Title: Compliance and the power of authority - ScienceDirect
Headings: Compliance and the power of authority
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
Compliance and the power of authority
Highlights
Abstract
JEL classification
Keywords
1. Introduction
3. Experimental design and hypotheses
3.1. Outline
3.2. The Open and Hidden treatments (O and H)
3.3. The Repeated question treatment (R)
Hypothesis 1
3.4. Repeated Compliance Constant pressure (RCC)
Hypothesis 2
3.5. Repeated Order (R-Order)
Hypothesis 3
3.6. Repeated Compliance (RC)
Hypothesis 4
Hypothesis 5
3.7. Repeated Compliance Justified (RCJ)
Hypothesis 6
Hypothesis 7
3.8. Repeated Compliance 1-sided (RC-1)
Hypothesis 8
4. Results
4.1. Testing the hypotheses
4.2. Supplementary analysis
5. Discussion and conclusions
Acknowledgments
Appendix A. Supplementary data
References

Content: 2006) and Silverman et al. ( 2014), we use experimenter demand as our tool to study compliance. 8
We wish to address the following questions in this paper. Can vertical, i.e., hierarchical, social pressure by an authority induce compliance? What if there is no financial incentive for complying, the action to be undertaken by the agent is antisocial (that is, contrary to the standard social norm of not damaging others), and the nudge is much weaker than in Milgram's experiments? And if so, does providing a justification for acting antisocially matters, and can we induce greater compliance by requesting to comply on specific intervals in time? Overall, our results suggest that greater attention on the psychological effect of authority should be given in principal-agent modeling and more generally in thinking about incentives and delegation in public and private organizations. We find that an indirect nudge to comply with our request to destroy half of another's participant earnings does not make any statistical difference when compared to a treatment that no cue is provided. However, when indirect pressure is reinforced by an explicit request in the instructions to reduce their partners’ income in the form of a polite request with respect to the action being ‘useful’, even if there is no explicit reason provided for the usefulness, the destruction rates more than doubles. If the request is phrased as an order, the increase is not as large.