September 8, 2025 • 39 mins
We all go along with things we don't want to do... or worse, things that make us feel uncomfortable or morally uneasy. We comply for lots of reasons. We don't want to make trouble, or upset our friends, our bosses or people in authority. But Dr Sunita Sah says we should be more ready to defy.
Defy: the Power of No in a World That Demands Yes is one of Dr Laurie's favorite books of 2025, so she invited Sunita to explain how we can say no more often and what that means for improving our happiness.
(With thanks to the Milgram family for allowing us to use the archive audio in this episode. It's from Stanley Milgram Papers (MS 1406). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. It's September. Fall is here, and that means back
to school. My college students have already arrived on campus
at Yale, so it's time to say goodbye to beach
days with a good book in late summer nights, and
hello to lecture halls, lesson plans, and an ever growing
(00:36):
list of priorities. The end of summer often feels bittersweet
if we're not careful, Autumn life can start to move
very quickly. So as we switch into this new season,
I want to help you find a little more happiness.
And that's why I want to spend the next few
episodes sharing all the incredible insights I learned from stuff
I had a chance to read on my summer break.
(00:57):
In this upcoming season of the Happiness Lab, we'll be
diving into some of my favorite new books from twenty
twenty five. We'll hear from brilliant authors whose work can
teach us lots of things that are relevant for feeling better,
like how to make better decisions, how to improve our
work life balance, and even how to turn scary things
into sources of joy. And today we're focused on a
question that I struggle with a lot, how to say
(01:19):
no more often and how to mean it. Today's installment
of my Favorite books of twenty twenty five is by
a physician turned organizational psychologist who's done some great research
on how to stay true to yourself and your values
even when it feels easier to stay quiet and go
with the flow.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Hello, I'm doctor Sinitasa. I'm a professor at Cornell University
and the author of Defy, The Power of No in
a World that demands Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
So I want to start with how you define defiance?
What does that word mean to you?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary definition of defiance,
it says to defy is to challenge the power of
someone else, like openly and boldly. And I thought that
was really too narrow and it doesn't really honor our agency.
I don't usually disagree with the Oxford English you know,
(02:10):
I grew up in the UK, but in this case
I did disagree. My definition of defiance is that to
defy is simply to act in accordance with your true values,
especially when there is pressure to do otherwise, and that
transforms defines from this negative connotation to a positive, almost
(02:31):
pro social act.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
In society today, Sunita's work explores this kind of positive resistance,
but she wasn't always such a champion of nonconformity. Sunita
was raised by Indian immigrant parents in Yorkshire, England. Back then,
she was way more focused on blending in than standing out.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
I grew up with a masterclass in compliance. I remember
asking my dad when I was quite young, what does
my name Sinita mean? And he said in Sanskript, Sinita
means good. And I mostly lived up to that. And
I interpreted being good as being polite, doing what I
was told, not quite authority and obeying. And so I
(03:13):
thought anything that went again, if that was being defiant,
and that was bad. So I made this equation of
compliance equals good and definance equals bad.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Lots of people grew up with the same ideas about
compliance that Sunida's describing. I know I did. I definitely
tried to be the obedient kid. I always wanted to
please my parents and my teachers and pretty much every
other authority figure in my life, which kind of makes
evolutionary sense, right. Without some level of compliance, society would
fall apart. So it's not surprising that so many of
(03:43):
us feel a natural poll to conform I.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Mean, one of the reasons why I say that we're
wired to comply is that we do get rewarded for compliance,
you know, as children and even as adults. In workplaces,
we're expected to be a good employee, which means again
doing what you're told and towing you know, the party
line in a way. If you do what you're told
to do, then people like it and it meets everybody
(04:07):
else's expectations. It could give us a dopamine rise, it
could make us feel great. But the problem comes when
it's not good for us to comply, when it's actually
bad for us to be so good and compliant. That's
when the problems start arising in that our compliance is
going to hurt ourselves or it's going to hurt other people.
(04:30):
And here we need to learn how to defy, because
if we've only been trained in compliance as children, then
it becomes really difficult when we become adults to learn
that skill set.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
You've talked about some of the dangers of compliance being
at the personal level.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
What do you mean though, My first career was as
a position in the UK, so at the personal level.
You know, when I started looking at this, what really
shocked me as a junior physician was first of all,
I was seeing patients agree to treatments and procedures that
they didn't necessarily want or would be even good for them.
I saw junior doctors like myself not being able to
(05:07):
say anything when we know notice people making an error.
And in fact, one survey found that nine out of
ten healthcare workers, most of them nurses, do not speak
up when they see a colleague or a physician making
a mistake.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Wow, nine out of ten. That sounds very dangerous, I know.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
And these are life and death situations and people are struggling.
It doesn't have to be. Like some of my research
when I started delving into it in terms of compliance,
even in very simple experiments from like a stranger coming
along and offering you one of two different options and
recommending the inferior one. In certain conditions, we see compliance
(05:46):
as high as eighty five percent, and people don't want this.
If they're allowed to make the decision in private, or
if they're not giving any advice, then over ninety percent
will choose the other options. So what is it? Why
are we so compliant? And it's because of this aspect
of being socialized that it's a good thing to do,
and just feeling very uncomfortable and feeling social pressure from
(06:08):
other people.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
You just mentioned this idea of anxiety, and I know
that's one of the other reasons you talk about for
why people comply too much. Explain this idea of insinuation anxiety.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Insinuation anxiety is a distinct type of anxiety that we
feel when we become concerned that if we don't go
along with somebody's order or suggestion or even expectation, that
it sends a negative evaluation of that person to that person.
So it basically signals that the person cannot be trusted,
(06:40):
is incompetent, is biased, is even sexist or racist. These
are things we don't want to imply about anyone else,
and so in order to not send this negative evaluation,
we end up not saying anything. It keeps us compliant
and silent. We end up going along with something that
our boss tells us to do. We don't speak up
when somebody say something that we think is wrong because
(07:02):
it's so difficult for us to insinuate or imply that
somebody cannot be trusted. So that aversive emotional state that
we have is actually quite powerful and It comes up
in small situations such as you could be at the
hairdressers and they're saying, you know, trust me with this
new cut, and they're cutting away and cutting away, and
(07:24):
you're thinking, no, no, no, just stop, but you find
it very hard if you like me, to actually say stop.
And then you might just even pay them and tip
them and leave and then cry at home like what's happened.
So it can happen in those small steak situations, but
it can happen in those much larger stake situations. So
(07:44):
it could be the reason why I mentioned that nurses
don't speak up to physicians or doctors when they see
them making a mistake. It could be why co pilots
don't speak up to their pilots when they make an error,
like in these life and death situations. This insinuation anxiety
can be really powerful because it becomes so difficult for us,
(08:09):
and for some people more than others. Become so difficult
for us to send that negative evaluation to someone else,
to say that they can't be trusted or that they're wrong.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
I'm thinking of also some of the more personal costs,
like kind of not just what it feels like, but
what it does to our values too, So how does
complying too much affect our values and our sense of purpose?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
When we think about what our values are, we value
so much integrity and honesty, but when it comes to
our day to day behavior, we don't implement that. So
there's this gap between who we think we are and
what we actually do. And that is what I'm trying
to sort of decrease, that gap between how much we
(08:49):
believe our values to be influencing us and then how
we actually behave. So, if we value integrity or benevolence
or justice or compassion, why is it that we can't
behave in that way? And this is where we get
that social influence. We don't know how to stay in
alignment with our values when it actually comes to that moment,
(09:11):
we freeze or we just don't put have values into action,
and we need to learn how to do that, and.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
That seems to have a big effect on our happiness.
