Psychology Researcher: Why Always Being Good Can Be Incredibly Bad for You | Dr. Sunita Sah

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Episode Transcript:

Sunita Sah: [00:00:00] I miss it sometimes. Bad to be so good and so compliant. And how can we make it easier for people to become defiant?

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:08] Doctor Sunita Sahi is a leading authority on the psychology of influence and decision making at Cornell University, whose groundbreaking work shows us how to resist manipulation and stand our ground.

Sunita Sah: [00:00:21] I saw that nine out of ten healthcare workers, most of them nurses, didn’t feel comfortable speaking up when they saw somebody making an error. And that could be life and death situations.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:33] It is so interesting the way that we we conflate compliance with goodness.

Sunita Sah: [00:00:39] I came to this revelation that we’ve misunderstood what it means to defy. Whereas my new definition is two pi is to.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:47] Take me into this a bit more.

Sunita Sah: [00:00:49] When we’re asked to do something that goes against one of our values, we feel tension. We need to recognize that because that could actually Hey there!

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:00] Before we dive into today’s show, one quick thing if you haven’t yet followed the show, it would mean the world to me. If you took just two seconds to tap the follow button on whatever app you’re listening in. It helps us grow our Good Life Project. community and continue creating the best possible show we can for you, and it ensures you’ll never miss an episode. Now on to the show. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:28] There’s this notion that defiance is a bad thing, that, you know, it’s inherently it’s not okay, you know, keep your head down and sort of like, follow things and that you make this interesting argument that says, effectively that we are conditioned to believe that compliance is inherently good and defiance is inherently bad. So take me into this argument more. It’s so fascinating.

Sunita Sah: [00:01:51] For me in particular, as a child, I was really known as being an obedient daughter and a student. Didn’t. 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 lived up to that. These were the messages that I received. Like to be good was to do as you told. Go to school when you’re told, do your homework, don’t question your teachers. And the messages came from family, teachers, community that we started to equate, or at least I certainly did. And a lot of people I know start to equate being compliant with being good and defiance with being bad. And that becomes so ingrained in us that questioning authority or trying to stand up to someone becomes really difficult. And I certainly struggled with it a lot, and I actually became really fascinated by the sort of single, powerful word defy and what it meant, and seeing people that had it an easier time of being defiant really fascinated me and I wanted to explore that in more depth. I started to see situations where compliance became a serious problem. When I looked into it, that being so compliant could cause so many serious problems in life. And when I looked into surveys, I saw that nine out of ten healthcare workers, most of them nurses, didn’t feel comfortable speaking up when they saw somebody making an error. And that could be life and death situations. And the same applies with crew members on commercial airlines.

Sunita Sah: [00:03:30] Again, another sort of life and death situation where a survey of 1700 crew members found that at least half of them felt uncomfortable when they saw their superiors making an error and did not want to speak up. So I started to think like, what does it mean to be so good all the time? Is it sometimes bad to be so good and so compliant? And what do we lose? What do we do you know, going against our values so often? And how can we make it easier for people to become defiant? And that’s why I realized after a lot of studying that I came to this revelation that we’ve misunderstood what it means to defy. And we need a new definition of of defiance, one that honors our agency and reframes it as a positive force. So if you look at the old definition, it to defy is to challenge the power of somebody else boldly and openly. Whereas my new definition is that to defy is simply to act in accordance with your values when there’s pressure to do otherwise. And having that positive reframe makes a big difference, because these acts of consent and dissent every day live up to the society that we live in. So that’s why I’m so passionate about it, because it affects our work lives, our communities and our personal lives. And it’s an important factor that we need to integrate into our lives and make easier and accessible for everyone to be able to defy.

Jonathan Fields: [00:05:03] And that makes sense. It is so interesting the way that we conflate compliance with goodness. You know, it’s like, oh, I think so many of us, we aspire to be I want to be a good person. I want to think of myself as a good person. I want others to think of me as a good person. A part of that equation is then I should just kind of comply with like, whatever is sort of like the norm around me. And it sounds like what you’re describing also is it’s these could be the norms and expectations in your family. They could be the norms and expectations in a single relationship, maybe a partner or a friend. It could be as large as like culture, society, a company you’re working in, you know, like the entire country. And it seems like we’re constantly scanning the way you’re describing it, saying like, what are these norms and expectations? And like, how do I go along with them so that I can keep seeing myself as like that good person that everyone wants to be around, that I feel good about myself.

