Here's Where It Gets Interesting - DEFY with Dr. Sunita Sah

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

How do you stay true to your values when the world pushes you to conform? Sharon McMahon is joined by award-winning Cornell professor Dr. Sunita Sah to talk about her new book, “DEFY: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes.” Dr. Sah breaks down why we feel pressured to comply—and says real defiance isn’t about rebellion, but about standing up for what you believe, even when it’s uncomfortable. After listening to this discussion, even the most obedient people pleasers will be able to say no. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It is with Dr. Suneeta Sa who has written a book that I personally found extremely useful and interesting and I think you will too. The book is called Defy the Power of No in a world that demands yes. Let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting. I am truly so excited to be speaking with you today because from literally page one of your book, Defy. I just found myself like nodding my head and feeling like this book was written as much

for me as for anyone else. And I just cannot wait to discuss this with you. So thank you for being here. It's an absolute pleasure. I can't wait to have our conversation. I can't wait to have our conversation. Your book is about defiance in a world that demands compliance. And we think of somebody who's defiant as being militant, disagreeable, insubordinate, you know, something you'd get written up for at a job or in the military. But you actually begin your book by proposing a new definition of what it means to defy. And I would love to hear you start by talking

about what do you mean when we're talking about being defiant? I've been fascinated by what that single powerful word defy means for such a long time, because I grew up pretty compliant. I was known for being an obedient daughter and a student. And I remember asking my dad when I was quite young, what does my name mean? And he said in Sanskrit, sunita means good. And mostly I did, I lived up to that. And the messages I received about being good was to fit in, to obey, to be compliant, don't question authority, don't make a scene. And we often teach children these messages. And what's interesting here is that we end up equating being compliant with being good

and defiant with being bad. And as you said, being defiant, it's not a nice label to have for a lot of people. We think it has this negative connotation to it. But I got really fascinated by looking at compliance, wondering why I struggled with it so much and how other people had an easier time being defiant. And when I delved in further, I saw that this amount of compliance can cause serious

problems. So, for example, one survey found that nine out of 10 healthcare workers, most of them nurses, don't feel comfortable speaking up when they see their colleague or a physician making an error. And that's also true in other professions. So in a survey of over 1700 crew members on commercial airlines, about half of them felt uncomfortable speaking up. So I started to wonder, is it sometimes bad to be so good? What do we sacrifice by always trying to be so compliant? And, you know, if I was to ask you, Sharon, how many times have you wanted to object with something or disagree or opt out, but you just end up swallowing your words and shaking your heads and going

along with it? And I often felt drained and muted, and that feeling inspired my work and research. And then what I've done now, I've spent decades studying influence, advice, and authority, and what I found that is really crucial and changed how I think substantially is that we've misunderstood what it means to defy. So if we look at the Oxford English Dictionary definition of defiance, it says that to defy is to challenge the power of another person to resist boldly and openly. And I don't often disagree with the Oxford English Dictionary. I grew up in the UK after all. But I think that's way too narrow and it doesn't honour our agency. And my definition

of defiance is that to defy is to act in accordance with your own true values when there is pressure to do otherwise. So we transform it into this proactive positive force in society. Because if you think about it, all our individual actions of consent and dissent and compliance, they build, they create the society that we live in. So it affects our lives, our communities, our workplaces. I think that's so interesting. And here's something that I know that people will wonder about. How do I even know what my true

values are? How do I know if I'm acting in accordance with my true values or if I just find that person annoying and I don't want to do what they say? I've talked with friends about this many times that I know that I bristle at what I view as illegitimate authority? Like, don't try to tell me what to do. You know, like that is my knee-jerk reaction. Who are you to try to tell me that I can't do that thing? And some of us perhaps have habituated behaviors that require compliance more than others. But how will we distinguish between our acting in accordance with our values and just being annoyed at another person trying to boss us around? Yes.

