Speaking of Psychology - How to say ‘no’: The power of defiance, with Sunita Sah, PhD

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

How often do you “go along to get along,” or say yes when you really want to say no? Organizational psychologist Sunita Sah, PhD, author of “Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes,” talks about why it can be so hard to speak up and and how can you strengthen your resolve and ability to say no when the situation calls for it.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. and do you go along to get along or say yes when you really want to say no? We've all done it, agreed to a volunteer position that we didn't really have the time for, or held our tongue at the holiday dinner table to avoid a family fight, or kept quiet at work when speaking up could have helped a colleague avoid a mistake. Today we're going to talk about the psychology of speaking up and saying no. Why is that so hard to do?

What does it mean to defy, to comply, to compromise? comply or to consent. And how can you strengthen your resolve and ability to say no when the situation calls for it? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Sunita Sa. Dr. Saw is an associate professor at Cornell University's SC Johnson School of Management, where she studies ethics, authority, compliance and defiance, including questions such as why we comply with bad advice and how disclosure policies can backfire. Her research has been published in many academic journals and covered by

media outlets, including the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review and Scientific American. Her new book is called Defy, the power of no in a world that demands yes. Dr. Saw, thank you for joining me today. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you, Kim. The Oxford English Dictionary defines defiance as to challenge the power of another person boldly and openly. But in your book, you offer an alternative definition. Can you tell us what that is and why you felt defiance needed a new definition? Absolutely. So I've been fascinated by what that single word defy means for a very long time.

So as a child, I was known for being an obedient daughter and a student. and I remember asking my dad at one point, what does my name mean? And he told me, in Sanskrit, Sinita means good. And I mostly lived up to that. So I did what I was told. I did my homework as expected, went to school on time. I even had my hair cut the way my parents insisted. And these were the messages I received, you know, to be good, which means to be polite, to obey, to listen, not question authority. And many of the words, get these messages from a young age. And we start equating compliance with being good and defiance with being bad. But when I looked into it, and I've been studying this now for a very long time,

I saw that there were some problems with that in being so compliant. So, for example, one survey found that nine out of 10 healthcare workers, most of them nurses, did not feel comfortable speaking up when they saw a colleague making an error. And it's the same across industries. So in another survey of over 1,700 crew members of commercial airlines, about half of them felt uncomfortable saying something when they saw a mistake. So these could be life and death consequences. We want these people to be speaking up when they see an error or a mistake. And it made me start to wonder, is it sometimes bad to be so good? what do we sacrifice by being so compliant? And what I discovered now that I've been looking at this for years,

even if it's not life and death situations, when we don't speak up, when we see something wrong, it can be quite draining and have an effect on us. And I often felt a lot of tension between that aspect of doing what was expected of me and doing what I thought that was right. And that inspired so much of my research. And what I discovered that I think is crucial and really changed how I think is that we've misunderstood what it means to defy. So I'm not one to usually disagree with the Oxford English Dictionary.

After all, I grew up in the UK. But I think that definition of defiance that you described is too narrow and doesn't honour our agency. And so my definition of defiance is that to defy means to act in accordance with your values when there is pressure to do otherwise. So it takes defiance and transforms it into a positive pro-social force for society. Because if you think about it, Kim, all our individual acts of consent and dissent every day add up to the society that we live in. And so it affects our lives, our workplaces, our communities. And that's why I'm so passionate about it and think that we need to understand what defiance really means and the power behind it. Now, as long as we're talking about language, let me ask you the difference between compliance and consent.

Absolutely. Well, the two are often conflated, but they are actually quite different. So to comply with something just means to go along with something. And it's usually externally driven. Somebody is asking you to do something or there's expectations in your organization or in society. and is to go along and do comply with that expectation. Consent is not compliance. Consent is a thoroughly considered authorization that is an active expression of our deeply held values. So why do I say that?

Well, I worked as a physician before I became a organizational psychologist, and what I do in my research is take informed consent, the definition of informed consent from medicine and apply it to other decisions that we make in our lives. So for informed consent, we need five elements. And these are, so first of all, capacity. We need to have the mental capacity to make a decision. So physicians assess patients for capacity. Is this patient too ill, are they under the influence of any drugs or alcohol?

So first of all, hopefully we have the capacity to make a decision. And then next, we need knowledge. so we need information on the decision that we're about to make. But it's not just knowledge, it's not just receiving the information, it's understanding it, which is the third element. What are the risks? What are the benefits? What are the alternatives?

