At twenty-four I was described, in writing, as “not a natural fit for structure.”
This was London, in a job I took because it paid rent in a postcode I had no business living in. The offence was that I had asked my manager why we did something a particular way. When the answer turned out to be a shrug wearing a suit, I asked again.
For about a decade I assumed that made me a bit of a pain. Twenty-something me rather enjoyed the story, if I’m honest. Sceptic. Contrarian. Doesn’t do well with bosses. Very cool, very tortured, absolutely useless as an explanation.
The duller version is closer to the truth. I wasn’t rejecting authority. I was running a quiet test on it, and most people failed inside ten seconds. The test was simple: can you tell me why?
We start filtering people absurdly early
Here’s what surprised me when I went looking into it. This starts obscenely early. Long before the bad haircut. Try age three.
Developmental psychologists have spent twenty years running a very simple experiment. Show a small child two adults. One of them labels familiar objects correctly, the other gets them wrong. Then have both adults name an object the child has never seen. Who does the child believe?
Kids didn’t side with whoever was louder, or friendlier. Researchers found that three and four-year-olds track which adult had been accurate before, then side with that adult when new information is on the table. A follow-up study got more precise about it: three-year-olds tend to write someone off after a single mistake, while four-year-olds start weighing how often someone gets it wrong, which is a rather generous upgrade in a single year of life.
Psychologists call this selective trust. In plain English, toddlers are already auditing their sources. Nobody teaches them this. It appears to come with the hardware, because the alternative is believing every confident adult in the room, which is how you end up eating something you shouldn’t.
The because-I-said-so problem
So if we all arrive with a working audit function, why do some of us end up with it turned up to eleven?
One answer sits in a body of work on how parents enforce rules. The psychologist Martin Hoffman split parental discipline into three rough camps. Power assertion is force, or the threat of it. Love withdrawal is the silent treatment. Induction is explaining the reasoning behind a rule, including what the child’s behaviour costs other people.
Induction wins, repeatedly. Children raised with explanations rather than commands show stronger moral internalisation, meaning they carry the standard around with them instead of only obeying when someone is watching.
Diana Baumrind’s research points in the same direction from a different angle. In what she called authoritative parenting, parents are warm but firm, and they back up their expectations with reasons. In the stricter, authoritarian style, reasons simply aren’t part of the deal. A review spanning 428 studies across multiple regions of the world found the authoritative approach came out ahead almost everywhere researchers looked.
Now flip that around. If you grew up where reasons were freely given, you learned that reasons are normal. You expect them. And when you meet someone in a position of power who won’t produce one, your instrument twitches, because in your experience the people worth listening to have never had a problem showing their working.
It’s calibration, working exactly as designed, in a room full of people who’d rather not be measured.
What people are actually reading when they judge authority
There’s a whole field devoted to this question, and it comes from an unlikely place: policing.
Tom Tyler spent decades asking why people comply with the law. The obvious answer is fear of punishment. Tyler’s research suggested otherwise. People cooperate with authority mostly because they judge it to be legitimate, and that judgment turns more on how a decision gets made than on what the decision turns out to be.
His model has four parts: voice, meaning you got to say your piece before the decision landed. Neutrality, meaning the rules were applied consistently rather than invented on the spot. Respect, meaning you were treated as a person. And trustworthiness, meaning the person deciding seemed to actually care what happened to you.
Three of those four are basically about explanation. Voice is being asked. Neutrality is a reason that would still hold for the next person. Trustworthiness is showing the thinking behind the call. What Tyler found in police stops and courtrooms is what my instrument had been picking up in that London meeting room years earlier, badly and rudely, but accurately.
Why it looks like rebellion from the outside
There’s a second thing going on, and it explains the misread.
Jack Brehm’s theory of psychological reactance holds that when someone’s freedom to choose gets restricted or threatened, they experience an unpleasant jolt and become motivated to take that freedom back. Sometimes by doing exactly what they were told not to.
What people usually miss is this. Reactance is a state, triggered by a moment, not a fixed feature of someone’s personality. It goes up when the freedom feels important and the pressure feels heavy. An unexplained order is a heavy bit of pressure, so it reliably produces the jolt.
Which means the sequence runs the wrong way round from how it looks. The observer sees defiance and concludes “rebellious type.” What actually happened is that someone issued an instruction with no reasoning attached, the instrument twitched, the jolt arrived, and the questioning followed. The missing explanation comes first. The behaviour follows it.
You get blamed for the smoke rather than the fire.
When the filter hardens into a wall
I want to be straight about the other side of this, because it would be convenient to write a piece where everyone who distrusts authority is secretly a hero.
Researchers who study what they call epistemic trust, our basic willingness to accept information from other people as reliable and relevant to us, draw a line between two things. Vigilance is the healthy sorting mechanism, the thing that lets you relax your guard around people who’ve earned it while staying alert elsewhere. Epistemic mistrust is different: a settled state where all incoming information gets treated as suspect, and learning shuts down entirely.
The difference is whether the door can open. A vigilant person is looking for a reason to trust you and will use one if you hand it over. A mistrustful person has stopped looking, and no explanation clears the bar, because the bar isn’t really about explanations any more.
Worth working out honestly which one you are. The tell I use on myself: when someone gives me a genuinely good reason, does anything actually change? If the answer is no, I’ve stopped filtering and started defending.
What I do with it now
A few things that have made this easier to live with.
Ask early, ask plainly, and frame it as a request rather than a challenge. “What’s the thinking behind that?” costs nothing and gets you most of what you need. Tone does about ninety per cent of the work here.
Then watch behaviour over words. A trustworthy person who doesn’t know the reason will usually say so. An untrustworthy one gets bigger, gets offended, or reaches for their job title. The size of the reaction is the data.
Separate won’t from can’t. Some people have good reasons they aren’t free to share, and treating that as evasion will cost you decent relationships. Ask whether they’re allowed to explain. Sometimes the honest answer is no, and that answer itself tells you plenty.
And the one that took me longest, being late to it as usual: give your reasons away freely. If this is your filter, other people are running it on you too. Explaining yourself when you don’t strictly have to is the cheapest trust you will ever buy.
The manager who called me difficult had the behaviour right. He just never worked out the cause. I didn’t want to run the place. I wanted someone to tell me why the thing was the way it was, and I’d have gone quiet immediately, probably for years.
Nobody ever did. So I kept asking. Eventually somebody paid me to write the questions down instead, which feels like a reasonable outcome for a difficult person.