I love this distinction and it's actually a very important one. So what you're describing there about, oh, I'm feeling really annoyed with someone if they're going to ask me to do something, I'm not going to do it. It's almost like my teenage son doing the exact opposite of what I ask me to do something, I'm not going to do it. It's almost like my teenage son, like doing the exact opposite of what I ask him to do. And psychologists sometimes call this reactance, that we're reacting to someone else. I call it false defiance in that, if that feels like defiance to you, and this goes back to what you asked about values. If we are doing something because somebody is telling us to do it and then we do the exact opposite, the way that, for example, my son when he is playing his computer game and I ask him if he's going to do his homework

and he says to me, well, I was going to do it. But now that you've told me, I'm not going to do it. Now I'm not. So maybe he finds me incredibly annoying. But in this situation, he's actually listening really intently to what I want. And he is doing the exact opposite of that. So his actions are not driven from within. If we think about what true consent is, what true defiance is, it's something that's coming from within you based on your values. But if it's based on what somebody else wants or doesn't want, whether we comply with it

or we react against it, that's now being dependent on someone else. So in a way, it's a different form of compliance. It might appear defiant to some people, but it's what I call false defiance because it's acting on an external expectation. So if compliance is sliding into something due to something external, an order request, an expectation from society, false defiance is also the same. You might do the

exact opposite, but you're listening to what other people are saying and taking action dependent on them. Now, if you are acting within your true values, then you can come to what I call a true yes or a true no that's coming from within something that's authorized and goes along with what you truly want. So how can we figure out what our true values are? That was your other question. And I have my executive students do an exercise where I get them to think about their true values and write them down. And the reason I do this is because if we become really clear about what our values are, then we actually are more likely to live in accordance with them. That's what the research shows. So that's really important to do. It's also really interesting that once we clarify our values, we actually

have a lower biological stress reaction. We have lower cortisol levels. So maybe we're less likely to act in reaction to someone else. And when it comes to those values and why your values are important, a lot of my students, when they drill down to it, their values often end up being just simple single words, but they're very powerful if we can enact them every day. So words such as integrity, benevolence, compassion, equality, these are the values I see time and time again. And yet, it's really difficult to act in accordance with those values. We might like

to think that we do, but what I've learned and what my research has shown me again and again is what somebody believes their values to be is quite different from how they actually behave when they're in a situation. And so really being clear on your values and then learning with defiance how we can close that gap between our intention and our action is crucial. I love the idea of writing down what your values are and then you are much more likely to act in accordance with them. There's just something about the trigger of seeing it on a piece of paper, what happens in your brain when you actually physically write something down. It almost seems in your mind like it is a commitment or like you are moving that

into long-term storage in your mind by actually physically writing it on a piece of paper. And you don't have to then wonder what actually are my values because you already wrote it down a while ago. Yes, you know what they are. And then the question you can ask yourself is, what does a person like me, with these values, integrity, compassion, benevolence, what does a person like me do in a situation like this? And that's really powerful because then you can think about your aspirational self, like this is what I would aspire to do.

A person with these values would act in this way. LESLIE KENDRICK You talk in the book too about a scenario that is very famous in the United States now involving George Floyd and about the two police officers who were brand new on the job, who complied with the orders of Derek Chauvin to go along with what they did to George Floyd. They just went along with it. They obeyed. And as a student of history, I can think of dozens of examples of people throughout history who just complied. And historians will also tell you that this is how authoritarians come to power, is people pre-comply, assuming that their defiance will be unsuccessful. They pre-comply with the orders of whatever it is. So you pose this very interesting question,

which is, how would I have reacted in that scenario if I were a brand new cop on the scene with George Floyd? How would I have reacted? I'd like to think of myself as a person who would not have complied. So many people throughout history have wondered how would I have acted if I was living in 1930s Germany? I would not have gone along with the Nazis. One hundred percent of the people listening to this at least want to believe themselves to be the kind of person who would not have complied with the Nazis, right? But you just mentioned, and you mentioned this in the book too, that there is a very

large disconnect between who we believe ourselves to be and who we actually are in terms of the actions that we carry out. So what we think we will do is often not at all what we would actually do. And compliance is almost the default as opposed to being willing to defy. Why is that? What is it that makes us comply with things we know are not right? Finding a therapist you trust shouldn't be so complicated or cost a fortune. That's why today's

