'We say yes when we could and should say no'

America has long been celebrated as the land of the free - a place where agency, independence and self-determination are enshrined in our national mythos.

- Sunita Sah, Tribune News Service

Whether idealising the rugged frontiersman or the daring entrepreneur, Americans take pride in the idea of forging their own paths. Yet despite these stated ideals, we often surrender our liberty in surprising ways.

Compliance is the act of going along with something — often imposed by a person or system — through reactive or passive obedience. It’s vandalising a book on command, going against our better judgment when someone tells us to or administering electric shocks to another person, as in Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments.

We say yes when we could and should say no. Experiments I've conducted suggest that Americans regularly comply with advice even when they know it is bad. In a series of studies, I gave participants obviously poor recommendations to choose a clearly subpar lottery over one in which they stood to win twice as much. I found that compliance rates soared as high as 858. In a nation that so cherishes independence, why are we so inclined to comply?

The answer may lie in our misunderstanding of compliance. Compliance and consent are often conflated, yet they are fundamentally different.