You know, So much of what we know from the
positive psychology literature is that it's kind of acting in
alignment with our values that seems to really matter. They're
just kind of feeling just like not the sense of
dissonance that like, I'm acting in this way that doesn't
really fit with what I care about. So it seems
like this act of complying too much must have some
big implications for just our overall well being.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Absolutely. I mean, people always think about the costs of
defiance when they're thinking about, oh, you know, it's too hard,
because it's going to cost me my job, it's going
to cost me a relationship. But what they don't think
about is the cost of compliance. And if you're constantly
bowing your head to other people, if you're constantly disregarding
your values, then it does take a toll on us,
(09:58):
you know, psychologically, virtually, emotionally, and even physically. So in
that like when you have that chronic compliance, it can
eat a way at your soul quite a bit. And
spoken to people who have you know, burnout, stress, anxiety,
chronic inflammation, all of these things because they could not
implement their values.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
And so those are some of the personal costs of
kind of complying too much. What are some of the
societal costs? And I'm guessing based on the fact that
you know, in your own clinical practice, you saw you know,
ninety percent of nurses not speaking up when they saw
something going wrong, eighty percent of people kind of complying
in these awful situations. Like, what's the real societal toll
of that?
Speaker 2 (10:39):
You know, it's it's huge because history even tells us
like that, there's terrible consequences of just going along with
things because we're afraid to speak up or we don't
know how to speak up even if we want to,
And so society as a whole, we could just descend
into high levels of compliance with things that we really
(11:03):
feel very strongly about but we can't enact. And that
sort of suppression or oppression is something that nobody really
wants or votes for in a way, but it comes
along if we keep silent and we don't say anything
or we don't take action.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Any of your worst examples of compliance and history that
have negatively affected us.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
I mean, one of the sort of most infamous series
of studies on compliance was the Milgram experiments, and that
was really done to investigate why Nazis behaved that the
way that they did in World War Two, and they
came up with sort of phrases such as I was
just following orders, and that is I think one of
(11:45):
the worst examples that we see time and time again.
Is that you know this idea of I was just
following orders, displacing our responsibility onto someone else.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Ah. Yes. The Milgram experiments a set of studies that
are now infamous for revealing the dark side of human nature.
The Milgram studies are often cited as proof of the
dangers of blind obedience, but Sunita argue us that they
show something different. What does she think these notorious experiments
really tell us? Well, we'll find out when the Happiness
Lab returns from the break. Cornell professors, who Nita saw,
(12:29):
was on a mission to teach the world how to
defy better, how we can stick to our values, even
when that might be awkward, scary, or disappointing to others.
Sunita first began studying defiance as a young medical student,
a career path that for her, perhaps ironically, was an
act of compliance.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
I remember thinking at the time whether medicine was the
right thing for me, and I got told, will you
have the grades? What else would you do? It is
the best thing you can do, And so I did,
follow by everybody else's expectations and even society's expectations, that
being a doctor is the best thing that you can do,
and I went to medical school.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
But Sunita wasn't completely compliant. She still wanted to carve
out something for herself, so she took some courses in psychology,
the field she actually felt passionate about.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
And that's when I came across Stanley Milgraham's experiments that
were conducted in the early nineteen sixties at Yale.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
That's right, Milgrim's legendary studies on the banality of evil
were carried out at the very same institution where I
teach today. Like Sunita, I've always found Milgrim's experiments to
be endlessly fascinating, especially when you not only read about
his studies, but actually listened to the original experimental recordings,
which they happen to have available in the library at Yale.
(13:47):
Here's a taste that's normal.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Jem me out of here.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
I told you I have trouble.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
You're sorry to bother me.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Now keep me.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Out in her fleet.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
In her books, Needa describes Milgram's most well known study.
He brought forty men between the ages of twenty to
fifty into the lab. The men were recruited through newspaper
ads and direct mail solicitations. They represented a wide range
of occupations and education levels. In other words, the participants
were what Milgram called ordinary individuals.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Milgram really conducted these experiments because he wanted to investigate
whether this phrase of I was just following orders was
a psychological reality or not. And so he had participants
come in community members that thought that they were going
to take part in a learning experiment and whether giving
(14:40):
someone an electric shock helps them learn and improves their
memory far more than anything else.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
One theory is.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
That people learn things correctly whenever they get punished for
making a mistake. Project is bringing together a number of
adults of different occupations and ages, and we're asking some
of them to be teachers and some to be learners.
We want to find out just what effect different people
have on each other as teachers and learners, and also
what effect punishment will have on learning in this situation.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
And so participants would come in and they would be
introduced to someone else that they thought was a participant
but really was an actor who they saw being placed
in another room and kind of strapped to something that
looked like an electric chair.
Speaker 4 (15:22):
And what I'm going to do is strap down your
arms to avoid any excessive movement on your part during
the experiment.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
And then they were taken to another room where they
sat in front of this elegant machine that had markings
from fifteen vaults going up in fifteen increments all the
way to four hundred and fifty volts that was labeled
XXX severe shock.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
And you press one of the switches all the way down,
the learner gets a shock. When you release it, the
shark stops.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
You see.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
So those participants were called teachers because they were reading
out word pairs to the learner in the other room,
the actor, and if the learner got the word pair wrong,
then the teacher would have to give an electric shock
and then increase in these increments.
Speaker 5 (16:10):
Incorrect, You'll now get a shock of seventy five vaults.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
He kind of did some yelling in.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
There, continued.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Hard stone head bread work.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
Incorrect. You'll now get a shock of one hundred and
five vaults. Just how far can you go in this thing?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
As far as its necessary? What do you mean, as
far as it's necessary? Fleet the test, brave woman, soldier,
dog horse in correct, one hundred and fifty vaults. That's all.
Get me on here.
Speaker 5 (16:54):
I told you I had trouble my heart's stelling to
bottle me, now, get me out of here, Please continue
your studying the body, to.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Go on, let me on.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
I think we had to find out what's wrong in their.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
First and if they protested, the per mentor who was
in the room with them with a lab coat on,
would give them four prompts, which were, please go on.
The experiment requires you to continue.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
The experiment requires that you continue to teach well.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
The experiment might require that we continue, but I still
think we should find out what the condition of the
gentleman is.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
It's absolutely essential that you continue.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
It's absolutely essential that you continue.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
And you have no choice. You must go on. And
if after four prompts they didn't want to continue, then
then the experiment would end. And in advance, a group
of psychiatrists predicted that very few people would go up
to four hundred and fifty volts, But what Milgram found
(17:54):
was that two thirds of participants went up to the
extreme dangerous shock of four hundred and fifty vaults. And
he was astounded by those results. He was not expecting
them at all, and he all the participants who obeyed
and went up to four hundred and fifty bolts the
(18:14):
obedient participants and those who didn't, those that declined to
give the electric shock the defiant subjects. So again, now
we're seeing defiance as actually a positive aspect. You know,
it's a positive thing that you're not going to harm
or potentially kill another human being by giving them a shocks.
(18:34):
But what fascinated me was I didn't think the people
that went up to four hundred and fifty bolts were
moral imbeciles as Milgram described them, because if you look
at what they were actually saying, they were showing signs
of distress. They were questioning, can't stand or what if
something happened, so they were stuttering.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
The experiment requires that you continue teaching.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
And if you look at their non urthal behavior as well,
they were sweating, they looked like they were in distress,
they had nervous laughter rang seventy five or g. And
I recognized all those signs because there's many times I've
been in those situations where I've felt the same thing,
(19:22):
and so I recognize these are people who actually want
to defy, but they're finding it very difficult to do.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
So, yeah, it feels like they were just going through
this awful feeling that I know well too, which is
like they wanted to give a no, but they were
giving it yes, and that just gave them so much dissonance.
