Compliance (psychology) in the context of Foot-in-the-door technique

Obedience, in human behavior, is a form of "social influence in which a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure". Obedience is generally distinguished from compliance, which some authors define as behavior influenced by peers while others use it as a more general term for positive responses to another individual's request, and from conformity, which is behavior intended to match that of the majority. Depending on context, obedience can be seen as moral, immoral, or amoral. For example, in psychological research, individuals are usually confronted with immoral demands designed to elicit an internal conflict. If individuals still choose to submit to the demand, they are acting obediently.

Humans have been shown to be obedient in the presence of perceived legitimate authority figures, as shown by the Milgram experiment in the 1960s, which was carried out by Stanley Milgram to find out how the Nazis managed to get ordinary people to take part in the mass murders of the Holocaust. The experiment showed that obedience to authority was the norm, not the exception. Regarding obedience, Milgram said that "Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others." A similar conclusion was reached in the Stanford prison experiment.

Social influence comprises the ways in which individuals adjust their behavior to meet the demands of a social environment. It takes many forms and can be seen in conformity, socialization, peer pressure, obedience, leadership, persuasion, sales, and marketing. Typically social influence results from a specific action, command, or request, but people also alter their attitudes and behaviors in response to what they perceive others might do or think. In 1958, Harvard psychologist Herbert Kelman identified three broad varieties of social influence.

1. Compliance is when people appear to agree with others but actually keep their dissenting opinions private.
2. Identification is when people are influenced by someone who is liked and respected, such as a famous celebrity.
3. Internalization is when people accept a belief or behavior and agree both publicly and privately.

Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard described two psychological needs that lead humans to conform to the expectations of others. These include our need to be right (informational social influence) and our need to be liked (normative social influence). Informational influence (or social proof) is an influence to accept information from another as evidence about reality. Informational influence comes into play when people are uncertain, either from stimuli being intrinsically ambiguous or because of social disagreement. Normative influence is an influence to conform to the positive expectations of others. In terms of Kelman's typology, normative influence leads to public compliance and identification, whereas informational influence leads to private acceptance and internalization.

Authority bias is the tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more influenced by that opinion. An individual is more influenced by the opinion of this authority figure, believing their views to be more credible, and hence place greater emphasis on the authority figure's viewpoint and are more likely to obey them. This concept is considered one of the social cognitive biases or collective cognitive biases.

Humans generally have a deep-seated duty to authority and tend to comply when requested by an authority figure. Some scholars explain that individuals are motivated to view authority as deserving of their position and this legitimacy leads people to accept and obey the decisions that it makes. System justification theory articulates this phenomenon, particularly within its position that there is a psychological motivation for believing in the steadiness, stability and justness of the current social system.

Agreeableness is the personality trait of being kind, sympathetic, cooperative, warm, honest, straightforward, and considerate. In personality psychology, agreeableness is one of the five major dimensions of personality structure, reflecting individual differences in cooperation. People who score high on measures of agreeableness are empathetic and self-sacrificing, while those with low agreeableness are prone to selfishness, insincerity, and zero-sum thinking. Those who score low on agreeableness may show dark triad tendencies, such as narcissistic, antisocial, and manipulative behavior.

Agreeableness is a superordinate trait, meaning it is a grouping of personality sub-traits that cluster together statistically. Some lower-level traits, or facets, that are commonly grouped under agreeableness include trust, straightforwardness, altruism, helpfulness, modesty, and tender-mindedness.

Passive-aggressive behavior is a communication that in the mind of the speaker is based on a strong, negative emotion such as anger but is expressed using words that do not convey the emotion, including completely avoiding direct communication when it is socially customary. It can be effective to avoid confrontation, rejection, and criticism but can be confusing, annoying, and exasperating to a recipient of the communication due to the discordance between what they hear and what they perceive.

Passive-aggressive behavior was first defined clinically by Colonel William C. Menninger during World War II in the context of men's reaction to military compliance. Menninger described soldiers who were not openly defiant but expressed their civil disobedience (what he called "aggressiveness") by "passive measures, such as pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, inefficiency, and passive obstructionism" due to what Menninger saw as an "immaturity" and a reaction to "routine military stress".