Disobedience to authority is cognitively costlier than compliance

Evidence

People who are averse to elaborate information search and processing are more likely to accept and follow the dictates of authority, which are usually unequivocal and definite; resistance to authority or to the group stems from thinking for oneself, a much more cognitively difficult and timeconsuming enterprise (Harvey, Hunt, & Schroder, 1961). — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 476

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the ch71 caution against attributing Holocaust perpetration merely to authoritarian personality: gives a cheap-cognitive-mechanism reading of Milgram-style obedience that doesn’t require a personality type. — connects to: Humanism centers individual agency and subjective intuition against received authority — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 49; Trivial compliance gestures progressively erode moral resistance — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 258; Academia demonstrates how loathed systems still secure compliance — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1719

Broader Connections

• Trivial compliance gestures progressively erode moral resistance #corroborates (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 258
• Humanism centers individual agency and subjective intuition against received authority #contradicts (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 49