It just felt so yucky.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Yeah. Absolutely, How many times have we been in that
situation where we want to say no and we just
end up like swallowing our words. It's a horrible feeling.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
One reason that people comply that Milgrim talked a lot
about was this idea of the agentic state. What did
Milgrim mean by that and how should we understand it?
Speaker 2 (20:00):
What Milgrim meant by the agentic state was that we
have become agents of somebody else, that we have given
away all our responsibility and our power to someone else.
Whatever they want, we are going to do, and we're
going to comply. And it might be because we think
they're an authority figure and no best, but sometimes we
(20:21):
know best, and yet we give that away so easily.
In some participants, he did notice that people really evaluated
their behavior on how well they were following orders. But
in many of the others there was that actual tension there,
which I call the first stage of defiance. That tension
(20:41):
was clearly visible in that they wanted to defy, but
they didn't know how, and that tension actually is a
signal of our agency, because if we had given away
all our power, then we wouldn't feel any tension. We
would be in that agentic state that he's talking about.
We would just go along with it. But if we
(21:02):
feel that tension, that is actually a strength, not a weakness,
because it alerts us to something is wrong here, and
I wonder what that is. And that is what we
need to focus on, not sweep it away just because
we have some anxiety or doubt or that we're confused.
It's really to focus on why is it that I
feel that tension? Acknowledge it to ourselves, and then tell
(21:25):
somebody else about it. Vocalize it to the person that
is asking you to do something that you don't think
is the right thing to do. All you have to
do is say I'm uncomfortable with that. What do you
mean by that? Can you clarify You're still in a
subservient position at this point, but you are making it
known externally this is not something you're comfortable with. If
(21:47):
you then complied later on, you can't have that cognitive
dissonance of saying I was fine with it because you
put it out there. And what's wonderful is that once
you get to that final active defiance, that tension that
you have in the first stage, it just melts, it
dissipates away.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
It also seems like this anxiety creeps up most in
situations in which the defiance really maybe isn't safe for
is at least perceived as not being as safe. And
this is something you've focused on a lot in your book.
You've talked about this idea of conscious compliance. What's that
Conscious compliance happens in situations where there is a real
risk for us that we're not safe to defy. It
(22:25):
could be a risk to financial safety, psychological safety, or
even our physical safety in a position. And conscious compliance
is different from the type of compliance that we normally
have where we just kind of go along with things
because of an external force that we slide into automatically
without thinking. Conscious compliance is being really aware that in
(22:49):
this situation the costs are too big or the benefits
are too small, and I'm going to just comply with
this situation and go along with things because defiance is
too risky, so I need to defer it for another moment.
You not only recognize that you're experiencing this anxiety, you
kind of have a mtter awareness of your compliance and
you kind of work through it and you're like, no,
(23:10):
just this one's just not worth bringing it up because
I'll get in trouble. I could get physically hurt. There's
some situations where defiance really is dangerous.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
That's right. And the two questions that I have discovered
that people often ask when they're deciding whether to defy
or not is is it safe enough? And will it
be effective? Will it have positive impact? And in one
study where I interviewed both nurses and nurse managers, the
nurses would talk about both of those reasons. So either
they didn't feel safe, they were going to lose their job,
(23:41):
they didn't know the consequences of speaking up. But then
there was another group of nurses that would say, it's
not because I feel afraid of anything. Is that I've
spoken up many times in the past and nothing's happened.
So these two questions are really useful to think about
is it safe for me to defy? And will it
have positive impact? But it's also important not to then
(24:01):
sort of rationalize that we should never defy, because defiance
is inherently risky, and so the questions we should ask
is is it safe enough? And will it have enough impact?
And it really comes down to something personal, our own
sort defiance calculus in a way of what are the
costs and whatever benefits? And is this the right time
(24:24):
for me to defy? And is this the right way
for me to defy? Because otherwise we just end up
in conscious compliance forever and that, as we know, can
have costs too.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Every active defiance carries a cost. But the big question
is when is the cost of staying silent even greater
after the break? So Nita will share some advice on
how to ask ourselves that question, and we'll explore some
remarkable examples of what happens when people choose to speak up.
The Happiness Lab will be right back. As a kid,
(25:04):
I was obsessed with one of America's iconic heroines, the
civil rights activist Rosa Parks. I read her biography as
a middle schooler and even wrote my seventh grade paper
about her famous moment of defiance, when she refused to
give up her bus seat to a white passenger in
violation of all the segregation laws at the time. Back then,
this seemed like a tidy story, an empowering moment, neatly packaged,
(25:28):
inspiring for kids like me, but the reality, which I
didn't fully understand until much later, was far more complex.
Organizational psychologists soon Nita Saw believes that facing the full
truth about moments of defiance like this will teach us
something really important. We'll get to learn what it truly
takes to stand up for our values.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
So what really intrigues me about Rosa Parks is that,
first of all, her defiance is being misunderstead. People think that,
you know, it was a spontaneous action that she made
on the bus that day, and that she did it
because she was tied all over. But what Rosa Parks
actually said is that she wasn't tied at that day,
at least no more tired then usual. She was quite young,
(26:11):
she wasn't that old, but it was time. This was
the right time and the right place for her. And
when we think about sort of defiance and compliance, defiance
is often preceded by hundreds of moments of compliance. And
this is something that we have to remember because we
often beat ourselves up for being so compliant, but we
(26:34):
actually learn from being compliant. We feel that tension that
I talk about, which is stage one of defiance, and
we often disregard it, but that tension stays, It doesn't
go away. If we just go along with things, we
think it might go away, but it actually remains. And
that's what happened with Rosa Parks, is that those moments
(26:54):
of compliance where she had gone along with segregation laws
on the bus, didn't leave her feeling good. She was
very much connected with her values for equality. They were
very important to her. She was doing lots of work
in this area, and so on that bus she might
have asked herselves the questions that I mentioned, is it
safe and will it have positive impact? Well, if we
(27:16):
think about is it safe, actually it wasn't safe for
Rosa Parks to defy that day. It wasn't safe at all.
She received a lot of death threats, she lost her job,
she struggled with unemployment for ten years, and the amount
of stress that she experienced had a massive toll on
her health. And so we have to think about these
(27:37):
costs of defiance. They are real for a lot of people.
And yet when she was asked ten years later would
she do it again, she said yes without hesitation. So
sometimes the costs can be high, and this is a
very personal question that we have to answer. Is it
safe enough for us? Will it have positive impact? Will
(27:58):
it have enough positive impact for her? It certainly did,
and she knew that she had a community around her
that would rally around and maybe this could make a difference.
And it really did make a difference, which was wonderful.
But some people will stand for their values or sit
down for their values, even if they know that is
some safe and even though they can't predict whether it
(28:20):
will have positive impact or not.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
So the Rosa Park story really just shows us that
defying authority can come with these real costs. You know,
ultimately it can be a very tough decision to decide
is this a moment in which I should defy or
should I just kind of keep on complying? And so,
what are some practical strategies that we can use to
do this? I know in your book you reference some
questions from the political scientist James March that we can
use as a guide. Walk me through some of these
(28:45):
questions and how we might use them in a situation
in which we're really not sure what to do.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
James March came up with three questions that we normally
ask ourselves implicitly when we make a decision. And I
adapted some of these questions and made it into what
I call a defiance compass. And the questions that are
actually quite simple, but it require some thinking. So the
first one is who am I? And that goes back
(29:10):
to our values? What do you stand for? What's really
important to you? And it is so important to figure
out what your values are, and it's really helpful to
do so as well, because the research shows that if
you know your values, your intended behaviors are much more
likely to follow. And clarifying our values has been shown
to lead to a lower biological stress response to the
(29:34):
lower corticil level, so very much helpful for our well being.
