Ever heard of the Milgram Experiment from 1961?
You probably have, but let's recap: Stanley Milgram placed experimental subjects (Yale students) in a situation where he had them believing that they were inflicting potentially lethal jolts of electricity on other subjects when questions on a fake quiz were answered incorrectly. As I recall (at ease, it was from reading: I was two years old in 1961), more than fifty percent of the subjects were willing to inflict the lethal voltages on a fellow human being simply because a guy in a white lab coat told them to.
And, like me, you've probably taken the time to wonder how anyone could have become Leopold or Loeb, or been a Treblinka camp guard, or a torturer in the Lubyanka. I still wonder about that: what do you have to tell yourself, what do you have to do to yourself, in order to go there?
So: can a motivational speaker convince middle-management types at his seminar to hit the Bank of England for one hundred thousand pounds cash?
No?