Anticipatory obedience

Anticipatory obedience describes the moment people start complying with what they guess an authority wants before anyone has actually ordered them to, or quietly stop resisting demands while genuine resistance was still possible. The Yale historian Timothy Snyder popularized the term, warning that individuals often think ahead about what a more repressive government is likely to want and then offer that compliance unasked, which teaches power what it can get away with and can open the door to further, harsher demands. Snyder pointed to Austria in 1938, where ordinary citizens and local Nazi officials began forcing Jewish neighbors to scrub streets on their own initiative, without any formal order, a wave of voluntary cruelty that convinced Nazi leadership they could escalate further, culminating months later in the organized violence of Kristallnacht. The historian of science Ute Deichmann found a parallel pattern among German university administrators and scientists, who moved to dismiss Jewish colleagues before any decree compelled them to, signaling loyalty and protecting their own funding. The concept builds on Stanley Milgram's classic obedience experiments but goes a step further, describing people who comply with authority's presumed wishes even without being directly told to.