Instant Genius - How psychology can help us unlock the power of saying ‘no’

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

Whether it’s accepting a work assignment we know we don’t have time for, attending a social occasion even though we’d much rather hunker down at home with a cup of tea, or something more serious such as not speaking up when we witness an act of discrimination, many of us find it difficult to say ‘no’. But why is this? In this episode, we speak to psychologist Dr Sunita Sah about her latest book Defy, The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes. She tells us how we are wired to comply, even if doing so comprises our true values, the far-reaching effect this has on our lives and the structure of society, and how by following her advice we can all unlock the power of a ‘True No’. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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digital precision with analogue warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit namea audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. Whether it's accepting a work assignment we know we don't have time for, attending a social occasion even though we'd much rather hunker down at home with a cup of tea,

or maybe something more serious, such as not speaking up when we will, witness an act of discrimination. Many of us find it difficult to say no. But why is this? In this episode we speak to psychologist Dr. Sinita Tsar about her latest book, Defy, the power of no in a world that demands yes. She tells us how we're wired to comply, even if doing so compromises our true values, the far-reaching effect this has on our lives and the structure of society, and how, by following her advice, we can all unlock the power of a true No. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you. So today we're talking about your latest book, Defy, the power of no in a world that demands yes.

So you kind of start pretty early on in the book. You lay out exactly what you mean by defiance. So let's start there. What do you mean by defiance? Well, I've spent decades studying, influenced advice and authority, and what I found that I think is crucial and really changed how I think is that we've misunderstood what it means to defy. So I came to this revelation through my research that we actually need a new definition for defiance. So the old definition or the definition that you'll find in the Oxford English dictionary is that to defy is to defy is to. challenge the power of another person, sort of boldly and openly. And I think that definition is too narrow. Now, I'm not one to sort of disagree with the Oxford English Dictionary that often. I grew up in the UK after all. But my definition allows more for our agency. And my definition is that

to defy is to act in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise. And that really transforms defiance from this negative connotation to a proactive positive force in society. Because if you think about it, every single act that we do, all our individual actions of compliance, consent, dissent, they create and build the society that we live in. And so it affects our lives, our communities, our workplaces. And that's why I think it's really important to reconsider that definition of defiance. So sticking with this sort of definition idea for a moment, so you mentioned there compliance, which is kind of the other side of the coin. And as you say there, defiance is typically thought of,

you know, it will bring to mind, I guess, disobedient children or perhaps an awkward work colleague, whereas compliance is typically thought of as a good moral quality to have. So what are we getting wrong with that one? Well, I think that that sort of equation that you have there, that compliance equals good and defiance equals bad was a message many of us received growing up because we are told often to be good, which means to obey, to be polite, to not question an authority, listen to our teachers. And I grew up with that kind of socialization and those messages, and I really did internalize them. And so I found it very difficult to defy in situations that we actually need to. And I became fascinated by sort of that single powerful word defy and what it means.

I mean, how many times have you wanted to object to something, disagree or opt out of something? And then you just end up shaking your head or swallowing your words and just going along with it. And so we end up being what I called wired to comply in that way too compliant. And this can end up causing serious problems. So when I delved into this, I found that one survey, found that nine out of 10 health care workers, most of them nurses, did not feel comfortable speaking up when they saw their colleague making an error. And that's not just in healthcare, it's in many industries.

So findings from another survey of over 1,700 crew members and commercial airlines found that 50% of them feel uncomfortable to point out a mistake. So I started to wonder, is it sometimes bad to be so good? what do we actually sacrifice by being so compliant? And even if it's not life and death situations like those, just keeping silent when you feel something is wrong can be really soul-destroying. And I often felt drained and muted. And that feeling, that feeling of tension really inspired my work and research and why defiance is actually a positive trait when we use it to act in alignment with our values.

