New study suggests people use “constructive noncompliance” to enact change | Hacker News Reader

New study suggests people use “constructive noncompliance” to enact change

newsoffice.mit.edu

72 pointsuser_23571128 comments

I live in the Czech Republic, a former member of the Soviet Union, and people and businesses here take breaking the law for granted. Many of the laws here concerning employment, taxes, and building permits can be quite overwhelming and our beurocrats are very slow to process the various forms. However, I believe that the fact that so many people and companies ignore these laws actualy tends to hide the faliures of the system. If everyone were to try to follow these laws and fill out all the forms that were needed, and wait for them to be processed then the slowness of the beurocratic system would become much more apparent than it is today.

Indeed, and there is an even darker side to this, which is what you get when the government starts selectively enforcing these ridiculous laws. Play ball with the oligarchy, and they'll ignore that you didn't bother to go through all various red tape stuff (because no one can actually meet all those requirements and stay in business). Pose a threat to them, and find your property confiscated and very likely facing criminal charges. This is Oppression 101, first week. I challenge anyone to find an unequivocally oppressive regime which does not engage in this tactic.

I'm not totally disagreeing with the article, because these tactics can be useful as long as you keep the long-term goal in mind: overturning stupid or onerous legislation. But if in doing this you foster a culture which does not respect rule of law, you most definitely will not challenge the legitimacy of the really oppressive regimes - rather, you will enable them.

Great point - I've experienced similar issues in business. A process, procedure or tool is set up for your team that doesn't work. Rather than following the process, the team simply finds the quickest route from point A to B (completing the task) and uses that rather than communicating that the system doesn't work. I imagine it's for similar reasons - they expect the response from management to be a slow and sub-optimal alteration to the process, to be ignored outright, or in some way punished for providing feedback. It's easier to just get the job done, right?

On the flip side, a lot of the time you can't simply copy their A to B process to replace the one they ignore as it often misses some annoying yet essential minutiae that needs to be covered from a management perspective. Just as a government might have good reasons for making you tick a bunch of boxes on a form to do something simple - what's not clear to the end user is that they're there to prevent disputes, avoiding treading on a very small minority of people etc. But to average Joe, it's just more work with no clear justification.

I always get a kick out of academics discovering phenomena that are pretty obvious.

If you have the ability to haggle with a person of authority, you'll eventually wear them down. It works for cops, teachers, bosses, etc.

My wife and I call them, "No shit studies," because no shit, that's obvious. However, there is a very good reason to do the "obvious" studies because, sometimes, the results are completely different than expected.

It's worse than that. They don't even use the strategy's common name: civil disobedience.

Everyone's talking civil disobedience, but the phrase that came to mind when I read the summary was "prefigurative politics": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics

> Prefigurative politics are the modes of organization and social relationships that strive to reflect the future society being sought by the group.

A little more general, and a little more complex, but also missing the negative connotation of "disobedience".

I get the feeling that the study wishes to remove some agency from this equation, as in "people will passively disobey and you should listen to that, because it means something", but behaving in a way that you'd like society to be has a somewhat prefigurative flavor.

> I always get a kick out of academics discovering phenomena that are pretty obvious.

Most of the time, academics 'know' that it's obvious. What they're trying to do is quantify it, and figure out 'why'.

> "They had this belief that if [officials] did see there was sufficient noncompliance, [the officials] would conclude that the citizens were trying to tell them something," Tsai says.

"Constructive Noncompliance": an alias of passive aggression.

Or, maybe this is collective or conspiratorial passive aggressive behavior, aimed at authority?

>[the officials] would conclude that the citizens were trying to tell them something

The officials may also take the opportunity to move against political rivals, or other threats and undesirables, under cover of laws which most people don't follow. Selective enforcement, in other words.

This study was conducted in China, which has a very different government structure compared to much of the West (or pretty much anywhere), so I fail to see how this can be applied to Western democracies (where the article was published).

Also from what I got from the article it was a survey with follow up interviews. This doesn't in anyway sound like a scientific study at all.

Qualitative research is still scientific. I'd go so far as to say just as scientific as quantitative research, holding the field of study constant.

In physics, chemistry, materials science, etc. quantitative is orders of magnitude better than qualitative. In the social sciences the two may be the same quality but that's largely because they've had such little success with quantitative methods.

I'm torn--parts of me agree with you (which is why I said holding field of study constant in my original comment), while other parts disagree.

Quantitative is just a style of argument, and it alone can be used to argue for or against good or bad science. E.g. at the onset the Copernican Revolution, quantitative arguments actually were stronger for the Ptolemaic model. The core body of science, however, is a complex of evidence-gathering, hypothesis generation, and hypothesis testing, that collectively generate new sources of and frames for evidence. There's no particular reason that you've got to be able to build an isomorphism between a class of evidence and a numeric type in order for that evidence to be valuable and scientific.

On the other hand, I find it hard to argue with the observation that doing science with numbers seems to lead to a better and healthier scientific community (better in the sense of making testable predictions that pass their tests and suggest new lines of evidence).