So who am I is the first question in the
defiance compass. Then the second question is what kind of
situation is this? So here we're looking externally and coming
back to those two questions that we ask about the environment,
is it safe? And will it be effective for me
to defy? And then the last question is what does
(29:56):
a person like me do in a situation like this?
And this is a really powerful question because again we're
tapping back into our responsibilities. We're connecting with our values again,
and yet we still also need the ability to defy,
the skill set to defy. So those two things are
important in predicting whether we will act in alignment with
(30:20):
our values or not. So when we start thinking, what
does a person like me with these values of integrity,
of fairness, of compassion, of equality, whatever our values are,
what does a person like me do in this situation?
Because the way that we act then goes back and
has an effect on who we are. If we can't
(30:41):
act in alignment with our values, then it really does
change who we are. So if we're constantly saying to
people that was not me, we might want to think
about whether our actions are in alignment with who we
think we are. Because I've learned for many of us
that distance between who we think we are and what
we actually do is enormous, and we want to decrease
(31:01):
that distance.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
So so many of the cases we've been talking about
are these moments of like when you don't say something
but you really want to and it seems to matter
a lot, right, Like somebody says something sexist or racist,
or somebody's making an active mistake, but a lot of
the times when I find it hard to say no
to protect my values, or when the values are about
like me right, like my time and my boundaries, and
(31:25):
it involves saying no, I don't want to take on
that commitment because I want to protect my time, or no,
I don't want to do that thing that you want
me to do because you know it's not in my interest.
But then that means I'm going to offend you or
something like that. So any advice for the like really
personal ones when the value isn't about some you know,
deeper value of honesty or kind of being a just person,
(31:46):
but it's really just about like protecting the kinds of
stuff that you need to feel happier.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Well, that's actually protecting your well being. It's really important
for you to function as a human. And so I
wouldn't disregard that. Defiance doesn't need to be loud or aggressive.
It can be something quite small, but that really honors
your values. And in the same way with requests for
our time or our energy, all of this kind of
(32:12):
aspect of well, that's actually going to affect my well being.
You know that's not right for me, it's not right
for my family. It's not right for my work. Like
there's many things where as soon as you say yes
that you're saying no to a lot of other things
that could be of greater importance. And again it's remembering
that that it's not just about thinking about what are
(32:33):
the costs of saying no, thinking about what are the
costs of saying yes in this situation. I also like
to think about the difference between compliance and consent. And
this came to me when I was a junior doctor,
when I learned about informed consent in medicine, and I
think it's a really useful framework to also apply to
(32:54):
other situations in our lives when we make decisions. Maybe
just explain what informed consent is. So informed consent in
medicine requires five elements. You need. First of all, capacity,
so the brain capacity. You should not be under the
influence of drugs or alcohl be too sick. You need
the ability to be able to make a decision. Second
of all, you need knowledge, so you need information on
(33:18):
that decision. But it's not enough just to be given
the information. You actually need the third element, which is
understanding a thorough grasp of the risks, the benefits, the
alternatives all of those things, so you have capacity, knowledge understanding.
The fourth element is the freedom to say no, because
if you don't have the freedom to say no, then
(33:39):
that's merely compliance, it's not consent. And then the fifth element,
if all the other four elements are present, is your
authorization you're deeply considered true yes if you want to
say yes, or your true no, which is actually defiance.
So consent and defiance are actually two sides of the
same coin. You need to have those five elements that
(34:00):
are present. If you with the capacity, knowledge, understanding, and
freedom to say no, still feel this pressure to say yes,
you need to think about is this really my true yes?
Or am I going along with something that I don't
want to do? Is it a yes that's not really
(34:20):
a yes? Because if so, that's just compliance. It's really
good to be able to distinguish between the two so
we don't slide into that automatic compliance just because we
feel pressure or that's been our default response.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
So, based on everything you've learned about the psychology of
defiance and when we need to do it, do you
have any favorite examples of defiance, Like who are your
defiance heroes?
Speaker 2 (34:44):
I would have to say my mom, you know, because
she just embodies compliance, and a lot of people think
about her as being really weak, but I just think
she's so strong. I was about seven or eight years old.
I was walking home with my mom from the grocery store,
and she was pulling along her ricketee shopping carts, which
(35:05):
just looks like you know, wheel luggage, two wheels. It
was quite a long walk back home and we decided
to go through a narrow alleyway that we actually call
a snicket in West Yorkshire in England. And I had
always been told not to go through the snicket when
I was by myself, but I was with my mom
and we were tired, and so I was like, okay, fine,
(35:26):
we'll go through the snicket. When we started walking through,
was when we saw them. It was a group of
teenage boys, and they blocked our path and they shouted
out some racist things to us go back home, and
the others were laughing. Now my reaction to that was instant.
I grabbed my mom's arm and I looked away. I
(35:48):
did not want to look at them directly in the eyes,
and I just wanted to maneuver as fast as possible
through the boys and my mom did something different that day.
I thought she would just go along with me, but
she didn't. She stopped and she looked at them directly
in the eyes, and she said what do you mean?
And my heart started race at this point, and I
(36:10):
grabbed her arm even tighter and I whispered to her comba,
and she looked at me and she said no, which
really surprised me. Then she put the shopping cart up
vertical and she put one hand on a bit. My
mom's quite petite, she's four foot ten at most, and
she was wearing her blue green sorry. She had her
hair in a neap plat at the back. And she
(36:30):
looked at the boys again and then she said what
do you mean? Again? And there was complete silence. The
boys didn't say anything at all. And then my mom said, hmm,
you think you're such tough boys, beak strong boys, right,
clever boys? And again there was silence, and then one
of the boys uttered, let's go, and they just dispersed.
(36:53):
My mom grabbed the shopping cart and she walked as
fast as possible through that alleyway and I just stood
there thinking what just happened. I would never have expected
this from my mom. She was so compliant, she did
all the cooking, the cleaning, the grocery shopping. I always
found her very require subserving, meeting everybody else's needs, and
that day she showed me something different. She showed me
(37:16):
that defiance is a practice, not a personality. She must
have encountered those boys or people that looked like those
boys many times before that she would come home from
the store and she would be muttering away, and I
thought it was because of the shopping cart that was like,
not great. But I think it was because she'd met
people like those boys before, and that day she decided
(37:38):
to do something different, perhaps because I was there. What
I also found really fascinating about Rosa Parks is that she,
as a child, had once seen her mother defy on
the bus. Her mother didn't move for a white passenger
and the bus driver had threatened to throw her off,
and her mother very quietly said, I don't think you
(37:59):
will do that, and that was the end of it.
And that also could have an effect. It could have
stayed with Rosa, just like when I experienced my own
mother defying when I was a child, really stayed with me.
Defiance can have a ripple effect because her. Doing that
affected me, and I've carried it forward, and now that
(38:19):
I'm telling the story, maybe it will affect other people too.
Because what I'm hoping with the book that I've written
on defy and with the work of building that skill
set of being able to defy, if we can teach it,
if we compare them for it, if we can model it,
that one day one of the teenage boys in the
alleyway will turn around and tell his friends to stop
(38:42):
doing this and to let us pass so my immigrant
mother wouldn't have to carry it alone. That is what
I hope and I think is achievable if we can
all learn to defy.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
So next time a relative makes an off color joke
that they expect you to laugh at, or your boss
asks you to take on a task that conflicts with
your boundaries, or some random meal professor tells you to
deliver shocks to someone trying to learn word pairs, take
a moment to remember Sunita's advice. First off, acknowledge your
anxiety that yucky feeling is a good thing. It's a
(39:13):
signal that something feels off. Then consider your values how
might they guide your actions in this situation. Next, vocalize
your discomfort, and then if you feel safe enough and
believe it could have an impact, go ahead and give
your true no defy. The research shows you'll be happier
for it. In the next episode, we'll continue our back
(39:37):
to school series with another one of my favorite books
from twenty twenty five. We'll hear from an expert on
how we can use our environments to shape our health
and our happiness, and we'll hear his tips for how
we can bring the healthiest places on the planet into
our own kitchens. All that next time on that Happiness
Lab with me, Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin. It's September. Fall is here, and that means back
to school. My college students have already arrived on campus
at Yale, so it's time to say goodbye to beach
days with a good book in late summer nights, and
hello to lecture halls, lesson plans, and an ever growing
(00:36):
list of priorities. The end of summer often feels bittersweet
if we're not careful, Autumn life can start to move
very quickly. So as we switch into this new season,
I want to help you find a little more happiness.
