I think it's deeply ingrained in our culture, and especially so in parenting and schooling. The model of schooling we have is based primarily on conditioning people from an early age to accept answers, wisdom, and decisions from an authority figure (externalizing the responsibility for thinking). It is pervasive in the typical classroom, where very strong emphasis is placed on having "the right answer" as opposed to having an effective thinking process. Little attempt is made to engage the students in dialogue, and they are expected to memorize and repeat whatever the teacher delivers. As a result, they do not develop a habit or ability in critical thinking, and do not question things that might need to be questioned. In my opinion, that is one of the greatest causes of the phenomenon of submissiveness in developed nations (this model of schooling is pretty much universal I believe).

There have been some very interesting developments counter to this in recent years, and I hope that they gain some traction. There's a program in the UK called Cognitive Acceleration [1] that seems to have a lot of promise for developing more of a habit of independent thinking. There's also some interesting stuff coming out of Harvard called Visible Thinking [2] that I believe is very beneficial.

Unfortunately, I think it will be quite a while before that kind of thing is widely adopted because of sheer momentum and the apparent drive toward ever more standardized testing.

I'm sure there are dozens of other factors that contribute to what you're talking about, but schooling is one that I recognized as having a huge impact on my own life in terms of my perception of my position relative to authority.

[1] http://www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/cognitive-accelera...

[2] http://www.old-pz.gse.harvard.edu/vt/VisibleThinking_html_fi...