Yeah, so you mentioned a couple of examples there. So why is it that we've reached this point where we are afraid to speak up? Yeah, well, there's multiple reasons why we find it difficult to speak up into those situations. I'll just talk about one of them right now specific to those examples and perhaps something that many of us have felt is that we do feel enormous pressure to go along with other people. Like even if it's an unspoken order, even if it's from a stranger. in my experiments, I've found that it's very difficult to say no. And one of the psychological concepts that I've discovered is I name insinuation anxiety. And that name came years after I knew the feeling so well. And it's a distinct type of anxiety that comes up when we worry that our noncompliance with another person's wishes will be interpreted as a signal of distrust. So it really insinuates the person is not whom they appear to be or should be. So you can imagine a situation where your boss is asking you to do something. They think it's a fantastic idea. Everybody else is

going along with it. How difficult is it to say that you're wrong? Especially in healthcare, which I used to work in the National Health Service as a junior doctor in the UK, it's very difficult to tell a physician and what I found in my research looking at nurses, it's very difficult to speak up when you see people making a mistake. And that's because you don't want to insinuate that the other person is incompetent or cannot be trusted or they don't know what they're doing, or they're taking a shortcut, or they've been unethical. And it becomes even more difficult, say, if the patient is present and the nurse thinks the physician is doing something different. So it's this insinuation anxiety that we don't want to insinuate that somebody is not who they

appear to be that they could be biased or unethical or incompetent. We don't want to insinuate that about our co-workers, about our advisors, or even our friends and family. And this subversive emotional state, I've found, appears even in one-off situations and even with strangers. Yeah, so you talk about in the book a lot about personal values and the notion of self. And you talk about the independent versus the interdependent self. So what's the distinction there? Yeah. So past research by Hazel Marcus and Shinobu Kittiyama has found that there's two ideal selves. So one is the ideal independent self where we want to have agency, we want to act the way that we want to act and do what we want to do. And then there's the ideal interdependent

self that's concerned about harmonious relationships and fitting in and affecting other people. And these are two ideals, so we can't actually reach either ideal, they're always in a little bit of tension. And that's important. We wouldn't really want to reach either ideal. But that sort of tension is an important one because it really makes us think about the consequences of our actions on other people. So it could be a reason why insinuation, anxiety is present. But what we often forget is this insinuation anxiety is present because we're worried about the person who has the expectation of us to go along with something or to comply with something or to not speak up. And what we miss is the greater environment and society and who

we might harm. So let me give you an example. As a faculty member, there was a situation that was described in a book by Michelle Lamont called How Professors Behave. And when she heard about my psychological process of insinuation anxiety, she approached me and she said, what do you think about this situation? So in this situation, it was a young woman who joined this committee to assess grant applications from other people. And so she joined about four other senior men and that we're assessing the applications in this meeting. And for one of the applicants, this woman felt that the discussion was going on gossip rather than the actual credentials of the applicant and what was written in the application. And she wanted to say something and she didn't. And

afterwards she said the one thing that she wanted to say was the one thing she couldn't say. And that's because she didn't want to question their integrity and tell them that she thought that they weren't being reasonable or they were being unethical or this was not the right thing to do. And so she sat there with this tension, this insinuation anxiety. And it's such an interesting thing that she didn't want to question their integrity, but then that actually compromises our values and integrity could be harmful to the applicant. The applicant might not get the grant, very likely not to get the grant, and how does that affect that applicant, their family, their lives, their careers, and what's the knock-on effect of these things? And so thinking broader

rather than just to the person who's in front of us is really important to avoid insinuation, anxiety, causing harm and compromising our own values. So let's have a look at sort of groups then. So in that example, you mentioned this person was female. So say somebody is female, they perhaps have a different gender identity, perhaps from a different race, perhaps from a different economical background. Do they feel extra pressure in these situations? So it's a great question. And what I've found is that there is what I call a defiance hierarchy in that some people can be defiant with little consequences and others are expected to comply. And what I've found in my research is that there's actually a double whammy for anyone that

deviates from the dominant sort of class of white heterosexual male. So anyone that deviates from that are often expected to comply more often. So certainly as a South Asian woman, I have been expected to be more subservient, more compliant. And so some people are expected to be more compliant than others. And so they have a greater need to defy. And yet when they defy, there are greater consequences for defying. And so it's kind of a double whammy that, yes, we do learn to experience more pressure because we know the consequences and the backlash and the expectations of compliance are much stronger in these situations. Peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing,

