Defy

1

Wired to Comply

In 2012, when the Summer Olympic Games were held in London, I was eager to see the flame pass by on its way to the stadium and the opening ceremonies. On the day of the processional, I arranged to meet my husband on a street corner a short walk away from our apartment, with our then five-year-old son in tow. I had in mind a pleasant afternoon stroll, followed by an exciting glimpse of the torch, held aloft by one of the athletes.

“This will be fun,” I told my son, who didn’t look convinced. “You’re going to witness history!”

Although the walk started well, within a few minutes it became apparent that getting all the way there would be a struggle. The day was hot and he was tired. Before our apartment building was even out of sight, his heels were dragging. A few minutes after that, he asked to be carried. When I refused—he was too heavy—he sat down firmly on the pavement.

“I don’t want to go,” he told me, his large brown eyes squinting in the sun.

I explained that the Olympics were special. I told him that seeing the famous flame in our neighborhood was a “once-in-a-lifetime experience.” But he was unmoved.

“I don’t want to see it,” he answered, jutting his chin out. “I want to go home.”

I pulled on his arm. I asked him firmly. I even tried to pick him up. But I couldn’t get more than a few steps down the stifling, crowded pavement before setting him back down again. I was frazzled, hot, and frustrated. We were going to miss the flame.

“Why can’t you be good?” I said to my son as we walked home.

My son’s only answer was a mulish shrug.

We never saw the flame. I watched it on television later that evening, and my husband laughed when I related the episode to him.

“You sound just like one of those people,” he said. “Remember them?”

I did. Soon after my son was born, I had been frequently puzzled by a question well-meaning acquaintances would ask:

Is he good?

What they meant was: Does your baby sleep when you want him to? Does he stop crying when you want him to?

In other words, does he do what you want him to do? Does he do what he’s told?

As someone fascinated by defiance, this moral equation of obedience to goodness always perplexed me. I had spent years questioning and resisting it—not only as an academic, but as a child of a strict upbringing. I sometimes joked that I studied defiance because my childhood had already given me a world-class education in how to be obedient.

And yet that London afternoon found me standing in the hot sun, pleading with my stubborn son to be “good”—to do what I wanted him to do.

That’s what kept me up that night, long after the opening ceremonies were over and the rest of my family was asleep. I should have known better—should have known that I had just repeated to him the most basic, unexamined equation that people had impressed on me growing up:

Compliance = good.

Defiance = bad.

From a young age, we are taught to obey.

The first authority figure we routinely encounter is a caregiver, usually a parent, someone whose job it is to nourish us and help us survive, and whose instructions must be followed. Later, teachers often step into the picture, instructing their students not only how to read and do simple arithmetic, but also how to follow the social protocols of the classroom: sit still, raise your hand. Then—as anyone who has attended middle school knows—there is the considerable pressure from our peers to do things the way everyone else is doing them.

This early training has a large effect on us: psychologically, socially, and even neurologically. When we are young, our brains grow at unprecedented rates, forming neural connections and structures that will affect how we behave for years to come. Obedience isn’t just a survival technique; it affects our writing and quite literally shapes our brains. When we are rewarded for compliant behavior, our brain’s level of dopamine—the neural transmitter that facilitates our experience of pleasure, among other things—rises. If we consistently repeat those behaviors, we build and strengthen neural pathways for compliance. Unrewarded, disobedient behavior doesn’t give our brains the same dopamine rush, and as a result, those behaviors are less likely to be repeated, and those pathways weaken or fail to develop.

We also learn many behaviors through imitation of our parents and caregivers, of our teachers and other authority figures, and of our peers. Psychologically, the value of belonging to a group—mirroring behaviors, attitudes, and actions—becomes apparent before most of us are out of kindergarten, and it continues to shape our behavior as we grow older and enter the community at large.

Compliance is baked into our customs, our laws, and even the way we talk to one another. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Civil society is largely based on the expectation of compliance. From speed limits to smoking bans, municipal zoning regulations to workplace codes of conduct, ours is a world that runs on compliance.

For any society to thrive, some level of compliance is necessary—it allows us to cooperate with each other. Governments, formal institutions, and laws may allow us to live in harmony despite our differences. Codes of compliance and obedience help us work together.

But unwavering compliance can also have devastating consequences: for individuals, who can lose their sense of autonomy, independence, and self; for governments, which can devolve into paranoid authoritarianism and persecute their citizens, perpetuating inequalities, poverty, and injustice; and for humanity in general, which requires a fine balance between freedom and limitations. A society without any compliance is anarchy; a society with total compliance is fascism.

The lessons many of us learned as children are extremely powerful, and they extend far beyond our individual lives. Compliance = good, defiance = bad doesn’t just keep children in line. It shapes the world we live in: our laws, our workplaces, our homes.

It also shapes us as individuals. Our training in compliance affects what our brains look like. It affects our wiring. It affects how we think.

So what happens when we want to think differently? When we need to?

I’ve spent much of my life working to answer these questions—not just for the field of psychology, but for myself.

Growing Up Good

When I was a child, my father told me that my name Sunita in Sanskrit means “good.” The Dictionary of Sanskrit Names says Sunita represents “she who has good conduct or behavior.”

Although I have spent decades studying why people defy, I was known for being an obedient daughter and student. I did as I was told. I got up when I was told to. I had my hair cut the way my parents insisted. I was what schoolchildren in Yorkshire, England, called “swotty”—preferring my books to other pursuits—but as much as I enjoyed mastering my subjects, and the praise I received for being “good,” I always wanted to know the reason why others had an easier time resisting the authority of our teachers, parents, and peers than I did.

I grew up in the heart of the post-industrial north of England in the 1980s. Our small three-bedroom house was crowded: with people, with love, and sometimes with friction. Money was tight, and since we had no extended family nearby, we often felt isolated. My parents must have felt the pressure the most. My mother was dealing with four children on her own every day, all while learning a new language and culture. My dad, who’d earned his PhD in metallurgy, the science and technology of metals and alloys, worked as a lecturer at the University of Bradford—a job for which he was overqualified, underappreciated, and certainly underpaid.

Now that I am an academic myself, I sometimes think about him in those early years: a short man in thin wire-rimmed glasses, his cheeks pitted by smallpox scars, his brown suit jacket barely visible beneath the grey raincoat he wore every day to work. I can see him walking confidently through the halls of a university where very few people looked like him, and where he would have to take indignities with a smile and swallow his hurt. The courage that took, the determination—it inspires me now.

But when I was a child, my father mostly shaped me to be quiet.

In many ways, my father was a traditional one. He was the voice of authority in our household. He worked all day and expected order, quiet, and peace at home. He often seemed exhausted and stressed not only by his workplace but also by the weight of his responsibilities, by the strain of supporting a family of six in an unfamiliar country. My three older siblings and I mostly tried to stay out of his way, and when dad told us what to do, we obeyed.

My dad was strict, and sometimes I felt his rules were too harsh—he once pulled me out of bed in the middle of the night to practice my flute because I hadn’t spent the mandatory thirty minutes that day playing through my scales.