And to really understand that. Then the fourth one is this freedom to say no. Because if we don't have the freedom to say no, it's not really consent. It's simply compliance. And if those four elements are there, then you can engage in the fifth element, which is your authorization. So if you want to say yes with all those elements, you have the capacity, the knowledge, the understanding, the freedom to say no, then that's your informed consent. If you want to say no, that's your informed refusal.

Why do most people find it so hard to say no even when we know we should, whether that's agreeing to an obligation we don't want or staying quiet when we see someone behaving unethically? In those moments, what is it that holds us back from speaking up? Well, we often actively resist defiance, and there's a number of reasons I've found for this, but one key reason is that we feel this enormous pressure to go along with other people, this social pressure. And I've seen this time and time again in my research experiment after experiment. So let me describe this type of pressure that I'm talking about.

And it could range from small-stakes situations to much larger ones. So when I was working as a junior doctor, my first job, I received an invitation to meet with a financial advisor for free. And I remember that meeting really well because it was in the posh meeting room at work. So as posh as you can get on the National Health Service, it was a room I didn't even know existed. It had a carpet. There was a couch.

I was like, how come I've never discovered this before? So I went in after a long night on call and I sort sank down on the sofa and Dan, who was the advisor when he walked in, he was tall, he was Hansen, big smile, smart suit. And he greeted me warmly and he spent an hour talking with me. He asked many questions, mostly about my finances. He built up this amazing report. And after about an hour, he asked me whether he could write a report. he would send it in a week and he recommended that I invest in a couple of funds. All of this was for free.

So I was impressed and I had to ask him, what's in it for you? And he said, well, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And he would receive a commission if I invested in the funds that he was recommending. So he disclosed this conflict of interest. And what was key for me is that that disclosure did change the dynamics of the situation. So I did feel less trust in the advice. which is arguably the intended purpose of that disclosure. But at the same time, I now felt more pressure to go along with his advice

because I didn't want to signal that distrust to him. I didn't want him to think that this disclosure had now corrupted the lovely rapport that had been built up. And I started to feel really uncomfortable and I just then just wanted to sign and say, okay, fine, I'll invest in these ones. And what's happening there is the psychological process of insinuation anxiety. So this is a distinct type of anxiety that arises when we worry about our noncompliance with another person's wishes, is going to be interpreted as a signal of distressed and insinuates that the person is not whom they appear to be or should be,

that they're not trustworthy or competent or have integrity or benevolence. And it's an aversive emotional state. We become so concerned with offending the other person, we comply with them. Even in one-off situations I've found with strangers, we have a huge amount of compliance because we don't want to insinuate that our advisors, our co-workers, our friends are not trustworthy. So I'm sure we can imagine a situation where a boss is asking you to do something, everybody's going along with it, but you don't think it's right. But it's just too difficult to tell them that they're wrong, right?

or that we're at the hairdresser and we're sitting there and they're cutting away, cutting away, and you're thinking, no, that's not what I wanted. And it's just really hard to sort of tell them, no, this is not good. We normally just say, yes, thank you, and tip and walk out and feel dreadful. And so it happens in those everyday interactions. But what my research has shown me is that it's also in larger stake situations. So in medical scenarios, when your doctor disclosed, a conflict of interest, people feel more pressure, more insinuation anxiety to go along with it.

So even though trust decreases, insinuation anxiety increases, and it depends on which force is greater as to whether they will take the advice or not and go along with that. So it's really important to know what that feeling is, this insinuation anxiety, and name it. Because once we name it, we know what we're dealing with and we can understand it. So what are some steps a person can take to overcome the pressure to comply? Are there things you can do in the short term and in the long term? And is this a kind of muscle you can train so it gets stronger? I absolutely believe that.

So in the short term, I'll tell you what happened to me when Dan asked me to invest in those funds is when things were starting to just get that little bit too uncomfortable. and the silence was a little bit too much, I was thankfully saved by my beeper going off. And that was not planned, but I managed to leave the room. And he was like, no worries, I'll send you everything as planned. But when he did, I had time to think about it and think about my extremely limited disposable income. And, well, actually, I don't want to invest in these particular funds. And it was much easier for me to make that decision away from debt. So this is what I call the power of the pause.

If you can just pause rather than agreeing in the moment or on the spot, and especially if you can get some physical distance, that really helps decrease that signal of distrust. Because if this is social pressure, what we want to do is reduce that social interaction as much as we can. So if we can make the decision in private, if we have an opportunity to change our mind, in all my experiments I show that compliance goes down,

a huge amount. But making the decision in front of the other person is what leads us to comply a lot of the time and shows us that our public behavior is not in alignment with our private preferences. So we really need to be aware of that. But what's even better than just sort of thinking about the power of the pause in the moment is to really train ourselves for defiance. Because if you're like me and you had a master class in compliance growing up, you don't actually have the neural pathways to know how to defy it, and we need to train them. Because we know that training makes a big effect, right? Our brains have what we call neuroplasticity, so the neural pathways can change. If we're wired to comply, we need to change that wiring. So how can we do that?