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and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French Acoustic French acoustic specialist focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So sort of going back to definitions then, you sort of make a point of drawing a difference between compliance and consent. So I think this is a really important point. So what can we about that? Yeah, so compliance is merely going along with something, and it's usually imposed by

something external. So somebody's expectation of you, maybe an order, a direct one, or it could just be expectations of, you know, from the people around you, from your co-workers, from your boss, from your family, or even from society that you've internalized. And you basically just slide into it, is expected of you, and it's something external. It's not coming from within. Consent is not compliance. It's often conflated with compliance, but it's fundamentally different. And I think it's very useful to take the definition of informed consent from medicine and apply it to other decisions in our lives. And for consent, we need five elements. And these are, first of all, you need capacity. That's the first element. You need the mental capacity. So you're not compromised by any illness, sickness, drugs, alcohol, anything like. So you have the mental capacity to make a decision. The second one is knowledge. So you need to have the information about the decision. You need to be given the information. The third element is not just that you've received the information, but that you thoroughly understand it.

You thoroughly understand the risks, the benefits and the alternatives. So the costs, the consequences, the benefits of the decision that you're going to make. The fourth one is actually the freedom to say no. If you don't have the freedom to say no, that's not consent. It's merely compliance. So you need that freedom to say no. And then if those four elements are present, the capacity, the knowledge, the understanding, the freedom to say no, then you can authorize, which is the fifth element, your either true yes, which is consent, or your true no, which is defiance. So both consent and defiance are the same in that it requires those five elements to be present. And they're a thoroughly considered authorisation. That's an active expression of your true values. So you mentioned a phrase you

used there in the book, True No. So what does a true no look like? A true no is simply dissent. So it's that informed refusal that I'm talking about. So a true no comes from within. Again, it's a thoroughly considered authorization. That's an active expression of your true values. And it involves all those five elements to be present. And it can look different for different people. So we can all enact our true no or we can all defy in our own unique way with far less angst than we used to have. Because I think one of the things when you ask about why don't people speak up, it is because of that insinuation, anxiety or pressure to go along with other people, it's also because we don't understand what compliance and defiance are. And then once we decide to defy, we don't know how, we don't have that

skill set. But we can learn that skill set because it is a skill. It's not a personality trait. We can be compliant one day and defiant the next day. And we can learn that skill set and it can look different for all of us depending on what we find is the best way for us to defy. Yeah. So we're looking to how we can develop that skill set in a bit. But I first wanted to talk about something that you call as an act of false defiance. So what do you mean by that? So you started talking about, like when we think about defiance as being a negative thing, we often think about children and their defiance being oppositional or it being a negative connotation. So what do we mean by that? So let me take something that isn't like purely clinical, but one that we might have experienced,

those parents that do have children coming up to sort of teenage years. When we ask our child to do something, sometimes they do the exact opposite of that. So people might be, have experience of this. So I know with my own son several years ago, I would ask him to do his homework and he would carry on playing on the Xbox or a video game and sort of 10 minutes would go by, 15 minutes would go by, 20 minutes. And I would ask him, so are you going to do your homework? And he would reply, well, I was going to do it. But now that you have asked me to, I'm not going to anymore. So that certainly is oppositional, but is it defiance? Now, if we take my definition of defiance to defy is to act in accordance with your true values when there's pressure to do otherwise,

he's actually not going along with that. He's going along by doing the exact opposite of what I've asked him. And what that shows me is that he's actually listening in 10, to what I want and what my expectations are and doing the exact opposite. So that's not really defiance. It's false defiance because he's actually listening to me. And defiance comes, your true yes and your true no come from within what you really want to do. So if he really did want to do his own work, he should really go on those values, not on what I expect of him.