Sunita Sah: [00:05:57] Yeah. And it certainly, you know, they’re not like how you’re socialized as a child certainly makes a difference. But the environment that we’re currently in also makes a big difference, as you’re saying. Like, what does our society expect? What does my relationship with one single person expect? And having worked in different institutions, I really do see sort of how workplace culture really takes a toll on this too. Like there’s some in some workplaces, you’re explicitly told this is a place where you don’t speak up, you just keep your head down and do your work, and you don’t question. And other places have a more psychologically safe environment where you can question, you can speak up. You can talk about things that you think are going in the wrong direction. So it is really fascinating how much there’s like an inner aspect, but there’s also the interaction with people that you have in your environment working in a business school as well. I look into sort of ethics and scandals, and I’m always so intrigued as to when people become what they call like a yes man or a yes person in a company, because you start equating how good you are with how much you follow your boss’s orders and what they want, even when they go off track into sort of ambiguous areas or even clearly unethical areas. Psychologists call it ethical fading that you start narrowing on what is your task and looking at how good you’ve performed as to how well you do that task, rather than asking the bigger, wider questions as to what is this about? Who’s it affecting? Is it?

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:31] Yeah, I would imagine also that so much of this is patterned in childhood. I’m just thinking like the typical kid is going to learn really quickly how to be in the good graces of a parent or a caregiver or a teacher, you know, and it’s sort of like as a kid, you want to be in the good graces, in part because you just it feels awesome because you know, you’re probably at an age where you want to feel like you’re safe and protected. And if you like, you’re kind of running these subconscious experiments all the time with that older person, which is kind of testing, like what keeps me in their good graces or gets me in their good graces. And if you keep getting rewarded for complying with like, whatever the rules and the norms and the expectations are, then you learn at an early age, oh, this is how it works. Yeah, this is how I stay in their good graces. This is how I feel good about myself, how they feel good about me. And this is just the way that you’re supposed to be in the world.

Sunita Sah: [00:08:23] Yeah. I mean, that reinforcement is so powerful. If you get rewarded for being good and you don’t get rewarded for doing anything, that goes out of the category of following my orders and being good. If you don’t get rewarded for that, then of course, those neural pathways for being obeying are going to strengthen and become very strong. And then it’s you have to really work at rewiring, but it can be done. We can change our default. And I always say that compliance might be our default, but it’s not our destiny. We can become different.

Jonathan Fields: [00:08:56] And it is so interesting the way that this shows up as you described, you know, you give the example of, you know, in the medical profession, which I know you also have personal experience in. I’m curious, in your time in medicine, is this an experience that you personally have seen in yourself.

Sunita Sah: [00:09:12] In terms of not speaking up? If I see an error?

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:15] Yeah. Or that you’ve grappled with in some meaningful way.

Sunita Sah: [00:09:17] I remember one occasion really well where I felt very upset about that particular order, but it seemed I was lacking power in that situation to make a difference. I was a junior doctor at the time, and I remember I was concerned about a particular elderly patient. So I ordered some tests and they were refused. Another healthcare worker came along and refused to do it, and asked me to delete something on the records that I had actually written, and I was incredibly upset about it. The doctor came and they said, yeah, I agree with you, but there was nothing we could do about that situation. And in that kind of environment, you feel really frustrated and just not knowing what to do. When you actually had noticed something, you’d followed what you thought was the right protocol in that place. So to some extent, I thought I was being compliant, and then I was told to go in a different direction. That doesn’t wasn’t for the best interests of the patient, and that can make somebody quite disillusioned with how to change the environment.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:24] Yeah, I would imagine, you know, as you’re describing that, also, I’m remembering the sort of like the famed Milgram shock experiments that I think so many of us probably learned about in college, you know, like in different examples. It kind of boggles my mind sometimes how far I will go knowing, like there’s a voice inside of us that says, this isn’t right. And yet, if we’re being told by a person in authority and the culture around us seems to support the fact, like, but this is just what we do, this is appropriate. Like keep doing the thing that, you know, deep down is wrong, that we we keep complying even when in this particular case, you know, you probably remember the facts better than me. I think it was students in a lab where they were told that there was another student, and in response to answers, they would give them varying levels of shock. Yeah, walk me through this a little bit more.

Sunita Sah: [00:11:11] The studies were conducted in the 1960s and.

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:14] Never be allowed now.

Sunita Sah: [00:11:15] So yeah. And it was really Milgram. Stanley Milgram wanted to investigate the sort of claim that from the Nazis after World War two, that I was just following orders. So that particular statement, that’s all that they was doing. Was this really a psychological reality? Is that what people do? And he didn’t expect that people would do that. There was a group of psychiatrists as well that predicted that it was less than 1% would go all the way up to the most dangerous shark, 450V, which could harm a human being or even cause cause death. So they weren’t the students that were members of the community that were invited to come into the lab, and it was framed as a learning, a memory experiment. It was set up in such a way that there was one person who was part of the experiment. So an actor that would always be the learner and be put in a separate room, and the real participant would see that that learner would be strapped to something that looks like an electric chair. And they were looking at the effects of electric shocks on memory and learning to see if that would improve people’s learning abilities. And the participant was then designated as a teacher, and they were put in a different room. And they have to read out these word pairs to the learner. And if they get something incorrect, they have to start very low voltage, around 15V, and then work up the scale that was shown quite prominently to the participants up to x x x.