Well, we can start anticipating situations that require defiance. So the next time I see a financial advisor, for example, I will know if they disclose a conflict of interest. If anyone discloses a conflict of interest, I will have some familiarity with that. So I find that surprise really disables defiance. It makes us freeze. But if we can anticipate something, we can then start visualizing it and role-playing or scripting it out and practicing it. And it's that practice that changes the neural pathways. In terms of anticipating, I always get asked, how do we know, right? How do we know what we need to defy?

Well, a lot of situations in which defiance is called for are actually quite predictable. So, for example, I know in a particular faculty meeting, there will be one colleague that will always say something inappropriate. You just know that this is going to happen. Perhaps you're in a job and you know, in this particular job, I might be asked to look the other way. I might be asked to do something unethical and you need to be prepared for that. So that anticipation is really important. We can't anticipate everything, but we can anticipate a lot of things. And we know the situations that we've

struggled with in the past. And we can think about those and practice what we wish we had said. And why is that so important? Well, there's this famous quote that's often attributed to Bruce Lee, but was actually a Greek poet, that I think really shows us the importance of practice and training. And that quote is, under duress, we don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training. And so that's why it's so important to start practicing for defiance and learning the skill long before the moment of crisis. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill for burner gas grill on special buy for only $199.

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deeply than that? Well, I certainly hope so. I mean, that's the idea, right, is to make defiance accessible to everyone. And Stanley Milgram's work was definitely an inspiration when I looked at the amount of obedience that we have. But what really fascinated me with that work was the defiant subjects. What enabled them to defy? And that is what I do a really deep dive on. It's the kind of book I wish I had had growing up, a step-by-step strategy to learn the will and the skill to defy. how can we do this and how can we practice this. So I want to make defiance accessible to everyone because with defiance, we often think that it is loud or aggressive or violent. And it's none of those things. It's simply living in an alignment with our values. And it's accessible to everyone.

It's not a personality. It's a practice. And that's a key point of misunderstanding what it means to defy is that we think we don't have the personality for it. You don't need to have a large than life personality. We can all defy in ways that are unique to us and with far less angst than we had in the past. So it's just learning how to do that. So what are some good ways of saying no without offending another person or completely blowing up the situation? So there's five stages of defiance that I've discovered. And the first one is tension. And we can see that in the Milgram experiments, the obedience to authority experiments, where the experimenter is asking a participant to give what they believe is harmful electric shocks to another person.

You can see some of the subjects showing signs of tension, sort of nervous laughter, hesitating, and those moments are really important to acknowledge, because often when we feel uncomfortable in a situation, we have a sign of tension that we know. This is what always happens me. Either you feel something in your stomach, you feel queasy, or your throat goes dry. It's different for every person. It manifests in different ways, but we have to get in touch with what is the tension that we have. Now, the second stage is really acknowledging that tension to ourselves, because often we just disregard it. We think it's not worth our doubt. We think the other person knows better, or nobody else is saying anything, and it's going to be fine. And so we push it away. And that's really

a shame because we're ignoring a really fundamental warning system that could be really powerful to us that we might need to defy. Now, coming to your question of how can we do this without offending the other person? This is stage three of defiance and it's actually a critical stage because if we can get to stage three, the research shows you're more likely to get to the final stage five and the act of defiance. So in this stage three, it's simply vocalizing your discomfort to someone else. And it's just saying, I'm not comfortable with that or asking for clarification. What do you mean by that? Have you considered this? And in this stage, you are still in a subservient position. You're just asking for clarification. Like, what is it that's really going on in this

situation. And so I call it curiosity, not confrontation. So let's ask some questions and find out what's going on because, again, a myth of defiance is that it's emotional and loud and aggressive. And that's not what defiance is. It's simply acting in alignment with your values and knowing what's going on. So it's not about confrontation. It's about living your life in alignment with integrity. Do you think girls are still socialized to be more compliant than boys? In your research, are you seeing gender differences in how likely men and women are to be defiant? So I've run quite a lot of studies on whether people will comply with bad advice. And in most of them, there were no gender differences.