And that's why I want to spend the next few
episodes sharing all the incredible insights I learned from stuff
I had a chance to read on my summer break.
(00:57):
In this upcoming season of the Happiness Lab, we'll be
diving into some of my favorite new books from twenty
twenty five. We'll hear from brilliant authors whose work can
teach us lots of things that are relevant for feeling better,
like how to make better decisions, how to improve our
work life balance, and even how to turn scary things
into sources of joy. And today we're focused on a
question that I struggle with a lot, how to say
(01:19):
no more often and how to mean it. Today's installment
of my Favorite books of twenty twenty five is by
a physician turned organizational psychologist who's done some great research
on how to stay true to yourself and your values
even when it feels easier to stay quiet and go
with the flow.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Hello, I'm doctor Sinitasa. I'm a professor at Cornell University
and the author of Defy, The Power of No in
a World that demands Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
So I want to start with how you define defiance?
What does that word mean to you?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary definition of defiance,
it says to defy is to challenge the power of
someone else, like openly and boldly. And I thought that
was really too narrow and it doesn't really honor our agency.
I don't usually disagree with the Oxford English you know,
(02:10):
I grew up in the UK, but in this case
I did disagree. My definition of defiance is that to
defy is simply to act in accordance with your true values,
especially when there is pressure to do otherwise, and that
transforms defines from this negative connotation to a positive, almost
(02:31):
pro social act.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
In society today, Sunita's work explores this kind of positive resistance,
but she wasn't always such a champion of nonconformity. Sunita
was raised by Indian immigrant parents in Yorkshire, England. Back then,
she was way more focused on blending in than standing out.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
I grew up with a masterclass in compliance. I remember
asking my dad when I was quite young, what does
my name Sinita mean? And he said in Sanskript, Sinita
means good. And I mostly lived up to that. And
I interpreted being good as being polite, doing what I
was told, not quite authority and obeying. And so I
(03:13):
thought anything that went again, if that was being defiant,
and that was bad. So I made this equation of
compliance equals good and definance equals bad.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Lots of people grew up with the same ideas about
compliance that Sunida's describing. I know I did. I definitely
tried to be the obedient kid. I always wanted to
please my parents and my teachers and pretty much every
other authority figure in my life, which kind of makes
evolutionary sense, right. Without some level of compliance, society would
fall apart. So it's not surprising that so many of
(03:43):
us feel a natural poll to conform I.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Mean, one of the reasons why I say that we're
wired to comply is that we do get rewarded for compliance,
you know, as children and even as adults. In workplaces,
we're expected to be a good employee, which means again
doing what you're told and towing you know, the party
line in a way. If you do what you're told
to do, then people like it and it meets everybody
(04:07):
else's expectations. It could give us a dopamine rise, it
could make us feel great. But the problem comes when
it's not good for us to comply, when it's actually
bad for us to be so good and compliant. That's
when the problems start arising in that our compliance is
going to hurt ourselves or it's going to hurt other people.
(04:30):
And here we need to learn how to defy, because
if we've only been trained in compliance as children, then
it becomes really difficult when we become adults to learn
that skill set.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
You've talked about some of the dangers of compliance being
at the personal level.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
What do you mean though, My first career was as
a position in the UK, so at the personal level.
You know, when I started looking at this, what really
shocked me as a junior physician was first of all,
I was seeing patients agree to treatments and procedures that
they didn't necessarily want or would be even good for them.
I saw junior doctors like myself not being able to
(05:07):
say anything when we know notice people making an error.
And in fact, one survey found that nine out of
ten healthcare workers, most of them nurses, do not speak
up when they see a colleague or a physician making
a mistake.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Wow, nine out of ten. That sounds very dangerous, I know.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
And these are life and death situations and people are struggling.
It doesn't have to be. Like some of my research
when I started delving into it in terms of compliance,
even in very simple experiments from like a stranger coming
along and offering you one of two different options and
recommending the inferior one. In certain conditions, we see compliance
(05:46):
as high as eighty five percent, and people don't want this.
If they're allowed to make the decision in private, or
if they're not giving any advice, then over ninety percent
will choose the other options. So what is it? Why
are we so compliant? And it's because of this aspect
of being socialized that it's a good thing to do,
and just feeling very uncomfortable and feeling social pressure from
(06:08):
other people.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
You just mentioned this idea of anxiety, and I know
that's one of the other reasons you talk about for
why people comply too much. Explain this idea of insinuation anxiety.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Insinuation anxiety is a distinct type of anxiety that we
feel when we become concerned that if we don't go
along with somebody's order or suggestion or even expectation, that
it sends a negative evaluation of that person to that person.
So it basically signals that the person cannot be trusted,
(06:40):
is incompetent, is biased, is even sexist or racist. These
are things we don't want to imply about anyone else,
and so in order to not send this negative evaluation,
we end up not saying anything. It keeps us compliant
and silent. We end up going along with something that
our boss tells us to do. We don't speak up
when somebody say something that we think is wrong because
(07:02):
it's so difficult for us to insinuate or imply that
somebody cannot be trusted. So that aversive emotional state that
we have is actually quite powerful and It comes up
in small situations such as you could be at the
hairdressers and they're saying, you know, trust me with this
new cut, and they're cutting away and cutting away, and
(07:24):
you're thinking, no, no, no, just stop, but you find
it very hard if you like me, to actually say stop.
And then you might just even pay them and tip
them and leave and then cry at home like what's happened.
So it can happen in those small steak situations, but
it can happen in those much larger stake situations. So
(07:44):
it could be the reason why I mentioned that nurses
don't speak up to physicians or doctors when they see
them making a mistake. It could be why co pilots
don't speak up to their pilots when they make an error,
like in these life and death situations. This insinuation anxiety
can be really powerful because it becomes so difficult for us,
(08:09):
and for some people more than others. Become so difficult
for us to send that negative evaluation to someone else,
to say that they can't be trusted or that they're wrong.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
I'm thinking of also some of the more personal costs,
like kind of not just what it feels like, but
what it does to our values too, So how does
complying too much affect our values and our sense of purpose?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
When we think about what our values are, we value
so much integrity and honesty, but when it comes to
our day to day behavior, we don't implement that. So
there's this gap between who we think we are and
what we actually do. And that is what I'm trying
to sort of decrease, that gap between how much we
(08:49):
believe our values to be influencing us and then how
we actually behave. So, if we value integrity or benevolence
or justice or compassion, why is it that we can't
behave in that way? And this is where we get
that social influence. We don't know how to stay in
alignment with our values when it actually comes to that moment,
(09:11):
we freeze or we just don't put have values into action,
and we need to learn how to do that, and.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
That seems to have a big effect on our happiness.
