Docile minds: a neuro-philosophical framework for understanding non-conscious compliance in social governance systems

Compliance with social norms is standardly explained as voluntary action grounded in conscious deliberation. This paper challenges that assumption through philosophical synthesis rather than a new mechanism. It clarifies what predictive processing and habit learning imply for Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian social theory, read alongside Bourdieu’s habitus, Mead’s pragmatist account of habit, mindshaping, and constructed emotion. Normative environments supply structured statistical regularities that the brain encodes as priors, making norm-conforming action the path of least prediction error and often the cognitive default. The Disciplinary Encoding Model is an integrative vocabulary, not a novel mechanism. The mechanisms are domain-general; what distinguishes normative compliance is the social organization of its inputs, since institutions manufacture regularities that are sanction-bearing, self-referential, and maintained for coordination, modulating their encoding precision and affective weight. Three implications follow. The conscious and the non-conscious form a graded continuum rather than a dichotomy. Agency is neither eliminated nor intact but structurally constrained, a position the account refines with mechanistic specification from relational autonomy and moral luck. Responsibility is distributed: institutions securing compliance below reflective endorsement bear structural responsibility. The contribution is conceptual: a neurocognitive vocabulary that sharpens, rather than replaces, the accounts it joins.