Sunita Sah: [00:12:54] Dangerous fatal shocks. Most psychiatrists predicted hardly anyone would go to the top level. And yet what they found was that everybody shocked at around 160 and everybody shocked at 300V even. And then about 65% of people went all the way to the deadly shock of 450V, which was really astounding. And he called those participants the obedient ones. The ones that refused were defiant. And that is why we have our definition wrong. Because the defiant, the defiant participants were actually doing the right thing and refusing to harm another person. But the obedient ones and his category of just dividing into obedient and and defiant is what we normally do. We have this binary of obedient or you’re defiant when really I’ve noticed that there is a scale of defiance, and some of those that were classified as obedient were trying to defy. They just hadn’t learned exactly how to be able to get to the final stage of defiance. So they would object. They would have had some nervous laughter, or they would smile, or they would ask questions. But when they were told to continue, they continued. So it was actually quite shocking experiment and shocking results. He also looked at different conditions that would allow for more defiance, which is also really fascinating to look in, what allows us to be more defiant in those types of situations.

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:24] And just for context here, for those tuning in, the shocks were fake. The shocks were fake. It was like the person thought that they were pushing a button and giving the shocks. But the actor, the person receiving them was just an actor who was really pretending to do this, so there was no actual harm. Can you even say there was no harm done? Because I often wonder what about the psyche of the person who then left that room going in thinking I’m a good person and then leaving thinking I’ve I’ve just done something horrible that I don’t believe is okay. Like, who am I?

Sunita Sah: [00:14:53] Yeah. So that was the that’s that’s why we wouldn’t be able to repeat the experiment now. Because just because there was no physical shocks being given to anyone. People had to live with the fact that they had indeed given someone perhaps a deadly shock. And what did that mean about them? And that could affect people in numerous different ways. So that psychological effect could have been there, even though they were debriefed and is really given as a lot of insight into human behaviour.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:24] Yeah. I remember there’s this mentalist, Derren Brown, who does all of these TV specials. He’s incredible. I remember seeing one, and he does these experiments that really push the envelope of human behaviour. I remember seeing him effectively doing his version of this where he was inviting people at an event. Basically, he would create a scenario where he would literally get people to come up to a rooftop and eventually have to choose between pushing somebody off the roof or not. And these are people who are unsuspecting. They had no involvement beforehand, and a very substantial of people did believe that they ended up pushing somebody to their death, even though it was all contrived and it was mind blowing to just see, like, these are not people where you’re like, oh, they just have this secret dark side, or like they’re secretly evil or violent. This is you and me. Exactly how manipulable we are when the right circumstances and expectations are wrapped around us. It’s like these are us in our family and our friends. And it’s so hard to wrap your head around that.

Sunita Sah: [00:16:19] Like when I read the descriptions of the participants that Milgram had written about and them sweating and even laughing nervously, I recognized aspects of myself and I was like, well, they’re trying to defy, but they don’t know how to. And we really need to learn how to defy in those situations because we get so much training. Well, I got so much training in being compliance. I say a masterclass of being compliant, but I wasn’t taught how to be defiant. And we need to sort of nourish that will, to defy when we really want to. And I believe people were and they were showing so much tension in those moments, but they weren’t able to act through to the end and actually defy the experimenter.

Jonathan Fields: [00:17:07] Yeah. And we’ve just shared some pretty extreme examples. But this is also this happens to everybody every day in all the tiniest ways. Whether you’re just like a people pleaser or somebody asks a favor and you’re like, it’s not quite aligned with you and you don’t have time and you’re like, just yes, yes, yes. And as you describe, you write about, you know, this, it’s almost like the the request for defiance and the act of defiance creates this tension like a conflict between your values and your expectations. Take me into this a bit more.

