Where does compliance collide?

In social psychology, compliance is a change in behavior that comes in direct response to a request from another person. Cialdini and Goldstein's 2004 review, Social Influence: Compliance and Conformity, treats it as one of three influence outcomes and describes the techniques that raise it, such as foot-in-the-door (a small request first) and door-in-the-face (a large request first). It is worth keeping apart from conformity, which is matching a group when no one has directly asked, and from obedience, which is following an order from an authority. The referent is a person saying yes to a specific request, and it has nothing to do with a patient following a prescription, the stretch of a blood vessel, or a firm obeying a regulation.[1]

Unit

A yes given in direct response to a request

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied in experiments and field settings as the rate at which people agree to a stated request under different framings

In medicine, compliance is the extent to which a patient's behavior matches a prescribed regimen, such as taking a medicine on schedule, following a diet, or keeping appointments. Vrijens and colleagues' 2012 taxonomy sets out how such behavior is defined and measured across the course of treatment. The field has largely moved from the word compliance, which many read as suggesting a patient who simply obeys, toward adherence and concordance, which frame care as a shared decision. That relabeling is a jangle-adjacent shift: much the same behavior renamed to change its tone, which is why this site also carries a separate entry for adherence. Nothing here is health advice; the point is only what the word names.[2]

Unit

The share of a prescribed regimen a patient actually follows

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Estimated by pill counts, pharmacy refill records, electronic monitoring devices, and patient self-report, each with known limits

In physiology, compliance is the distensibility of a hollow organ or vessel: the change in volume produced by a given change in pressure, written as ΔV/ΔP. A highly compliant lung or artery expands a lot for a small rise in pressure, while a stiff one expands little. Westerhof, Lankhaar, and Westerhof's 2009 review, The arterial Windkessel, treats arterial compliance as the storage term that lets large vessels buffer each heartbeat, and Lutfi's 2017 review covers lung compliance in the same volume-per-pressure terms. The referent is a mechanical property of living tissue, measured in units of volume per pressure. It is not a person yielding to a request, a patient following orders, or an organization obeying a rule.[3][4]

Unit

Change in volume per change in pressure, in volume per unit pressure

Recovery means

Elastic recoil returns the organ or vessel toward its resting volume as pressure falls

Measured by

Derived from pressure and volume records, such as a lung's pressure-volume curve or an artery's change in diameter with pressure

In law and business, regulatory compliance is an organization conforming to the laws, rules, and standards that apply to it. Firms staff compliance functions and run governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) programs meant to detect and prevent violations. Parker and Nielsen's 2009 study, Corporate Compliance Systems, asks whether such systems actually change what a firm does. The referent is an organization's conformity to external rules, judged against statutes and codes and checked by audit and enforcement. It shares only the word with the stretch of a blood vessel, the beat of a heart's demand on it, or a single person saying yes to a request.[5]

Unit

An organization's conformity to applicable laws, rules, and standards

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed through audits, inspections, enforcement and violation records, and internal compliance reporting