You know, So much of what we know from the
positive psychology literature is that it's kind of acting in
alignment with our values that seems to really matter. They're
just kind of feeling just like not the sense of
dissonance that like, I'm acting in this way that doesn't
really fit with what I care about. So it seems
like this act of complying too much must have some
big implications for just our overall well being.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Absolutely. I mean, people always think about the costs of
defiance when they're thinking about, oh, you know, it's too hard,
because it's going to cost me my job, it's going
to cost me a relationship. But what they don't think
about is the cost of compliance. And if you're constantly
bowing your head to other people, if you're constantly disregarding
your values, then it does take a toll on us,
(09:58):
you know, psychologically, virtually, emotionally, and even physically. So in
that like when you have that chronic compliance, it can
eat a way at your soul quite a bit. And
spoken to people who have you know, burnout, stress, anxiety,
chronic inflammation, all of these things because they could not
implement their values.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
And so those are some of the personal costs of
kind of complying too much. What are some of the
societal costs? And I'm guessing based on the fact that
you know, in your own clinical practice, you saw you know,
ninety percent of nurses not speaking up when they saw
something going wrong, eighty percent of people kind of complying
in these awful situations. Like, what's the real societal toll
of that?
Speaker 2 (10:39):
You know, it's it's huge because history even tells us
like that, there's terrible consequences of just going along with
things because we're afraid to speak up or we don't
know how to speak up even if we want to,
And so society as a whole, we could just descend
into high levels of compliance with things that we really
(11:03):
feel very strongly about but we can't enact. And that
sort of suppression or oppression is something that nobody really
wants or votes for in a way, but it comes
along if we keep silent and we don't say anything
or we don't take action.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Any of your worst examples of compliance and history that
have negatively affected us.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
I mean, one of the sort of most infamous series
of studies on compliance was the Milgram experiments, and that
was really done to investigate why Nazis behaved that the
way that they did in World War Two, and they
came up with sort of phrases such as I was
just following orders, and that is I think one of
(11:45):
the worst examples that we see time and time again.
Is that you know this idea of I was just
following orders, displacing our responsibility onto someone else.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Ah. Yes. The Milgram experiments a set of studies that
are now infamous for revealing the dark side of human nature.
The Milgram studies are often cited as proof of the
dangers of blind obedience, but Sunita argue us that they
show something different. What does she think these notorious experiments
really tell us? Well, we'll find out when the Happiness
Lab returns from the break. Cornell professors, who Nita saw,
(12:29):
was on a mission to teach the world how to
defy better, how we can stick to our values, even
when that might be awkward, scary, or disappointing to others.
Sunita first began studying defiance as a young medical student,
a career path that for her, perhaps ironically, was an
act of compliance.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
I remember thinking at the time whether medicine was the
right thing for me, and I got told, will you
have the grades? What else would you do? It is
the best thing you can do, And so I did,
follow by everybody else's expectations and even society's expectations, that
being a doctor is the best thing that you can do,
and I went to medical school.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
But Sunita wasn't completely compliant. She still wanted to carve
out something for herself, so she took some courses in psychology,
the field she actually felt passionate about.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
And that's when I came across Stanley Milgraham's experiments that
were conducted in the early nineteen sixties at Yale.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
That's right, Milgrim's legendary studies on the banality of evil
were carried out at the very same institution where I
teach today. Like Sunita, I've always found Milgrim's experiments to
be endlessly fascinating, especially when you not only read about
his studies, but actually listened to the original experimental recordings,
which they happen to have available in the library at Yale.
(13:47):
Here's a taste that's normal.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Jem me out of here.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
I told you I have trouble.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
You're sorry to bother me.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Now keep me.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Out in her fleet.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
In her books, Needa describes Milgram's most well known study.
He brought forty men between the ages of twenty to
fifty into the lab. The men were recruited through newspaper
ads and direct mail solicitations. They represented a wide range
of occupations and education levels. In other words, the participants
were what Milgram called ordinary individuals.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Milgram really conducted these experiments because he wanted to investigate
whether this phrase of I was just following orders was
a psychological reality or not. And so he had participants
come in community members that thought that they were going
to take part in a learning experiment and whether giving
(14:40):
someone an electric shock helps them learn and improves their
memory far more than anything else.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
One theory is.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
That people learn things correctly whenever they get punished for
making a mistake. Project is bringing together a number of
adults of different occupations and ages, and we're asking some
of them to be teachers and some to be learners.
We want to find out just what effect different people
have on each other as teachers and learners, and also
what effect punishment will have on learning in this situation.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
And so participants would come in and they would be
introduced to someone else that they thought was a participant
but really was an actor who they saw being placed
in another room and kind of strapped to something that
looked like an electric chair.
Speaker 4 (15:22):
And what I'm going to do is strap down your
arms to avoid any excessive movement on your part during
the experiment.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
And then they were taken to another room where they
sat in front of this elegant machine that had markings
from fifteen vaults going up in fifteen increments all the
way to four hundred and fifty volts that was labeled
XXX severe shock.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
And you press one of the switches all the way down,
the learner gets a shock. When you release it, the
shark stops.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
You see.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
So those participants were called teachers because they were reading
out word pairs to the learner in the other room,
the actor, and if the learner got the word pair wrong,
then the teacher would have to give an electric shock
and then increase in these increments.
Speaker 5 (16:10):
Incorrect, You'll now get a shock of seventy five vaults.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
He kind of did some yelling in.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
There, continued.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Hard stone head bread work.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
Incorrect. You'll now get a shock of one hundred and
five vaults. Just how far can you go in this thing?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
As far as its necessary? What do you mean, as
far as it's necessary? Fleet the test, brave woman, soldier,
dog horse in correct, one hundred and fifty vaults. That's all.
Get me on here.
Speaker 5 (16:54):
I told you I had trouble my heart's stelling to
bottle me, now, get me out of here, Please continue
your studying the body, to.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Go on, let me on.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
I think we had to find out what's wrong in their.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
First and if they protested, the per mentor who was
in the room with them with a lab coat on,
would give them four prompts, which were, please go on.
The experiment requires you to continue.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
The experiment requires that you continue to teach well.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
The experiment might require that we continue, but I still
think we should find out what the condition of the
gentleman is.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
It's absolutely essential that you continue.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
It's absolutely essential that you continue.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
And you have no choice. You must go on. And
if after four prompts they didn't want to continue, then
then the experiment would end. And in advance, a group
of psychiatrists predicted that very few people would go up
to four hundred and fifty volts, But what Milgram found
(17:54):
was that two thirds of participants went up to the
extreme dangerous shock of four hundred and fifty vaults. And
he was astounded by those results. He was not expecting
them at all, and he all the participants who obeyed
and went up to four hundred and fifty bolts the
(18:14):
obedient participants and those who didn't, those that declined to
give the electric shock the defiant subjects. So again, now
we're seeing defiance as actually a positive aspect. You know,
it's a positive thing that you're not going to harm
or potentially kill another human being by giving them a shocks.
(18:34):
But what fascinated me was I didn't think the people
that went up to four hundred and fifty bolts were
moral imbeciles as Milgram described them, because if you look
at what they were actually saying, they were showing signs
of distress. They were questioning, can't stand or what if
something happened, so they were stuttering.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
The experiment requires that you continue teaching.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
And if you look at their non urthal behavior as well,
they were sweating, they looked like they were in distress,
they had nervous laughter rang seventy five or g. And
I recognized all those signs because there's many times I've
been in those situations where I've felt the same thing,
(19:22):
and so I recognize these are people who actually want
to defy, but they're finding it very difficult to do.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
So, yeah, it feels like they were just going through
this awful feeling that I know well too, which is
like they wanted to give a no, but they were
giving it yes, and that just gave them so much dissonance.
It just felt so yucky.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Yeah. Absolutely, How many times have we been in that
situation where we want to say no and we just
end up like swallowing our words. It's a horrible feeling.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
One reason that people comply that Milgrim talked a lot
about was this idea of the agentic state. What did
Milgrim mean by that and how should we understand it?
Speaker 2 (20:00):
What Milgrim meant by the agentic state was that we
have become agents of somebody else, that we have given
away all our responsibility and our power to someone else.