Sunita Sah: [00:17:33] So I call this this tension resistance to resistance that we often feel uncomfortable when we’re asked to do something that goes against one of our values, which is, you know, probably for many people, not harming another human being. And when we are asked to do that, we feel tension in lots of situations where we want to defy, we feel that aspect of tension, and it can manifest in different ways for different people. So for some people, it could be their throat closing up, or it could be a quickened heartbeat or feeling some sweat, or I have what I call my crocodile smile, which is like a spontaneous smile that comes up as soon as I’m uncomfortable. Because in some ways, perhaps I want to appease the other person. But I also feel very uncomfortable, and I’m trying to mask that in some way that I’m really uncomfortable with what you’re asking me to do. And we need to recognize that, because that could actually be a warning sign to us. It’s a way of your body telling you that you want to defy, perhaps before you even know it. And a lot of the time we just disregard it. We sort of sweep it under the rug, or we just think it’s not worth the doubt that we feel. And yet, if we did really listen to it, we could think, right now I’m feeling uncomfortable. I acknowledge that to ourselves. And then the next step is, is communicating that to the other person. And that’s a big step. But once you can do that, you’re much more likely to get to the act of defying and saying, no, I’m not going to do that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:04] So I guess the big question in my head then is like, just on a practical level, you know, you describe like, you know, that you have this crocodile smile. So like you’ve discovered your tell, like you’re like, okay, so now my brain translates this as like, this is happening. There’s something that must be going on inside of me where there’s a conflict happening here between values and expectations. How might the typical person start to recognize, like, what is the signal inside of me? That should raise the question here.

Sunita Sah: [00:19:32] Well, it might be something that you are accustomed to doing. So I know about my crocodile smile. I think one of my colleagues pointed it out to me. I was like, you’re right. And also, laughter. I have the same nervous laughter. I think that the Milgram participants would have in that situation if you if you’ve been in a situation where you wish you had done something different and you’re recalling it, you probably know how you felt. So I talk about a time that I went for a CT scan as a doctor. Knowing this, how could I not be able to say no in this situation? The doctor had told me to go for a CT scan. I thought it was completely unnecessary. I felt uncomfortable about it. I talk about these stages of defiance and stage one is that tension, you know, feeling that tension which could be different for many. You have your own unique sign that you might be able to recognize from having been in these situations. But I certainly felt uncomfortable straight away and I felt some anxiety and I just swept it away. I didn’t even try to acknowledge it to myself rather than communicate to the other person.

Sunita Sah: [00:20:38] I think I said the most I said was, oh, is it’s only a small amount of radiation. And I knew full well how much radiation was in there, but I thought that was enough for the other person to realize that I was uncomfortable and it wasn’t. What I realized then is that even if I get to the point of saying I’m uncomfortable, you need to repeat it several times to be able to then say you’re not going to go along with it. So I think learning, thinking about situations where you wanted to be defiant or you wanted to refuse something but weren’t able to, you can start thinking, why didn’t you? What was it that you felt in that situation? Because what I feel when I end up going along is that tension doesn’t go away. It actually increases. And then it makes me think and ruminate about, why did I do that when I didn’t want to? So I start thinking about it afterwards. Why did I just go along with that?

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:32] That lands so strongly with me. I’m thinking about what am I towels, what are my internal signals? And I’m pretty sure for me it’s actually my gut is the place where that lands, where when I sense a conflict like this, that tension like I know what’s right here and I’m not doing it in some way, shape or form. It often lands. It’s embodied for me before it’s cognitive, like it starts in my body and then like my body is kind of twisting or spinning and often in my gut, and I feel like my brain then sort of like even subconsciously, is like, ooh, what’s happening here? It’s almost like it goes from the gut up into my brain and my brain starts to ask the question, like, what’s this signal about what’s actually happening?

Sunita Sah: [00:22:08] Happens to me, too. Like, I feel.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:10] Like.

Sunita Sah: [00:22:10] Oh, something feels wrong, but I don’t know what it is. And I have to try and then figure out, like, what is it exactly that feels wrong about this situation?

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:19] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. So you describe this sort of like the stages of defiance, starting with this early tension, this signal. Walk me through the progression here.

Sunita Sah: [00:22:30] So stage one is that tension. And then it’s an important step is that next thing about acknowledging that tension to yourself. So stage two is acknowledge it. Tell yourself you feel tension. Something feels wrong. You feel uncomfortable rather than just disregarding it, which so many of us do. Then stage three is articulating that tension to someone else. Like perhaps the person who is asking you to do something that you think is wrong. So telling them that you’re not comfortable with that, and that stage three is actually a critical stage, because if you can get to stage three, you’re more likely to get to the end stage, stage five and defy. Stage four is to continue saying that you feel uncomfortable and threatened to, you know, you basically threatened and to defy that. I can’t go along with that, you know. So it’s remaining. Sometimes I get to stage three and I go back, but that’s if you can get to stage three, you can just repeat it. So stage four is saying, like, you don’t think you can comply with this or you’re not going to comply with this. And then stage five is the actual defiant act. And the most interesting aspect about that is that once you do get to stage five, a lot of that tension that you’re feeling just evaporates and you actually feel great about being able to to go along with, with your values and what you thought was the right thing to do in this situation.