Milgram found the same in his studies that the obedience to authority was the same for women as it was for men. So in that aspect, I haven't seen gender differences. It affects us all, this reluctance to defy affects us all. There was one study, however, I did see a gender difference. And that is in what I call the ferry study, where we approached over 250 passengers going from Long Island to Connecticut. And we had a middle-aged white man sort of dressed quite smartly, approached passengers as if he was an employee, of the ferry to ask them to fill out a short survey. And the short survey were quite innocuous questions, such as is the fairy clean, was it leaving on time, was very short. And he promised them $5 if they finished the survey. So after they finished the survey, he then asked them, well, I could give you the $5 as promised, or I could enter you into this mystery lottery that pays out between $0 and $10,

but the average payment is less than $5. So once he said that, there was different conditions. With that alone and no advice about what to do, most of the people chose the $5 cash. Just give me $5, right? Why would I enter a lottery where the expected value is less than $5? And so it was 92% of people chose the cash, showing by far this is the preferred option.

In another condition, as well as presenting the two, options, he also said, advised them to take the lottery, just recommended it. I think you should go for the lottery. Here now, people took it. 20% now took the lottery or just over. And then when he disclosed an ulterior motive that he would also receive a bonus if they took the lottery, it more than doubled to 42%. And when I asked the passengers afterwards, why? It's, it's It wasn't because they liked the advisor more. In fact, they liked him less once the disclosure was there. They felt much more uncomfortable to turn down the recommendation with disclosure than without,

much like I did with Dan, the financial advisor. Here, we saw a gender difference. We weren't expecting one, but when we measured insinuation anxiety, it was far higher in the women than it was in the men. And that could be because it was a man given the advice or the men didn't expect this man to be given them benevolent advice in any way or they felt more comfortable to reject the advice. But that experiment showed me there are situations where insinuation is more powerful for some people than it is for others. And we need to be aware of that. What about cultural differences?

In the U.S., we think of ourselves as a nation of individualists. And is that self-image correct? Or are we just as likely to comply as people in other countries? I mean, the Milgram experiment was conducted, so 35 years after Milgram conducted in then early 1960s. And what people found was that obedience hadn't changed over that time, even though they were actually increased perceptions of agency and autonomy. So we do think of ourselves as possessing agency.

And yet, with my experiments, I see an extremely high rate of compliance. So in some of the lottery experiments that I'm describing to you, I see rates of compliance of 85% or over. And this is what researchers call a ceiling effect, and that is very hard to get higher compliance. So when I get asked, like, do you think we'll see different results in different countries? well, if we're getting such high compliance in the U.S., then I'm not sure that we're going to sort of see higher compliance elsewhere. And so I really do think we in America think that we are more defiant than we actually are and that we have possessed more agency than we actually display.

Now, sometimes it's dangerous to be defiant, whether that's for your career or health or mental health or for a physical safety. So how can people decide when is the right time to comply and when it's really necessary to defy? Great question. So defiance is never completely risk-free. And there are costs to defiance. Like the things that we worry about that is going to cost me a relationship. It might cost me a job. It might be actually physically dangerous at points. But what we often forget is that there's costs to being compliant and giving up our agency. So bowing our head to others continuously and disregarding our values. So I recommend assessing the situation for defiance in two ways.

So two key questions that we want to ask. And the first one is, is it safe? So of course physically, but also maybe financially, psychologically, emotionally, we want to ask ourselves those questions. again, it can never be completely safe. So the question is really, is it safe enough? Is it safe enough? And then the second question is, is it effective? Will it be effective? Will I have some positive impact? And again, effective enough. Because some people don't really think about the positive impact because it's more important for them to take a stand for what they believe in, regardless of whether it has a positive impact or not. And so if we think, Think about like some of the really famous acts of defiance in history, like Rosa Parks. I mean, she was not safe to defy. She was living under segregation, under mortal threat at times.

There was many consequences as well for her defiance that people don't talk about. It really had a huge impact on her. She lost her job. She was unemployed for 10 years. There were many consequences. But when she was asked 10 years later, would she do it again? She was a course, you know, and she had actually practiced for that moment. It wasn't a spontaneous decision like some people think.

She had been practicing for that moment in years. And at that particular point, her defiance calculus, whether it was safe or effective enough, was a yes for her. Now, here's a question for parents and other caregivers. You don't want your toddler to be defiant every time you need to get them in their car seat. So how do you teach children to respect adults and other children, but also to stand up to themselves when necessary? Well, one of the things that I think we do for most children is train them in compliance. We train them in compliance a lot. And if we misunderstand what defiance actually means, which is acting in alignment with your values, some of them, especially when it comes to teens, and they're doing the exact opposite of what you tell them. No, I have a teenager right now.