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And that's, there's just enormous pressure to go along with what other people want. And in that situation for the rookie officers, even though one of them was a black rookie, like three or four days into the job, and he had joined the police force with the best of intentions. You could even say with the right values. He wanted to make change from the inside and be a bridge for people like him, like his brothers, people

like George Floyd. And yet when it came down to it, there's so much pressure to go along with what other people want. And that pressure really has a huge effect on us. And it could be in small stakes situations where we don't say anything to these larger situations that are unfolding in front of us, and we feel powerless to almost do anything about. In my research, I've discovered a psychological concept that I call insinuation anxiety. And this is a distinct type of anxiety that arises when we worry that our noncompliance with another person's wishes is going to be interpreted as a signal of distress. So if you think about it, if your boss is in that situation, or

even if you're with family and friends having a discussion, saying no to something or objecting to something or saying that a particular statement is inappropriate really could signal distrust. It implies that the other person could be corrupt, unethical, incompetent. And we have this anxiety about signaling that. It really is an aversive emotional state where we become concerned with offending the other person. And I found that, yes, it exists in these power dynamics, like a rookie police officer with a training officer,

with an employee and their boss, the manager, but it also happens in one-off situations with strangers when they aren't large consequences. And we just don't want to insinuate that somebody else cannot be trusted. That's very difficult for us to do. LESLIE KENDRICK What happens to us mentally when we believe that we are causing this sort of rift between us and this other person? I can't trust you. I'm not going to do what you say. What is it that is happening in our mind that makes it so difficult for

us to be willing to step out and do that? There's two ideal selves. So we have this ideal independent self where we want to act on our own agency and do what we think is right. But we also have this ideal interdependent self where we're concerned about harmonious relationships and we have to live in society with other people. And these are kind of ideals, so they're always going to be in some kind of tension. We can't reach either ideal and probably we wouldn't want to. So that creates some kind of tension between what you want to do, what you think is right versus what somebody else is expecting of us. That tension is the stage one of defiance and it's a really important stage because

we all feel tension in different ways and we can really think about how does that tension manifest in my body? So some people might have anxiety, some people might have anxiety, some people might have doubt, some people might have a stomach ache or a headache or feel their throat constricting. We all feel that tension in different ways when we feel we're being silenced or we're expected to comply with something but we really don't want to comply with it. And noting that tension, not disregarding it or thinking it's not worth our doubt, the other person must know better, is really critical because only when you acknowledge it, which

is the stage two of defiance, can you work up through the other stages of defiance. LESLIE KENDRICK Well, you mentioned too in the book that we have a difficult time acting in accordance with our values. You know, you mentioned a time when you felt pressured into a medical test, you mentioned a time when you felt pressured into a medical test you didn't think that you needed. And as a physician, you're like, I don't have the right symptoms, I don't have the thing that you think I have.

But you didn't want to offend your colleagues in medicine by appearing to doubt their judgment. By being like, listen guys you're just straight up wrong. Yes. That sense of like, I don't want to offend you by doubting your judgment. So I'm going to go along with something that I don't think is right.

Is that what we're talking about here? That's exactly right. So this insinuation anxiety could also explain why the nurses don't speak up when they see something wrong or why the co-pilots don't tell their pilots that something's wrong, something that could risk their own life. Like when I had that medical procedure that I knew I didn't need, it was very hard for me to tell the other doctor that, no, you're wrong. I don't have that. I don't think it's necessary to have that. So it really does become a powerful force, even when