And so this false defiance can arise in many situations. can arise, we see it in children doing the exact opposite of what their parents want rather than deciding for themselves, or it can come from just as following like a crowd or a protest because everybody else is doing it rather than it being what we really want. We often see false defines on social media where people are oppositional or they put a viewpoint really to sort of attract likes and other things rather than something that they really thoroughly believe in. Or of true constructive change. So we need to be careful about what defiance, whether it is an act in accordance with your true values or whether it is really to get a reaction from someone else.

So how do we know what our true values are? Yeah. So this is an important point. Like the first step when I talk about the defiance compass, there's three questions in there. And the first one is who am I, which is really identifying what your values are and what you stand for. And I have, I teach MBA students and executive students, and this is an exercise I do with them year after year, because it's such a critical one, and they find it transformative. So I ask them to think about what their values are and have them write it down.

And there's a number of reasons why I ask them to do that. So first of all, identifying your values can come in many different ways. it can come from really conversations you have with someone else. It can come from experiences you've had. A lot of my students identify situations in their childhood that sort of showed them, oh, integrity is very important to me or compassion is very important to me. It's a reason why a lot of my healthcare students go into medicine is because of a value that they identified in their younger days or earlier days.

So I have them write out and explain why their values are important. And the reason I do that is because if you actually clarify them and write them out, your intended behavior is more likely to follow. Because the biggest thing is that the distance between who we think we are and what we actually do is enormous. So we think that we are the people that act with integrity, that we have compassion, empathy, that we value equality. But more often than not, what someone believes their values to be is actually quite different from how they actually behave because we get caught. by the situation, we freeze and we don't know how to implement those values. And so one of the biggest things about learning how to defy is to figure out how can we close that gap between our intended self and our behaviours. But yes, the first step is to identify those values.

And they often come down to some very simple, single words that, well, they seem simple, but they're really powerful if we can enact them every day. So they're things such as integrity, benevolence, compassion, equality. I see them over and over again. They seem to be universal values. So sort of slightly shifting gears for a moment. You also talk about something called quiet defiance. So what do you mean by that? So quiet defiance, you can use this as a technique if you're in a situation where the consequences for defiance you feel are too great. And so it's a way of enacting your true values without publicly saying no. And there's many ways we can do this, which is to, you know, if you need to avoid confrontation

with someone or you're worried about the consequences of perhaps losing your job in a situation, I've seen quiet defiance being implemented. Also in some of my interviews with the military where, of course, like compliance is expected, and sometimes in situations, what I have heard is that, that the orders are sometimes very dangerous and could risk the lives of other people. In those situations, it's very difficult to defy publicly, but there might be ways to make yourself safer in a quieter way. One of the so famous or infamous experiments, I should say, on obedience to authority was Milgram's experiments conducted in the 1960s that many of us might be

familiar with. And he decided to conduct these experiments to really look at sort of the refrain from Nazis saying I was just following orders after World War II. And he really wanted to see was this type of compliance unique to Germany, or is it a psychological reality everywhere for people? And so we invited people in to take part in what was a learning experiment and whether people will learn more if they receive electric shocks from someone else. And nobody actually received electric shocks, but he did have participants come in and believe that they were giving electric shocks to another participant. And it started at like a harmless 15 volts,

but it went up to a very harmful 450 volts that can be sort of life-endangering. And that was labeled on the box as X, X, X, X, X, X. So the participant was sat in front of this, what looked like an electric box. They saw the other person go into a room and be strapped into what looks like an electric chair. And even though psychiatrists predicted that only about one in a thousand would go up to 450 volts. What Milgram found was that 65% of people went up and they pulled the lever for that 450 volts, which to him was really shocking. Now, one of the variations for the experiment was

where the experimenter who was in the room telling the participant to go on if they protested, and there was four prompts such as please go on, the experiment requires you to continue. it's absolutely essential that you continue and you have no choice. After those four prompts, if participants still objected, the experiment would stop. In one version of the experiment, the experiment actually left the room and gave orders by telephone. So they weren't physically present in the room. And what was interesting here was that the level of obedience went down from 65% to about 20%. And it was interesting that some of the participants were actually using quiet defiance in that they weren't saying no to the experimenter.