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:59] Yeah. I mean, even knowing that there may be repercussions, you know, because if you have just, you know, like stated your defiance and made an act that is perceived as being a defiant act within a system or a culture where it’s like they like, you know, that’s not okay. It’s not accepted. That’s so interesting. Right? Because on the one hand, you may be feeling this internal alignment where the warning signals internally are kind of calming down and your mind is like, yeah, like that was the right thing. But then externally, like, you may have to pay a price for that. And this is some of some of the things you write about, you know, like it’s and it goes to, you know, it starts to speak also to power differentials and who really who gets to defy and when.

Sunita Sah: [00:24:40] Yeah. So a couple of things there. One are the costs of defiance which a lot of people think about. Right. So it’s one of the things that keeps, keeps us so compliant is that we fear the costs. And there might be consequences. There usually are consequences of being defiant. So you might not get promoted. You might lose your job, you might damage your relationship. And these are the things that are often on our minds when we think about defying. But we don’t think about the costs of continually complying with other people. And because there are large costs of that, if you are not living in alignment with your values and you’re constantly bowing your head to other people and disregarding your values, it can be soul crushing and that can affect you both psychologically, Spiritually, physically it takes its toll as well. So we do need to take that into consideration. And then there is a defined hierarchy where it’s easier for some people to defy and live in alignment with their values. And for others that are not of the dominant class. So there’s more of a backlash. There’s more consequences for defying, especially in certain situations. I mean, we know that black people are more likely to experience severe consequences if they refuse to give over their cards or if they refuse to comply with the police, even if the police are wrong in conducting a search of any kind. The students that I’ve spoken to, my African American students, my black students, they will say, you know, they comply because they want to go home. They want to go home. That is not the time to defy. The time to defy is later, but not when you could be physically unsafe. So we need to make assessments as to how safe this environment is. And also another good one is to think about what impact is it going to have. And we can think about not just so we remain compliant continuously, but that we find the right time to defy when it’s going to be both safe and effective.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:41] That lands us so true. There are certain systems or cultures, whether it’s work or whether it’s society, where if you say like, I can’t just go along anymore, like it’s time for me to actually do some act of defiance. And you think about the cost benefit analysis there and you’re like, okay, because I get to be true to myself. I know what’s right, and I need to stand in my values. All right. That will make me feel so much better. And on the cost side, there may be times where you’re thinking to yourself, this may effectively get me cast out from the culture, from the family, from the company, from, like, whatever it is. Like, I literally may not be able to that door may be closed to me, you know. And I may have to find a new culture or place or family. But then there are moments where you’ve got to still live in that world, no matter what. It just is what it is, you know? And it’s awful. But like, on the cause side, it’s like I’m then going to have to sort of like stay in this community, this society, this culture, because effectively there’s no real easy way out and pay that price in various different ways, maybe indefinitely. And that’s got to be such a brutal thing to grapple with.

Sunita Sah: [00:27:50] Yeah, it really is. And I heard some fascinating stories about how people manage this in different ways. So one was a police officer that I spoke to, that he trained during the time of the George Floyd incident, and he saw how the rookie officers were so compliant to their training officer in restraining George Floyd. And he didn’t want to be like that. And he there was a situation where they were late at night investigating some bicycle thefts. And he was a rookie police officer himself, and he was with some veteran police officers that wanted to search the garage of someone because they suspected, I think, that there might be some bicycles in there. And he knew that he knew his law, that this could not be, that they didn’t have any standing to go in there. Right. Nobody was screaming. There was no blood on the floor, and they needed the home owner’s permission. And the veteran police officers were kind of annoyed that this rookie police officer had called this out and they said, okay, get permission. And he knocked on the door for a really long time. The homeowner’s car was there, but he was probably fast asleep and he didn’t answer the door. And the senior police officers were like, F it, I’m going in. And he refused to go in because he was just imagining a situation where they were searching this garage and the homeowner would come out and think somebody was in there and perhaps take action and something terrible could happen.

Sunita Sah: [00:29:24] So he was motivated by the worst case scenario and he just didn’t want to be involved. So he decided not to comply with his senior officers. And the only reason he could actually do that, which is a very difficult situation to be in, and to do that is because he had thought about it before he joined the police force. You know, his father was a police officer, and he said, I knew this job was going to be difficult. He told me, I knew this job was going to be difficult, and I was going to see some unethical things, and I just didn’t want to be the person that just followed orders and did the wrong thing. So he had already thought and contemplated those situations where he imagined this, but the consequences for him were pretty high. Like as soon as the journey back to the police station, everybody was really quiet. And then within an hour he was in the office of his superiors, and they were telling him that he was wrong and his voice was stuttering, but he was glad that he did it. But word went all around and he was basically ostracized. In the end, he ended up getting referred to another unit, which was much better. But there were consequences for him, and he said that he was fine to take them on because that’s what was important to him. But it takes a lot of thinking through and knowing that this is the time to act.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:44] And also a real clarity and self-awareness, you know, to sort of like say, you know, like I’m going into a situation where I who knows what may happen. And certainly pre-thinking, you know, like, what are some of the most likely situations that will come up, you know, against maybe just a daily basis even, and how might I handle them? And like, what are the values that I would bring to it? Is this kind of you described this phrase that you call sort of like your true. No. Yes. True. Sort of like, you know, like, are we kind of talking about like this in a roundabout way To a certain extent.