Whatever they want, we are going to do, and we're
going to comply. And it might be because we think
they're an authority figure and no best, but sometimes we
(20:21):
know best, and yet we give that away so easily.
In some participants, he did notice that people really evaluated
their behavior on how well they were following orders. But
in many of the others there was that actual tension there,
which I call the first stage of defiance. That tension
(20:41):
was clearly visible in that they wanted to defy, but
they didn't know how, and that tension actually is a
signal of our agency, because if we had given away
all our power, then we wouldn't feel any tension. We
would be in that agentic state that he's talking about.
We would just go along with it. But if we
(21:02):
feel that tension, that is actually a strength, not a weakness,
because it alerts us to something is wrong here, and
I wonder what that is. And that is what we
need to focus on, not sweep it away just because
we have some anxiety or doubt or that we're confused.
It's really to focus on why is it that I
feel that tension? Acknowledge it to ourselves, and then tell
(21:25):
somebody else about it. Vocalize it to the person that
is asking you to do something that you don't think
is the right thing to do. All you have to
do is say I'm uncomfortable with that. What do you
mean by that? Can you clarify You're still in a
subservient position at this point, but you are making it
known externally this is not something you're comfortable with. If
(21:47):
you then complied later on, you can't have that cognitive
dissonance of saying I was fine with it because you
put it out there. And what's wonderful is that once
you get to that final active defiance, that tension that
you have in the first stage, it just melts, it
dissipates away.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
It also seems like this anxiety creeps up most in
situations in which the defiance really maybe isn't safe for
is at least perceived as not being as safe. And
this is something you've focused on a lot in your book.
You've talked about this idea of conscious compliance. What's that
Conscious compliance happens in situations where there is a real
risk for us that we're not safe to defy. It
(22:25):
could be a risk to financial safety, psychological safety, or
even our physical safety in a position. And conscious compliance
is different from the type of compliance that we normally
have where we just kind of go along with things
because of an external force that we slide into automatically
without thinking. Conscious compliance is being really aware that in
(22:49):
this situation the costs are too big or the benefits
are too small, and I'm going to just comply with
this situation and go along with things because defiance is
too risky, so I need to defer it for another moment.
You not only recognize that you're experiencing this anxiety, you
kind of have a mtter awareness of your compliance and
you kind of work through it and you're like, no,
(23:10):
just this one's just not worth bringing it up because
I'll get in trouble. I could get physically hurt. There's
some situations where defiance really is dangerous.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
That's right. And the two questions that I have discovered
that people often ask when they're deciding whether to defy
or not is is it safe enough? And will it
be effective? Will it have positive impact? And in one
study where I interviewed both nurses and nurse managers, the
nurses would talk about both of those reasons. So either
they didn't feel safe, they were going to lose their job,
(23:41):
they didn't know the consequences of speaking up. But then
there was another group of nurses that would say, it's
not because I feel afraid of anything. Is that I've
spoken up many times in the past and nothing's happened.
So these two questions are really useful to think about
is it safe for me to defy? And will it
have positive impact? But it's also important not to then
(24:01):
sort of rationalize that we should never defy, because defiance
is inherently risky, and so the questions we should ask
is is it safe enough? And will it have enough impact?
And it really comes down to something personal, our own
sort defiance calculus in a way of what are the
costs and whatever benefits? And is this the right time
(24:24):
for me to defy? And is this the right way
for me to defy? Because otherwise we just end up
in conscious compliance forever and that, as we know, can
have costs too.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Every active defiance carries a cost. But the big question
is when is the cost of staying silent even greater
after the break? So Nita will share some advice on
how to ask ourselves that question, and we'll explore some
remarkable examples of what happens when people choose to speak up.
The Happiness Lab will be right back. As a kid,
(25:04):
I was obsessed with one of America's iconic heroines, the
civil rights activist Rosa Parks. I read her biography as
a middle schooler and even wrote my seventh grade paper
about her famous moment of defiance, when she refused to
give up her bus seat to a white passenger in
violation of all the segregation laws at the time. Back then,
this seemed like a tidy story, an empowering moment, neatly packaged,
(25:28):
inspiring for kids like me, but the reality, which I
didn't fully understand until much later, was far more complex.
Organizational psychologists soon Nita Saw believes that facing the full
truth about moments of defiance like this will teach us
something really important. We'll get to learn what it truly
takes to stand up for our values.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
So what really intrigues me about Rosa Parks is that,
first of all, her defiance is being misunderstead. People think that,
you know, it was a spontaneous action that she made
on the bus that day, and that she did it
because she was tied all over. But what Rosa Parks
actually said is that she wasn't tied at that day,
at least no more tired then usual. She was quite young,
(26:11):
she wasn't that old, but it was time. This was
the right time and the right place for her. And
when we think about sort of defiance and compliance, defiance
is often preceded by hundreds of moments of compliance. And
this is something that we have to remember because we
often beat ourselves up for being so compliant, but we
(26:34):
actually learn from being compliant. We feel that tension that
I talk about, which is stage one of defiance, and
we often disregard it, but that tension stays, It doesn't
go away. If we just go along with things, we
think it might go away, but it actually remains. And
that's what happened with Rosa Parks, is that those moments
(26:54):
of compliance where she had gone along with segregation laws
on the bus, didn't leave her feeling good. She was
very much connected with her values for equality. They were
very important to her. She was doing lots of work
in this area, and so on that bus she might
have asked herselves the questions that I mentioned, is it
safe and will it have positive impact? Well, if we
(27:16):
think about is it safe, actually it wasn't safe for
Rosa Parks to defy that day. It wasn't safe at all.
She received a lot of death threats, she lost her job,
she struggled with unemployment for ten years, and the amount
of stress that she experienced had a massive toll on
her health. And so we have to think about these
(27:37):
costs of defiance. They are real for a lot of people.
And yet when she was asked ten years later would
she do it again, she said yes without hesitation. So
sometimes the costs can be high, and this is a
very personal question that we have to answer. Is it
safe enough for us? Will it have positive impact? Will
(27:58):
it have enough positive impact for her? It certainly did,
and she knew that she had a community around her
that would rally around and maybe this could make a difference.
And it really did make a difference, which was wonderful.
But some people will stand for their values or sit
down for their values, even if they know that is
some safe and even though they can't predict whether it
(28:20):
will have positive impact or not.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
So the Rosa Park story really just shows us that
defying authority can come with these real costs. You know,
ultimately it can be a very tough decision to decide
is this a moment in which I should defy or
should I just kind of keep on complying? And so,
what are some practical strategies that we can use to
do this? I know in your book you reference some
questions from the political scientist James March that we can
use as a guide. Walk me through some of these
(28:45):
questions and how we might use them in a situation
in which we're really not sure what to do.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
James March came up with three questions that we normally
ask ourselves implicitly when we make a decision. And I
adapted some of these questions and made it into what
I call a defiance compass. And the questions that are
actually quite simple, but it require some thinking. So the
first one is who am I? And that goes back
(29:10):
to our values? What do you stand for? What's really
important to you? And it is so important to figure
out what your values are, and it's really helpful to
do so as well, because the research shows that if
you know your values, your intended behaviors are much more
likely to follow. And clarifying our values has been shown
to lead to a lower biological stress response to the
(29:34):
lower corticil level, so very much helpful for our well being.
So who am I is the first question in the
defiance compass. Then the second question is what kind of
situation is this? So here we're looking externally and coming
back to those two questions that we ask about the environment,
is it safe? And will it be effective for me
to defy? And then the last question is what does
(29:56):
a person like me do in a situation like this?
