Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't stress how differently power works in the Southern States (EDIT: Missouri is a midwestern state officially, but I've always considered it part of the South). It's a very traditional place, where you do not dare contradict, let alone correct, your boss. There is none of this "avoid surrounding yourself with sycophants because they will only tell you what you want to hear" business. There is no upside to speaki…
As a species I feel we need a means to overcome this problem within organizations, and demonstrate convincingly to others that we have done so. Chernobyl and Fukushima were also both created by a culture of deference to higher-ups. The anti-nuclear crowd were wrong about the science, but may have had a point once you consider human fallibility.
Chernobyl suffered from compounding of reactor and test design flaws and human error. Fukushima suffered from (retrospectively) insufficient risk assessments, which resulted in a design meeting a rare event beyond it design limit sooner than expected.*
I'm unaware of a human society, in fact any animal society, where politeness does not involve some degree of deference. So saying these accidents were caused by a culture of deference is essentially meaningless without some more "who, what, why, how" and importantly 'how much' and 'compared to what'.
From the IAEA report: "This common mode failure reached a scale considerably beyond that usually addressed in the assessment of BDBAs. [ed: beyond design basis accident]". https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/AdditionalVol...
https://www.coursera.org/lecture/intercultural-communication...