Sunita Sah: [00:31:15] There is a true no and a true yes that I refer to, which is often when we comply, we just go along with what somebody else has asked us to do. It’s really dependent on the external circumstances and somebody else asking us. It’s not an alliance with our true values. Whereas what I call consent, I take in informed consent from medicine and the definition of informed consent there, which has five elements, which is that you have the capacity. So you have the mental capacity not impaired by disease, sickness, drugs or alcohol. So you have the capacity to make the decision. You have the information, the knowledge and the understanding of that knowledge. You know the risks and the benefits and the consequences. And also you have the freedom to say no, because often if you don’t have the freedom to say no, then you can’t consent. It’s simply compliance. If you have those four elements capacity, knowledge, freedom to say no, then you can authorize your either true yes or your true? No. But often we just end up complying with things. Even though all those factors are present because we’re being very conscious. It’s not a knee jerk compliance, but it’s what I call conscious compliance that we comply with it because the costs of defiance are too great in the moment. So we’re just putting our defiance on hold. We’re not planning never to defy, we’re just putting on hold in the moment. But when you mention Pre-thinking, that’s something else in terms of preparing for how to defy, because a lot of the situations that we face could be predictable. So we might know that this particular friend or this particular work colleague, they’re always going to make some kind of sexist remark.

Sunita Sah: [00:32:57] And if you let it go in every encounter or meeting, you feel that about it and you want to do something different. So you can predict some of the things that would happen. So like Kevin, the police officer could predict something was going to come up. And how would you like to respond? For me, it was the CT scan that I went along with that and I regretted it. And so I was like, next time this happens, I want to do something different. And so the first thing we want to do is think about those situations and visualize, anticipate it, visualize it, and then pre-script or pre-think. What is it that you would like to say? What would be your aspirational self? That who would you like to be in this situation? And then practice it. Because if you do all of those things, your neural pathways change. So even if your default was compliance, you can now become to a new default of becoming defiant. So that practicing that skill is really important, because we can get our mouths used to saying the words and our ears used to hearing it, because we’re not used to being defiant, or we might not have been trained to be defiant. And there’s this wonderful quote that’s often attributed to Bruce Lee, but it was actually a Greek poet that said, under duress, we don’t rise to our level of expectations. We fall to our level of training. And that’s why it’s so important to train for defiance. It’s a practice, not a personality.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:29] And I would imagine part of that training also is the reframing of what defines really is and what isn’t, as you offered earlier in our conversation. Like it’s to sort of like offer yourself and remind yourself of that alternate definition of what defiance is, which is really can you share that again once more?

Sunita Sah: [00:34:46] Just so the old definition of defiance is to challenge the power of another person to resist boldly and openly. Whereas my new definition is two pi is to act in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise.

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:03] Right. So to remind yourself that that’s what defiance really is. And that also brings up another question, which is we have we’ve talked around this notion of values a whole bunch in this conversation, but let’s just dive right in, because I think values is one of these phrases where people have heard them in so many different contexts. Almost anyone who’s been sort of like in the world of work for more than a hot minute has probably done some form of values exercise at some point as part of an offsite or an onboarding process or something. And a lot of people probably roll their eyes at the notion of values these days to take me deeper into what we’re actually exploring here when that value is.

Sunita Sah: [00:35:39] Yeah. So values. The most powerful interpretation of values are words such as integrity, fairness, equity. What’s really important to us is it’s not something like homosexuality is wrong or abortion is right, which they’re subjective stances. And there’s two answers. Right. And that’s why it becomes devices. But for values, when I do ask my executive students to list their values. Most of them will list integrity, you know, because it’s a value that is very highly rated in our culture that if anyone says that our character lacks integrity, it’s a huge insult. Nobody wants to be known for lacking integrity. So I actually asked my students to conduct this exercise. So when they’re in the room, I ask them to rate their honesty in comparison with other people in the room. On a scale of 0 to 100, where zero is, you think you’re the least honest in the room? 100. You think you’re the most honest in the room, and 50 you’re about average. I asked them to write their number down so they can’t change it. Can you imagine what they say?

