Policies designed to encourage people to speak up – from whistleblower protections to conflict-of-interest disclosures – often fail because they address informational barriers, not social ones. Drawing on research into insinuation anxiety, defiance, and conscious compliance, Sunita Sah argues that effective policy must reduce the social cost of dissent, not just permit it.
A financial adviser tells you she has a conflict of interest – she stands to profit from the product she is recommending. You now have more relevant information than you had before. Standard logic says this should help you make a better decision.
It doesn’t. In a series of experiments, my colleagues and I found that people who received conflict of interest disclosures were more likely to follow advice that they trusted less, compared with those who received no disclosure at all. They recognised the bias. They discounted the advice internally. And then they complied anyway.
This finding, along with others on conflict of interest disclosure, is not an anomaly. It reveals a much larger problem: the systematic failure of policy design to account for the social psychology of compliance. As institutions face growing pressure to suppress internal dissent, understanding why people comply despite knowing better has never been more urgent.
Why disclosure backfires
The logic underpinning mandatory disclosure is straightforward and, on its face, reasonable. If people know about a conflict of interest, they can adjust their behaviour accordingly. The policy assumes that the barrier to better decision-making is informational – that people only comply with biased advice because they don’t know it’s biased.
But the barrier is not informational. It is social.
When an adviser discloses a conflict of interest, she is sharing something personal. From the advisee’s perspective, rejecting her recommendation now carries an additional social cost: it implies that the adviser is untrustworthy, self-serving, or corrupt. The disclosure transforms a simple economic decision into a social one, and the pressure to maintain the relationship overrides the analytical case for scepticism.
This phenomenon is termed insinuation anxiety – the fear that pushing back on someone’s recommendation or position will be interpreted as an insinuation about their character or motives. It is almost entirely absent from the policy frameworks that mandate disclosure as a remedy for conflicts of interest.
Conscious compliance: A problem far wider than disclosure
Insinuation anxiety illustrates a broader phenomenon that undermines many well-intentioned policy interventions. People do not always comply because they lack information or have been deceived. Often, they comply with full awareness that they are being taken advantage of or pressured into something they do not want.
I call this conscious compliance – going along with something you disagree with, not because you have been fooled, but with full knowledge that you are choosing silence or acquiescence. And it extends well beyond disclosure settings: The junior doctor who sees a senior consultant’s error but says nothing. The financial analyst who recognises a flawed investment thesis but nods along in committee. The employee who signs off on a decision she knows is wrong because objecting would mark her out as difficult.
Conscious compliance is not a failure of reasoning. It is a failure of action in the face of social pressure. And it is ubiquitous across the very institutions – medicine, finance, law, and government – where we most need people to speak up.
This is what makes it so dangerous for policy design. Most policy interventions aimed at encouraging ethical behaviour assume that the barrier is a deficit: of information, of awareness, of channels through which to report concerns. But conscious compliance reveals that people can possess all of these things and still go along. The barrier is not what people know. It is what it will cost them, socially, to act.
Calls for a greater emphasis on intrinsic values – cultivating professionalism, integrity, and ethical character – face a similar limitation. My research has shown that a high self-concept of professionalism can paradoxically increase vulnerability to conflicts of interest, as confidence in one’s ability to self-regulate leads professionals to accept compromising situations they should have avoided entirely. Relying on how professional people feel does not solve the problem of how they behave under social pressure.
Good at predicting consent, bad at predicting compliance
There is a further complication. When policymakers and organisational leaders design interventions to encourage speaking up, they typically imagine how a reasonable person would respond to pressure. They picture a calm, deliberate decision – weighing the options, recognising the ethical case, and choosing to act.
But this imagined scenario is a consent scenario. And the situations in which people actually face pressure to go along are compliance scenarios – and the two are fundamentally different.
Consent is an active, deliberate authorisation – a considered expression of one’s values and judgment. It requires five elements: capacity, knowledge, understanding, freedom, and explicit authorisation (see Figure 1). It is your True Yes.
Compliance is reactive, often passive. It is a yes that is not really a yes. We slide into it without reflection, directed more by our wiring for compliance than by any conscious choice.
Figure 1: Consent, Conscious Compliance, and Defiance
Defiance, your True No, requires the same five elements as consent. It is also an active, deliberate authorisation – a considered expression of one’s values and judgment.
Conscious compliance exists when we have all the elements for consent or defiance, but we choose to comply anyway. Research demonstrates that people are remarkably good at predicting whether they would refuse consent – whether they would say no if asked directly. But they are remarkably poor at predicting whether they would comply when the pressure is social and situational. The gap exists because consent scenarios allow for reflection and deliberation, whereas compliance scenarios are immediate, visceral, and social. In our imaginations, we experience the moral clarity. In the actual moment, we experience the pressure.
This has direct implications for policy. Informed consent frameworks, whistleblower protections, speak-up initiatives, and ethics hotlines all assume conditions closer to consent – that people will have the psychological space to deliberate and act. But the moments that matter are almost always compliance situations, where the forces pushing people to go along are far more powerful than policymakers anticipate. Policies designed from a consent mindset will systematically underestimate the barriers faced by people in compliance situations.
Designing for defiance
What changes when policy design takes the psychology of compliance seriously?
First, it shifts the focus from simply encouraging dissent to reducing the social cost of dissent. Rather than exhorting people to speak up, effective policy should restructure decisions so that objections are normalised and expected. Structured dissent mechanisms – pre-mortems, anonymous input protocols, mandatory devil’s advocate roles, and independent evaluation before group discussion – reduce the social burden on any individual who disagrees.
Second, it challenges the assumption that information provision is sufficient. Disclosure mandates, transparency requirements, and informed consent processes all rest on the premise that people will act on what they know. The evidence suggests they often will not, when acting on that knowledge requires social defiance.
Third, it recognises that defiance itself is a learnable skill, not an individual character trait. In my book DEFY, I lay out five stages of defiance: a path from recognising the forces that sustain our compliance to building the capacity to act against those forces. If institutions wish to cultivate environments where people speak up, they must invest in developing this capacity, not simply assume it exists.
The psychology of compliance is not a marginal consideration for policy design. It is central. Until our frameworks account for the social forces that sustain our silence, we will continue designing interventions that look effective on paper but too often fail in practice.
Dr. Sunita Sah is a Professor of Management and Organizations at Cornell University, a Fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and a former Commissioner on the U.S. National Commission on Forensic Science. Her book, DEFY: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes, is available in paperback from 24 February 2026. Find more about her work at her newsletter Defiant by Design and at sunitasah.com.