── ── Cognitive bias
Authority Bias
Authority bias is the automatic tendency to comply with directives from authority figures — often overriding one's own judgment, ethics, or evidence. It operates beneath conscious deliberation: people substitute the authority's judgment for their own rather than weighing it.
Run Authority Bias on a real problem
Bring something you're actually deciding — free, in the browser.
How it works
S1 — Identify: Authority (person/institution) · question/decision · authority signals (title, attire, credentials) · pressure to defer.
S2 — Expertise vs. positional: Actual track record on this question type? Positional (CEO, chair) or domain expertise (years operating here)? Would a peer expert agree?
S3 — Examine reasoning: Is the reasoning sound independent of who's stating it? Are logical gaps being filled by authority signals?
When to use it
- someone says 'should we trust the expert on this?', 'they're a professor/CEO/MD so they must be right', 'I don't want to push back on them', 'we deferred to the board and it blew up', or is evaluating a charismatic founder, assessing due diligence on a high-credential deal, or building a team where senior voices dominate
When not to use it
When the decision is routine and reversible, applying a formal method costs more than it returns.
Worked example
Deferring to AI Authority — Confident LLMs and Lab-Leader Pronouncements (2024–2026)
By 2024–2026, two new authority signals became routine inputs to real decisions. First, large language models answer in fluent, confident, well-formatted prose — a rhetorical register that reads as expertise regardless of whether the underlying answer is correct. Second, the leaders of frontier AI labs make widely-quoted pronouncements about capability and timelines (when models will reach a given benchmark, when a class of jobs is automated, when "AGI" arrives), and those pronouncements are treated as forecasts from the highest possible authority. In both cases the…
Install this skill (free, MIT)
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skillsUseful? Star the repo — stars help other builders find it.
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