So some of these scenarios are very vivid in my mind, such as playing the Xbox, for example, and I would love him to do his homework instead. And so I ask him, are you going to do your homework? Well, and he's like, well, I was going to do my homework. But now that you've asked me to, I'm not going to do it. And so what does that show us? Is that being defiant? Well, actually, in my definition, no.

because what he's doing is listening intently to what I'm saying and acting in the exact opposite direction, which means that it's what I call false defiance. But defiance like consent comes from within. It's not from an external source. It doesn't depend on anybody else's expectations. It's coming from within you. And so that's not really defiance. And what we need to do is actually train our children to,

be defined. If we think of defiance as a good, positive force, we want to give them training in that. So one of the ways this really hit home was when I was about six or seven years old and I was walking home with my mom from the grocery store. And my mom was wheeling the shopping cart, which was just like an old rickety cart on two wheels, a bit like wheel luggage that we take to the airports. And it had our produce in it. And it was quite a long walk back home. I grew up in Yorkshire in England, and we wanted to take a shortcut through what we call there a snicket. A snicket is just a very narrow alleyway, and we decided to go through that alleyway on the way home to reduce the length of our walk. Now, in that alleyway, we were confronted with about five or six teenage boys,

and they blocked our path, and they shouted out some obnoxious things to us and told us to go back Now, my mom is quite petite. She's 4'10 at the most. She was wearing her blue sari. She had her hair neatly platted back one single plat. And the way I thought about my mom, if we think about compliance and defiance as binary, which I've realized it is not, you know, there's these stages of defiance. But if we do think about it that way, I had very neatly put her in the compliant box because she served everybody's needs. She did the cooking, the cleaning, the grocery shopping. She was always looking after other people. She was not loud or aggressive. And until that day, I thought she was completely compliant. But when this happened and those boys stopped her, my reaction to them was instant. So I grabbed my mom's arm and I averted my gaze. I did not want to look at them.

And I just wanted to maneuver as fast as possible through them to go home. and she stopped and she looked at them straight in the eye and she said, What do you mean? And my heart started racing. I grabbed her arm even tighter and I whispered to her, no, come on, Ma. And she shrugged me off. She said no.

And then she got the shopping cart. She put it up upright and she put one hand on her hip. And she looked back at the boys again and she said, What do you mean? And the boys didn't say anything. They were looking at each other. And she said, oh, yeah, you think you're so big and strong, big tough boys, right? Clever boys.

And again, there was complete silence from their side. And then one of the boys looked at the other and said, let's go. And they just dispersed. And I was astounded because I never expected that from my mom that day. And she grabbed the shopping cart and then she started walking back home really fast. and I kind of stood frozen for a while before I ran after her. But what that really showed me was a couple of things. One is that defiance is not a personality, it's a practice.

It's a skill set that we can choose to use or not. And it became clear to me that she had encountered those boys before, but that day she did something different. She must have been practicing for it, or perhaps I was there in that moment, and she wanted to show me something. And that day she did something different. So even if we're being conditioned to comply the way I was, that I'm sure the way that my mother was as well,

compliance might be our default, but it's not our destiny. The second thing that it showed me is that defiance might change you. The instances where I've been able to defy, it is transformational. We feel more authentic, more honest. It's more joyful life to be able to live in alignment with your values. but it also changes the people that observe it. I mean, my mom's defiance definitely had an impact on me. It stayed with me.

And it's what I call this ripple effect or the defiance domino effect is that it inspires other people to also go along with their values instead of going along with other people. And that's why it's really important because if we want to train our children to be defiant, these moments are what creates society. And what I really hope for with my book and making to find successful and a changing our understanding is that one day, one of those teens would have spoken up and said, stop doing that to his friends. So my immigrant mother wouldn't have to. So just to close, let me ask you, what are the big questions you still want to answer? What's next for you in research? Well, I am researching what I call the voice empathy gap. So I've interviewed over 50 nurses and nurse managers.

And what I've uncovered is that when you ask nurses why they don't speak up in a situation at work, when they see some errors, the reasons that they give are very different from why their nurse managers think that they don't speak up. So there is this gap in how it's viewed in that the nurses don't think it's safe or effective enough. And the nurse managers think it's to do with the characteristics of the nurses, is that they're not taking responsibility for things that go wrong or that they just don't have the ability or the skill set or the confidence to speak up. Looking into interventions to decrease that gap,

because if we have a different understanding about what's causing people to speak up, then we have some kind of status quo where the environment and the culture doesn't change. And that's really important for us to manage if we want to create the right types of culture for people to speak up. Well, Dr. Saw, I want to thank you for joining me today.

This has been really interesting. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology. Or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For those of you who want to know more about psychology and the work of APA, you can join us as a supporter.

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