What obedience is

1. Obedience: you carry out a direct order given by someone you see as an authority figure.
2. There has to be an order: something was actually asked of the person, out loud or in writing.
3. The order has to come from above: the person giving it holds more status or power in that situation than the person receiving it.
4. The order has to be carried out: obedience is the action itself, so the person has to do what was asked of them.
5. Most obedience is ordinary: classrooms, hospitals, airports and roads work only because people do what the person in charge tells them.

Obedience and conformity

1. In obedience the pressure comes from above: someone with more power in that setting tells you what to do.
2. In conformity the pressure comes from beside you: a group of equals is behaving a certain way and you move into line with them.
3. Conformity works through what you see: watching what the group is doing is enough to move you.
4. Obedience is easier to recognise in yourself: following an instruction feels like keeping to a rule, so people can say why they did it.

Degrees of obedience

1. Full obedience: the order is carried out as it was given.
2. Partial obedience: the person does some of it, or does it so slowly and badly that it barely happens.
3. Refusal: plenty of people say no, and asking a question first makes saying no much easier.
4. The order shapes the response: a small, harmless instruction is usually carried out at once, and an order that feels wrong draws questions and resistance.

Authority figures and their signals

1. An authority figure is someone you treat as having the right to tell you what to do, such as a police officer, a teacher, a paramedic, a security guard or a shift manager.
2. Uniform: a hi-vis jacket, a lanyard or a badge tells you someone's role before they have said a word.
3. Setting: a steward's words carry weight inside the stadium they are working in.
4. Job title and manner: being introduced as the duty manager adds weight, and so does giving the order calmly as though it is routine.
5. Consequences sit behind the order: the person can often reward or punish you, so refusing feels risky even when what they want is trivial.
6. The uniform signal has been tested directly: in Bickman (1974) the same orders were given by the same young men in different outfits, and obedience varied with the uniform they wore.

Pro-social and anti-social obedience

1. Obedience can be pro-social: following a marshal's instructions during an evacuation keeps a whole crowd moving and unhurt.
2. Obedience can be anti-social: people will carry out an order they think is unkind or unfair because of who gave it to them.
   1. A supervisor tells a new member of staff to refuse service to a customer who is behaving oddly, and they do it although they think it is wrong.

Turning this into marks

1. When two features of obedience are asked for, make the order and the authority figure genuinely separate points rather than one point rephrased.
2. Name the signal that marked the person out, such as the uniform, the badge or the job title, because a general reference to someone in charge does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. Say what the person actually did, because stalling and doing half of it are outcomes as real as carrying the order out in full.
4. The mark most often lost is describing a group of equals, which is conformity, in an answer about obedience.