And they were even sometimes reassuring the experimenter that they were giving the shocks, but they were using the lower level 15 volts rather than increasing up to the really harmful one. So that's an example of quiet defiance that we can use in situations. and we can also know that once we're in a safer environment, that quiet defiance doesn't need to be so quiet. So, yeah, let's go back to what we said about this being a skill set that we can develop. So how do we go about doing that? You know, I'm sure most people listening will have been in situations where, you know, they'll go home in the evening and think, oh, I shouldn't have done that. I should have spoken up.

You know, but maybe they're, I don't know, they have social anxiety or they lack confidence. or like we said earlier that even the group that they're in is putting a lot of external pressure on them. How can we sort of get better at saying, no, I don't, I don't think that's right? Yeah. It's a very important point because if society is built upon these moments of consent and defiance, how can we get better and build that skill set? So there's a couple of things. One is really comes back to what we think about defiance, and this is a big one. If we equate compliance with being good and defiance with being bad, we find this very, very difficult. And first of all, it's shifting that mindset.

If you think of defiance as being loud and bold or angry and aggressive or bad, it's going to be very difficult. So understanding that defiance is just acting in accordance with your true values when there's pressure to do otherwise is really a big shift. Another sort of myth is that to be defiant, you need to be heroic, superhuman or You need to be like Rosa Parks with her famous no on the bus. That's also a myth. In fact, if you think about it, Rosa Parks did something that was amazing on that bus. But how many moments of compliance did she have before where she complied with segregation laws? Because many moments of defiance come after we've complied many, many times. And we are, as you said, sitting at home thinking, I wish I had said something in that meeting or I wish I had said no to that. And how can you can we incorporate defiance in our life? Because it isn't just for the brave or extraordinary. It's available and necessary for all of us. And we can do it in our own unique way. So how do we start doing

this? You can even start with thinking about the situations that you've regretted in the past. That's how I learned how to defy. I was thinking about, I wish I had said no in that situation and why didn't I? What are the factors that held me back? What allows me to be defiant? And so we can start anticipating the next time I'm in that situation, this is what I'm going to do. And this level of anticipation actually is really important. And we can actually anticipate the most common situations that arise, the ones that arise again and again. So the woman in the meeting with the other professors can anticipate this might happen again in another meeting. What can I do the next time? Because I'm going to recognize that tension. I'm going to

understand that feeling, and then how can I work through it? So start anticipating because it's often predictable, because if we don't anticipate, is the surprise that disables the defiance. Once we anticipate it, this is what I wish I had said, start visualizing it. So we start picturing it, and then we start practicing by scripting what we wish we would have said. And they can be simple statements that we just want to clarify the situation. We don't need to be. be confrontational, we can act with curiosity. So simple sentences, such as what do you mean by that, or I feel uncomfortable with this situation. I'm not sure I want to do that. So we can start with those sentences, which still leave you in this subservient position. You're not being loud and

bold. You're doing something that's easier for you. You can also perhaps address it in email if you don't want to do it face-to-face. There's many different ways. So anticipate, visualize, practice, then role play and repeat. And the reason I say that is because if we have been wired to comply, we need to change those neural pathways to make it easier for us to say those statements in the moment. So the practice becomes long before the moment of crisis, because then your ears can get used to you saying those words and your mouth can get used to you saying it. That's what changes the neural pathways and the practice. We don't appreciate sometimes how important practice is to changing our behavior and increasing our confidence and ability and

skill set. But athletes understand this. You know, practice is what makes us act in the moment, in that high stress moment. And there's a wonderful quote that's often attributed to Bruce Lee because of the training, but it was actually a Greek poet. And the quote is, under duress, we don't rise to the level of our expectations, but we fall to the level of our training. And that's why we need to actually train for defiance. You know, and think about defiance is not a personality. It's a practice. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr. Sanita Saar. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her latest book, Defy, the power of no in a world

that demands yes. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music

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