we have the full knowledge and understanding that this is incorrect, this is not the best way forward. It's very hard to not go along with it in those circumstances unless you know, oh, this isn't situation anxiety, we can name it, unless we start practicing for these situations. And as I say, defiance is a skill and it's something that we can practice for. Even if you grew up being as compliant as I am, you can learn how to be defiant. LESLIE KENDRICK Do you think because you mentioned before that so much of our compliant behavior is a result of socialization. Are women more socialized to be compliant? Is that a higher value you find in parents who are socializing their little girls, even subconsciously to like be a good girl? And what makes you a good girl is if you listen

to mommy and daddy, you'd be a good girl. You know, like even parents who are very well intentioned, they feel like they're being judged by how compliant their children are. Absolutely. We do. Like in a way, we want our children to be compliant. And I remember a situation when my son was quite young, I think about four years old, and we were in London at the time and I really wanted to see the Olympic torch. So it was the 2012 Olympics and he wouldn't comply. He would not walk along the street to come and see the torch. And I remember thinking, why can't you be good? And then I was fascinated. I'm making the same moral equation that compliance equals good and defiance equals bad. And we

often give our children these messages, possibly more to girls. There is a defiance equals bad. And we often give our children these messages possibly more to girls. There is a defiance hierarchy in terms of who we expect to be compliant and the consequences if those people are not compliant. So girls are often expected to comply more than men. In my experiments, often I see both men and women comply and they find it difficult. But there are certain situations, there's one particular study that I did where it was a middle-aged white man giving advice and it was the women that felt insinuation anxiety and complied with bad advice. The men were okay in that situation to reject it. So sometimes women do feel more insinuation anxiety or the people that are more vulnerable,

that have less status in society often feel more vulnerable to having to comply. What does it mean to have true or real defiance like you talk about in your book? What does that actually mean? And what does that look like in somebody's real life? We just walk around telling our boss, like, it's not my values, I'm not doing that job. What's at stake if we don't learn how to defy? LESLIE KENDRICK So there's a few things there. So what do we mean by defiance? What exactly is it? And then what is at stake that we can live in alignment with those? Defiance and consent are actually two sides of the same coin. So if you think about compliance, what I said

about compliance is that we often just slide into it. It's expected of us and it's something usually externally imposed by a boss, somebody else, a system, maybe even society has these expectations of us. But if we think about what is consent and what is defiance, you can take the definition of informed consent in medicine and apply it to other decisions that we make in our lives. And to have consent, you need to have five elements. So these elements are first of all, capacity. You need the mental capacity to make a decision. So you don't want to be under the influence of drugs

or alcohol or be too sick. Maybe you need that coffee to have the capacity to make a decision, but capacity is the first element. Then you need knowledge. So you need information about the decision that you're going to make. And then it's not just the information, it's the understanding. That's the third element. So you need to know and understand the facts, the risks, the benefits and the alternatives. And then the fourth element is the freedom to say no, because if you don't have the freedom to say no, then

you can't really have consent. It's merely compliance that you sort of slide into. So if you have those four elements, capacity, knowledge, understanding, the freedom to say no, then you can authorize the fifth element, your true yes, which is your informed consent if you want to go along with it, or your informed refusal, which is your defiance of that situation. So in terms of what we should defy or not, what we want to be thinking about again is what are our values in this situation? So what you're talking about there is what some researchers call non-promotable tasks, like making coffee for everyone else.

You're probably not going to get promoted unless that is your role and your job. But if this is not in your job description, then making coffee for other people is probably not going to get you promoted. And some people get asked to make coffee and take notes more than other people get asked to do that. In terms of whether this goes against your values or not, you might think equality and you might want to speak up. Hopefully other people are asked to do that. In terms of whether this goes against your values or not, you might think equality and you might want to speak up. Hopefully other people are going to speak up about that too. But where it really becomes important is situations where, for example, if all you're thinking about is how well you do your job according to whether your boss

is going to be pleased with you or not, it really narrows our frame of reference to how good or bad we are based on what our boss thinks of us. And that can be problematic, especially if your boss is making requests that are not equitable requests, asking certain people to make coffee over their others. Or even that they could be asking you to do something unethical or break the rules. At what point do you have to say, is this going against my values? And if it is, how can we prepare for that moment before we're in a moment of crisis is really important. And then you do have to ask yourself, will defiance be safe and will it be effective?