And this is a really powerful question because again we're
tapping back into our responsibilities. We're connecting with our values again,
and yet we still also need the ability to defy,
the skill set to defy. So those two things are
important in predicting whether we will act in alignment with
(30:20):
our values or not. So when we start thinking, what
does a person like me with these values of integrity,
of fairness, of compassion, of equality, whatever our values are,
what does a person like me do in this situation?
Because the way that we act then goes back and
has an effect on who we are. If we can't
(30:41):
act in alignment with our values, then it really does
change who we are. So if we're constantly saying to
people that was not me, we might want to think
about whether our actions are in alignment with who we
think we are. Because I've learned for many of us
that distance between who we think we are and what
we actually do is enormous, and we want to decrease
(31:01):
that distance.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
So so many of the cases we've been talking about
are these moments of like when you don't say something
but you really want to and it seems to matter
a lot, right, Like somebody says something sexist or racist,
or somebody's making an active mistake, but a lot of
the times when I find it hard to say no
to protect my values, or when the values are about
like me right, like my time and my boundaries, and
(31:25):
it involves saying no, I don't want to take on
that commitment because I want to protect my time, or no,
I don't want to do that thing that you want
me to do because you know it's not in my interest.
But then that means I'm going to offend you or
something like that. So any advice for the like really
personal ones when the value isn't about some you know,
deeper value of honesty or kind of being a just person,
(31:46):
but it's really just about like protecting the kinds of
stuff that you need to feel happier.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Well, that's actually protecting your well being. It's really important
for you to function as a human. And so I
wouldn't disregard that. Defiance doesn't need to be loud or aggressive.
It can be something quite small, but that really honors
your values. And in the same way with requests for
our time or our energy, all of this kind of
(32:12):
aspect of well, that's actually going to affect my well being.
You know that's not right for me, it's not right
for my family. It's not right for my work. Like
there's many things where as soon as you say yes
that you're saying no to a lot of other things
that could be of greater importance. And again it's remembering
that that it's not just about thinking about what are
(32:33):
the costs of saying no, thinking about what are the
costs of saying yes in this situation. I also like
to think about the difference between compliance and consent. And
this came to me when I was a junior doctor,
when I learned about informed consent in medicine, and I
think it's a really useful framework to also apply to
(32:54):
other situations in our lives when we make decisions. Maybe
just explain what informed consent is. So informed consent in
medicine requires five elements. You need. First of all, capacity,
so the brain capacity. You should not be under the
influence of drugs or alcohl be too sick. You need
the ability to be able to make a decision. Second
of all, you need knowledge, so you need information on
(33:18):
that decision. But it's not enough just to be given
the information. You actually need the third element, which is
understanding a thorough grasp of the risks, the benefits, the
alternatives all of those things, so you have capacity, knowledge understanding.
The fourth element is the freedom to say no, because
if you don't have the freedom to say no, then
(33:39):
that's merely compliance, it's not consent. And then the fifth element,
if all the other four elements are present, is your
authorization you're deeply considered true yes if you want to
say yes, or your true no, which is actually defiance.
So consent and defiance are actually two sides of the
same coin. You need to have those five elements that
(34:00):
are present. If you with the capacity, knowledge, understanding, and
freedom to say no, still feel this pressure to say yes,
you need to think about is this really my true yes?
Or am I going along with something that I don't
want to do? Is it a yes that's not really
(34:20):
a yes? Because if so, that's just compliance. It's really
good to be able to distinguish between the two so
we don't slide into that automatic compliance just because we
feel pressure or that's been our default response.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
So, based on everything you've learned about the psychology of
defiance and when we need to do it, do you
have any favorite examples of defiance, Like who are your
defiance heroes?
Speaker 2 (34:44):
I would have to say my mom, you know, because
she just embodies compliance, and a lot of people think
about her as being really weak, but I just think
she's so strong. I was about seven or eight years old.
I was walking home with my mom from the grocery store,
and she was pulling along her ricketee shopping carts, which
(35:05):
just looks like you know, wheel luggage, two wheels. It
was quite a long walk back home and we decided
to go through a narrow alleyway that we actually call
a snicket in West Yorkshire in England. And I had
always been told not to go through the snicket when
I was by myself, but I was with my mom
and we were tired, and so I was like, okay, fine,
(35:26):
we'll go through the snicket. When we started walking through,
was when we saw them. It was a group of
teenage boys, and they blocked our path and they shouted
out some racist things to us go back home, and
the others were laughing. Now my reaction to that was instant.
I grabbed my mom's arm and I looked away. I
(35:48):
did not want to look at them directly in the eyes,
and I just wanted to maneuver as fast as possible
through the boys and my mom did something different that day.
I thought she would just go along with me, but
she didn't. She stopped and she looked at them directly
in the eyes, and she said what do you mean?
And my heart started race at this point, and I
(36:10):
grabbed her arm even tighter and I whispered to her comba,
and she looked at me and she said no, which
really surprised me. Then she put the shopping cart up
vertical and she put one hand on a bit. My
mom's quite petite, she's four foot ten at most, and
she was wearing her blue green sorry. She had her
hair in a neap plat at the back. And she
(36:30):
looked at the boys again and then she said what
do you mean? Again? And there was complete silence. The
boys didn't say anything at all. And then my mom said, hmm,
you think you're such tough boys, beak strong boys, right,
clever boys? And again there was silence, and then one
of the boys uttered, let's go, and they just dispersed.
(36:53):
My mom grabbed the shopping cart and she walked as
fast as possible through that alleyway and I just stood
there thinking what just happened. I would never have expected
this from my mom. She was so compliant, she did
all the cooking, the cleaning, the grocery shopping. I always
found her very require subserving, meeting everybody else's needs, and
that day she showed me something different. She showed me
(37:16):
that defiance is a practice, not a personality. She must
have encountered those boys or people that looked like those
boys many times before that she would come home from
the store and she would be muttering away, and I
thought it was because of the shopping cart that was like,
not great. But I think it was because she'd met
people like those boys before, and that day she decided
(37:38):
to do something different, perhaps because I was there. What
I also found really fascinating about Rosa Parks is that she,
as a child, had once seen her mother defy on
the bus. Her mother didn't move for a white passenger
and the bus driver had threatened to throw her off,
and her mother very quietly said, I don't think you
(37:59):
will do that, and that was the end of it.
And that also could have an effect. It could have
stayed with Rosa, just like when I experienced my own
mother defying when I was a child, really stayed with me.
Defiance can have a ripple effect because her. Doing that
affected me, and I've carried it forward, and now that
(38:19):
I'm telling the story, maybe it will affect other people too.
Because what I'm hoping with the book that I've written
on defy and with the work of building that skill
set of being able to defy, if we can teach it,
if we compare them for it, if we can model it,
that one day one of the teenage boys in the
alleyway will turn around and tell his friends to stop
(38:42):
doing this and to let us pass so my immigrant
mother wouldn't have to carry it alone. That is what
I hope and I think is achievable if we can
all learn to defy.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
So next time a relative makes an off color joke
that they expect you to laugh at, or your boss
asks you to take on a task that conflicts with
your boundaries, or some random meal professor tells you to
deliver shocks to someone trying to learn word pairs, take
a moment to remember Sunita's advice. First off, acknowledge your
anxiety that yucky feeling is a good thing. It's a
(39:13):
signal that something feels off. Then consider your values how
might they guide your actions in this situation. Next, vocalize
your discomfort, and then if you feel safe enough and
believe it could have an impact, go ahead and give
your true no defy. The research shows you'll be happier
for it. In the next episode, we'll continue our back
(39:37):
to school series with another one of my favorite books
from twenty twenty five. We'll hear from an expert on
how we can use our environments to shape our health
and our happiness, and we'll hear his tips for how
we can bring the healthiest places on the planet into
our own kitchens. All that next time on that Happiness
Lab with me, Doctor Laurie Santos
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com