

The Milgram experiment concentrated on our adherence to authority.

From Wikipedia--

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

The Standford Prison experiment, from Wikipedia--

The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Twenty-four undergraduates were selected out of 70 to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The students who were assigned to be the prisoners were paid $15 a day as an incentive, which is worth about $80 per day in 2008 currency.

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These experiments speak for themselves, and you can watch them here:

Stanford Prison experiment (watch in order):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o0Nx31yicY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCsgwcIil7I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU6r4mNZ8g0

Milgram experiment:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8325294940857002700&q=milgram+experiment&ei=BYlYSNSGPJzG2wKw7ZmADw

And revisited:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6GxIuljT3w

Pinky.