In September 1951, aboard the Canadian destroyer HMCS Cayuga off the coast of Korea, sixteen wounded South Korean soldiers were brought aboard. Three of them needed surgery immediately, including one with a bullet near his heart. The ship's surgeon, Dr Joseph Cyr, had never performed an operation in his life and had no medical training whatsoever.
He asked for the men to be prepared, retreated to his cabin with a textbook, read for an hour, and then operated. All of them survived. The ship's captain, impressed, sent a press release.
Ferdinand Waldo Demara had been a Trappist monk, a Cistercian, a psychology instructor at a Pennsylvania college, a deputy warden at a Texas prison, a teacher, a hospital orderly and a cancer researcher, and would later be a schoolteacher in Maine and a chaplain in California. He had no qualification of any kind. His method never varied: he obtained the credentials of a real person, usually by writing to a university for a transcript, and then presented himself as that person.
The insight underneath, and it is the reason this chapter is in the guide, is that institutions verify function rather than identity.
An organization that hires you checks a document, and then checks nothing further. Thereafter the question it asks continuously is whether you are doing the job — and if you are, no further inquiry is triggered. Demara was extremely good at the jobs. He read voraciously, worked hard, and delivered results, and competence is treated as evidence of qualification because in ordinary circumstances it is.
Two social mechanisms protected him.
The first is the fundamental attribution error. Observers watching a person perform a role fluently attribute the fluency to a stable internal property — he is a doctor — rather than to the situation, which in Demara's case was an hour with a textbook and unusual nerve.
The second is status-based suppression of scrutiny, and it is the more useful observation. Demara consistently chose roles with high status and scarce expertise. In those roles, questioning him is expensive for the questioner: a junior nurse who asks a surgeon whether he is really a surgeon is risking her own standing on a suspicion she cannot support. The higher the status of the role, the more the cost of a wrong challenge falls on the challenger, and the fewer challenges occur.
He was caught aboard the Cayuga only because the press release reached Canada and the real Dr Joseph Cyr's mother saw her son's name in the newspaper attached to a face that was not his.
Which is the pattern in nearly every case in this part. The impostor is rarely detected by the institution he is inside. He is detected by an accident from outside it.