Why blind obedience is worth preventing

1. Most obedience is useful and completely ordinary, and the problem is only the unquestioning kind that keeps going after the order has started to cause harm.
2. Prevention works on two fronts, what a person can do for themselves in the moment and what an organisation can build around them in advance.
3. Because so much of obedience comes from the situation rather than the person, the strategies that alter the situation are the ones with the most to work with.

Ways a person can resist an order

1. Question who is giving the order
   1. Ask whether this person really has the right to tell you to do this, because once you doubt that, the order stops feeling like something you simply have to carry out.
2. Ask what the order will actually do
   1. Naming the consequence out loud pulls your attention from the instruction to the harm, and harm you have looked at directly is much harder to go along with.
3. Take the responsibility back
   1. People obey more easily when they feel the person in charge will carry the blame, so reminding yourself that you are the one doing it and you would have to answer for it puts the decision back where it belongs.
4. Find someone else who objects
   1. Seeing one other person refuse breaks the impression that everybody is going along with this, and it shows you that refusing is a real option rather than an unthinkable one.
5. Buy yourself time
   1. Asking for the instruction in writing, or saying you will check first, slows an order down, and pressure that works by being immediate loses most of its force once you have paused.

Ways an organisation can reduce blind obedience

1. Teach people how the pressure works
   1. Someone who has been shown that uniforms, official settings and orders that grow a step at a time all raise obedience can recognise those pressures while they are happening.
2. Give people a protected way to object
   1. A written procedure for challenging an instruction, with a promise that nobody is punished for using it, removes the cost that usually stops people speaking up.
3. Remove the anonymity
   1. Requiring people to sign for what they have done makes each person identifiable, so nobody can rely on the idea that they were only a small part of a larger machine.
4. Separate the order from the check
   1. If a different person has to approve a serious decision, one authority figure can no longer carry it through on their own say-so.

How well these ways of preventing it work

1. These strategies aim at the right target, because in Haney, Banks and Zimbardo (1973) men screened as normal and healthy and given their roles at random still became harsh guards.
2. Prevention built into the situation is more dependable than prevention that rests on the individual, because a procedure holds steady while courage does not.
3. Knowing about a pressure is not the same as resisting it, and refusing can cost you your job, your place in the team or your safety.
4. Much of the evidence comes from unusual settings such as a mock prison or a laboratory, so how far the same fixes transfer to an ordinary workplace is uncertain.

Turning this into marks

1. Name the strategy and then give the reason it lowers obedience, because a list of strategies with no reasons scores once.
2. When you are given a scenario, name the person and the order in it rather than describing prevention in general.
3. The mark most often lost is finishing without a judgement, so end by saying which kind of strategy works better and why.