I think the principle is basically, go for the best evidence you can get. Sometimes you need to do qualitative research before you can formulate the right questions to ask.

I think you're being partially blinded by a complex definition of science. A more intuitive notion of science is that the strength of an idea is based on evidence alone. The philosophers will hate you but science will make more sense.

> There's no particular reason that you've got to be able to build an isomorphism between a class of evidence and a numeric type in order for that evidence to be valuable and scientific.

As you hinted at, the experiment has been unofficially done many times and the evidence suggests the quantitative approach is better. That is the particular reason as far as I can tell. (Numbers may not be technically essential, but measurement and comparison are. That leads to things like everybody agreeing that a piece of metal in Europe is exactly one kilogram and everybody talks about mass in reference to that one object. It was a qualitative decision to choose which kilogram became the standard, but from then on measuring mass was quantitative and easily communicable. Fields that can't establish conventions for their observables in this way are generally not very scientific.)

My argument was that when holding the field constant puts qualitative and quantitative science on the same footing, it's a bad sign for that field. Take chemistry: when qualitative arguments were equal to quantitative it was called Alchemy. When quantitative approaches took over it changed the world.

Does it really need a domestic application to be interesting? It might not fit a Western political agenda, but I still enjoyed reading about it.

In any case, the information pertained mostly to the interactions between individuals and municipal authorities. I don't know that those relationships are really so disparate here and abroad. The political structure may differ, but the dynamic is probably very similar to what you see in democracies with a low voter-participation rate: aggregate everyday behavior winds up being a better mode of communication between the group and the authority than election results or town-hall meetings.

Also consider: corporate life. Pretty much every major corporation and most managers have to deal with the issue of foot draggers. That's why getting buy-in for new initiatives and policies is considered a worthy goal.

Civil disobedience (such as the Rosa Parks, the Boston Tea Party, and lunch counter sit-ins) has been a vehicle for social and political change since forever.

This constructive noncompliance seems more pragmatic than political, to the point that it feels like a distinct form of disobedience to me. Your examples come to mind exactly because of their tight association with grander social-change movements, and I think that context sets them apart from individual acts of noncompliance in response to ill-conceived legislation. Where civil disobedience is often based in morality and identity politics and aims to reform broad inequities in society with a visible campaign, the examples of civil noncompliance seem to focus on the political change effected when individuals quietly eliminate minute inefficiencies by ignoring detrimental laws.

And there may be something to be said for covert noncompliance in a democracy where strongly polarized political parties shoot down visible campaigns the moment they take off. Civil disobedience (openly democratic) is about kickstarting the political process, swaying society in the hopes of swaying their representatives. But civil noncompliance (covertly democratic) is about bypassing politics entirely, forcing authorities to either punish the community at large or acknowledge the impotence of the law in question.

This is all very stream-of-consciousness on my end, hopefully it's coming across with some clarity.

Disagree. As the article implies they expected this to be MORE common in democracies than in more authoritarian systems like China but they were surprised that even rural Chinese often disobey laws they disagree with.

There are many examples of laws being widely ignored and the government eventually giving up on enforcement and/or changing the law to conform to popular behavior. Good examples in the U.S. include prohibition, homosexuality, cannabus, speeding, illegal immigration... In all the cases some government decided enforcement or laws should be weakened in the face of popular noncompliance. There are many more examples as this is quite common.

Isn't this exactly what is working for Uber and AirBnB? As far as I can tell, what they are doing is mildly illegal in most of their major markets, but once sufficient economic benefit and traction was demonstrated, it made it very hard for officials to ignore it.

It seems a terrible precedent to set that the disobedience be driven by a corporation that provides a service, rather than consumers, but it also seems that a corporation's legal pockets are much deeper and the disobedience can be enacted on a much larger, safer scale. i.e. if I disobey the law, I can go to prison. If Uber disobeys the law, and has a million customers, Uber just stalls in court and lobbies, and nobody goes to prison, nobody gets a criminal record, and nobody gets hurt. Its a fun subversion of the legal protection that corporations afford the individuals that work for them.

It does help when you have a few hundred million dollars in the bank too. Welcome to real world, where if you are rich, you can break the law as you see fit.

The example of Night School is instructive here. They tried to disrupt transportation while playing by the rules. For their pains, they were shut down.

For a book that talks a lot about this as a vehicle for political demands, see James Scott's Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance.

...and, slightly off-topic, for a book that talks a lot about scientific forestry, colonization in Tanzania and the pitfalls of centralized cultural and city planning see James C. Scott's Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes To Improve The Human Condition Have Failed.

One hole that this study has (in my opinion) is that it asks people people about what they would do in a certain situation instead of observing them in that situation (admittedly more difficult when you're talking about not following rules of law).

But I can't help wondering if the numbers in this study would be very different if it observed actions rather than words. A lot of people talk big, but don't follow through when it comes to acting.

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