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:52] I would guess most people think that they’re more honest than the typical person, which also has like an embedded assumption, which means like they’re also assuming that most other people are sort of like a little bit dishonest.

Sunita Sah: [00:37:03] Actually, the results year after year are a pretty extreme that they rate themselves. Pretty much all of them rate themselves as 80 or above, which is impossible, right? Because if the average is 50. Half the class needs to be below 50. But yeah, hardly anyone says 50. And pretty much no one is going to go below. And so that of course is impossible. So on one hand we’re writing our values very highly. And what we think, how we live up to our values. But what my research has shown again and again is what somebody believes their values to be is actually quite different from how they actually behave. And this starts at quite a young age. So I’m always astounded by the survey of over 20,000 high school students as because I have a son at high school, so this survey stays in my mind or not, because in that survey, nearly two thirds reported cheating on a test. Oh, that’s a lot. And nearly one third admitted to stealing something from a store in the past year. I’m more than 80%. This is heartbreaking. More than 80% said that they had lied to a parent about something significant. So these figures are likely to be conservative as well, because 1 in 4 of the confessed that they’d lied on at least one question in the survey. So and it’s not unique to high school students, because even though they’re saying those things, they’re saying they’re happy with their ethics and integrity are our actions are not aligned with our behavior.

Sunita Sah: [00:38:33] So we need to become, first of all, more aware of when that happens and how we can resist unwanted influence, because so much of our behavior is influenced by other people and what they ask of us. And learning to defy is one important way to be able to resist that. And so we can start to decrease the gap between who we think we are and what we actually do. And that becomes really important to put defiance into practice if we want to stay true to our to our values. I also think with the values exercise, writing your values down and explaining why they’re important might, you know, it might lead us to roll our eyes because it’s hard. But what the research shows is if you actually do that, first of all, your intended behaviors are more likely to follow. And if you clarify your values, you actually feel less stressed. Going along with them in these situations, there’s a lower biological stress reaction, lower cortisol levels. If you are very clear about your values and who you want to be. So coming back to your aspirational self, if we want to live our life aligned with our values, we want to be fair, we want to have integrity. We want to show benevolence, all of those things, if they’re important to us, why not live a life aligned with them rather than just going along with what somebody tells us in a situation?

Jonathan Fields: [00:39:54] I wonder also with sort of like the values, the typical values exercise, if the knowledge that at some point you might need to share what you wrote down on your piece of paper with other people in that room. Makes it an act of compliance, because you’re like, you know, you’re going to be judged for what you write down, and you want to be seen as the quote, the good person in the room. So you’re like, what are the top five values that a person like me, who’s a good person and a hard worker and wants the career path, like, what would that person write down? Let me write these things down. And even if you think you’re writing down what’s true to you, there’s like a subconscious script that might be running, nudging you towards writing down the values that are really like the subject or the the external expected values, rather than what’s true to you.

Sunita Sah: [00:40:39] Yeah, that’s certainly could be possible. They don’t share with the other students, but they are sharing with me. Right. So it could be I wonder what my professor wants, wants, wants to hear here, but maybe I will do an exercise where they don’t. They don’t have to share it with anyone. They can just do it for themselves. Do you remember an exercise that I did this summer where we could get a little bit deeper about sort of not just values, but how they want to live their lives. And I did have a student come up and say, once you’ve read these, can you please delete them off of the. I was like, that’s absolutely is going to go no further.

Jonathan Fields: [00:41:14] Yeah. Years ago I was working on a book on how people handle uncertainty. Sort of like unquantifiable uncertainty, where you’ve got to make a decision or take an action. And, you know, there’s no easy way to actually define the probability of things going off the rails or succeeding and even what the stakes would be. And this is sort of like a classic variation of what often became known as the Ellsberg paradox, where you got two urns next to you and one has 50 black marbles and 50 white, and the other has a blend of 50 black and white marbles. But you have no idea what the distribution is. And you have to make a gamble saying, I’m going to wager all the money in my bank account and then pick a marble from one and you have to guess, like, do I want to pick from the urn? That is where there’s a known distribution 50 over 50 or just random. And most people default to the known distribution, even though there’s no rational basis. To do that, we just we don’t want to be seen as choosing wrong. But when that experiment was repeated and there was a variation that was really interesting where they set it up so that the expectation of the person who had to make a choice, they they were confident that that choice would never be known by anybody else, including the experimenters. The bias away from the uncertain option completely vanished. What they start to realize is there was a massive social context, you know, in that scenario. And I wonder if, like a similar thing happens with values like if you just said, do this exercise at home, write it down for yourself, never show another person. Would somebody come up with a different answer?

Sunita Sah: [00:42:38] I wonder how we would actually investigate that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:41] You have to find out, right?