They're the other two questions we want to ask ourselves because they are consequences of being defiant. And we need to think about those costs when we make those decisions, the benefits, is it going to have any positive impact? And even though we think about those costs when we make those decisions, the benefits. Is it going to have any positive impact? And even though we think about the cost of defiance, we also need to think about the cost of compliance. Because if we are constantly disregarding our values, then it does have an effect bowing our head to other people constantly and disregarding our values. So we want to think about those costs as well.

I know there are going to be people listening to this who are going to be like, I am a people pleaser and it gives me hives to think about letting anybody down and the idea of saying no, even if I believe it is aligned with my own values, the idea of saying no, of defying something, I just cannot abide that thought. It's too much for me. Whatever it is. I know there are people listening to this who are going to be like, I have no idea how

I would even begin to practice that because the idea of implementing it seems too psychologically unsafe. Yeah. Right? They don't feel like any situation of defiance is safe. What would you say to those people? I would say I was in their shoes at one point, and I totally understand that. It is very difficult. And what makes it easier is, if you think about the situations that you've complied and everybody complies, we comply and then we might regret it. So if you call yourself

a people pleaser, are you pleasing other people because it makes you feel good and you have the time and energy to do that? Or are you doing it because you find it difficult to say no? Because that also has some costs. So even when I took the medical procedure that I didn't need, I started thinking about it. Why didn't I speak up? It would have been safe and effective for me to speak up in that situation. Yes, I didn't want to make a scene. I didn't want to be seen as a difficult patient. I didn't want to tell the doctor that she didn't know what she was doing and that she was wrong. All of those things were there. But yes, it still would have been safe and effective for me to say, no, I don't want

this. And so how can we do that? So in terms of practice, there's a number of steps. First of all, we need to anticipate because often we can anticipate the most common situations that will arise because we've faced them before and many of them are predictable. So we know that surprise disables defiance. If you're surprised by something, you've never encountered it before, it's quite likely you're going to comply if that's your default. But if you can anticipate it, that this is going to happen because it's happened to me many times in the past, then we can start visualizing it. So I did that with my medical procedure. I started to anticipate the next time I was going, about a year later, that this is probably going to happen. And then you can start practicing by scripting and role-playing what you're going to say. And this is really important to do this

and repeat this, because if we have been wired to comply, we need to change those neural pathways. We need to get our mouths used to saying defiant words, and our ears used to hearing defiant words. And so we do need to practice it, because that changes the neural pathways. And a couple of things happen with that. This idea that defiance isn't a personality, it's a practice, it's a skill set that we can choose to implement or not. So there's a wonderful quote that I think really brings this home that's often attributed to Bruce Lee, but it's by a Greek poet, which is, under duress, we don't rise to the level of our expectations, but we fall to the level of our training. And so it's this aspect of training that's really important.

And we're not often given that level of training. We get trained on how to comply. We don't get trained on how to defy. So even in the police academy, if we go back to that example, police officers are told intellectually that if you see somebody doing something wrong, you must question your superior or another police officer. But they're never given any behavioral training in how to do that. And unless you have that training, role playing and scripting and doing that, you're not going to be able to do it in a moment of crisis. And that's why the training aspect is really important to make defiance a practice. You need a plan that starts long before the moment of crisis. That's a really good point because defying somebody, especially somebody in a position of authority, doesn't always look like, hey, buddy, screw you.

You're doing it wrong. And that's where a training would come in. Here is how you would go about diffusing this situation while practicing defiance, defying something that you know is incorrect. And I think it's such an important point that number one, we can practice this for ourselves. We can rehearse this for ourselves. We can plan this for ourselves. We can rehearse this for ourselves. We can plan it for ourselves. What will I say if somebody offers me a medical test that I don't think that I need? We can practice what it might look like in a work setting.

It's actually something we could practice with our own children. This is a joking example. But here in the United States, Sunita, in the 80s, there was a big push to say no to drugs. Are you familiar with this? Yes. Did they have this in the UK as well? Yes. Just say no. Just say no was a really big thing. And we all walked around believing that at any moment, we were just going to be offered heroin. That somebody

was going to be in a white van outside the school with crack. That cocaine, speed, ecstasy, whatever was lurking in every corner. And we were going to have to say no. And there was this sort of like, now we can joke about it because the number of times I've been offered free drugs is like none. But nevertheless, school children were actively being taught how to defy. Exactly. What will you do if a man offers you drugs? What will you say if there's a white van and a man with a puppy offers you candy? Will you get in his car? You know, like those are silly examples, but they're examples of how we actually, in certain circumstances, are taught to defy. Yes, I love that example.

Just say no. It tells you exactly what to do in that situation. And I think that's important. And I think it's also important if we think about what no means, that we also need to understand what yes means, that we also need to understand what yes means. So when you say yes, we need to know exactly what that means for it to be valid. You have a section in the book about becoming a moral maverick. Yes.

And I would love to talk a little bit more about what that means and what it looks like in practice. What is a moral maverick? So a moral maverick is really trying to be that person who speaks up and acts when it matters most. So it's applying these principles of defiance and making it a practice. And as you said, right, you don't need to be aggressive. Like these are some of the myths of defiance that we think of it as being loud, bold, violent, angry, aggressive, or the other side, we think of it as being heroic, a superhuman and out of reach. And both of those visions of defiance are not correct. You don't have to be a superhero. You don't have to have a strong personality

or be larger than life. We can all be defiant in our own unique way. So the way that I'm defiant and say no to something might be different to the way that you do it. But it's not just for the extraordinary or the brave, it's available and necessary for all of us. And we do that with this practice of thinking that it's not a personality, it's not that person's defiant and that person's compliant. We can choose to be compliant one day and defiant the next day. And it's that practice that brings us into being moral mavericks. People who live their lives are lined with

their values so they can speak up and act when it really matters. What do you hope that somebody remembers when they close the last page of this book? What is it that you hope they will take with them and sort of tuck into their pocket and carry with them moving forward? What I would love people to think about is a few things. One is compliance might have been your default, but it's not your destiny. So you can practice for defiance.

And society is actually built on these smaller moments. You know, when we think about defiance, we might think about some big acts of defiance that are dramatic, like Rosa Parks saying no on the bus. But in reality, her no on that bus preceded a lot of yeses on the bus. So if we think about these smaller moments, ideally we're building a society where people will speak up and say no when it really matters. And defiance doesn't only transform you in making you more your authentic self, and it is very powerful, but it also changes the people around you. So it does have a ripple effect, this defiance domino effect, even when nobody's present. So the second time I was able to say no to a medical procedure, I didn't think was the

right one. Nobody was really there to observe that interaction between me and the doctor, but I did tell other people about it. And they encouraged me to write an article which eventually got published, and that had a big ripple effect. But all we need is that one moment to say no, to practice for that, and that changes everything around us. It changes the water in which everybody else is swimming, and it develops neural pathways,

so it makes it a little bit easier next time. So my hope is this book is going to make Defyance accessible to everyone, so we can all become moral mavericks. And live in accordance with the values we have written down. Exactly. Thank you so much for being here today. I absolutely loved Defy.

I really did. I loved it. And I love chatting with you. Thank you for making for being here today. I absolutely loved Defy. I really did. I loved it and I love chatting with you. Thank you for making time to do this. Thank you. I enjoyed our conversation very much. Thank you so much for having me. You can find Dr. Sunita Sa's book Defy, The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes wherever you get your books. If you want to support your local bookstore, head to yours or go to bookshop.org. And you can also find more about Dr. Saw's work at sunitasaw.com. I'll see you again soon. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show? That helps podcasters out so much. I'm your host and executive producer Sharon McMahon, our supervising producer is Melanie

Buck-Parks and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. We'll see you soon.