Sunita Sah: [00:42:43] I love that aspect of and the known versus unknown right. It reminds me of a study that I’ve done with Caitlin and Molly at Cornell, where we look into, if somebody tells you to do, to make a decision that goes against your better judgment. We predict that if somebody tells us to do that, where if something goes wrong, we’re going to feel less blame, less responsible. But what I find when it actually happens, they’re more likely to blame themselves and feel more responsible and feel more regret than if they’d made their decision on their own. And that’s because they went against their better judgment and did something just because somebody else was telling them to. When they kind of knew better. And then if something goes wrong, they actually blame themselves. It is really fascinating when you look into these things and the social desirability of what you’re saying with the high school students. I’m surprised we got so many admitting those things and then saying, well, actually, you know, I also lied, didn’t want to admit some things.

Jonathan Fields: [00:43:41] Right. It’s amazing. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. You talk about this other interesting phenomenon, the false defiance trap. Take me into this.

Sunita Sah: [00:43:54] Yeah. So false defiance can often look like true defiance, in that it could often be even loud or rebellious, and it could be like just going along with perhaps a political crowd, because everybody else in your community is doing so. It could look like reacting to something on social media again, because you want to be seen as right or you want. I think about false defiance a lot with my teenage son when I asked him to do his homework and he’s playing video games and he’ll say, oh, I was about to do my homework. But now that you’ve told me to, I’m not. And he thinks he’s being defiant. If he doesn’t do exactly what I say or he does the exact opposite. But that just shows if you’re doing the exact opposite of what I’m asking you, you’re actually listening entirely to me. Right. You’re totally dependent on what I want. You’re not doing what you want to do, and you should like. So I call that false defiance because it doesn’t. It’s not a thoroughly considered decision that is going along with your values. It’s reacting to something else externally. And so we want to be careful that we don’t fall into that false defiance trap.

Jonathan Fields: [00:45:12] Yeah. It’s really it’s like it’s performative defiance. You’re doing it in fact because you want to comply with whatever the the culture is around you that you want to see be seen as fitting into. Which also brings up another phenomenon. I thought it was really, which is this notion of what you define as quiet defiance. I thought it was really interesting, especially in the context. Over the last years. We’ve heard this term in the business world as we were sort of emerging from the pandemic, quiet quitting. And I was like, oh, that’s an interesting potential overlay there.

Sunita Sah: [00:45:40] Yeah. So I mean, my understanding of quiet quitting, if I’m right, is that it’s doing your job, but not not going overboard with your job. So you’re doing what’s required of you, but you’re not going out of your way. And something that came up during the pandemic when people actually could reflect on their values and what was really important to them. It’s you want to be defiant, but you can be defiant in in different ways. And this one is by not publicly saying no, but you are being defiant and staying true to your values. So there’s many different ways that quiet defiance can come into play. And there’s the story of Matthew, who’s one of my students who’d been deployed to Iraq, and he had experienced some encounters where his immediate superior, he hadn’t exactly agreed with it, whereas before he just went along with everything. And in the military, you know, it’s all. Yes, yes, yes, you have to, because that’s what you’ve been trained to do. And it could be very dangerous not to follow orders. But there was one particular incident where they were in the desert and they heard some gunfire and they stopped, but they couldn’t see where it was coming from. And he told me that the rules of engagement is that you need to have a clear line of sight. You can’t just spray and pray. And that’s exactly what they were ordered to do, was just spray and pray because you could hurt citizens. And in that moment, he turned around and he didn’t fire. And he said it was like half conscious, half unconscious. But it was due to previous incidents that had happened before that he hadn’t agreed with.

Sunita Sah: [00:47:17] When his superior, when things calmed down, his superior asked him what he was doing. He didn’t say he was defying the order because then he would have been in serious trouble. He said that he was providing security. He was the only reason he could think of of why he didn’t spray and pray. His sergeant said, well, I didn’t order that, but it was actually a good idea. So he let him go. And that little bit of quiet defiance made it easier for him to actually be a little bit more defiant in the future, when they had a mission that they had to go on a night Mission, which he thought was very, very dangerous. He did go to his sergeant and say, you know, I think this is going to be too dangerous. We’re going to lose a lot of men. And he wasn’t rewarded for that. You know, he did go. He was going up for a promotion and he was denied. But they did actually have to call off that mission half an hour into it because it was so dangerous. So even though he was right, he did suffer in his career for that. But his goal in the military is to make sure that his team remained safe. That was the most important thing and that became priority to him over his career. So he said he never got to the point where he would openly defy an order. But quiet defiance helped him at least remain true to some of his values.

Jonathan Fields: [00:48:33] Yeah. And I mean, you know, again, that’s sort of like a very big, you know, like lives on the line example. But you could imagine scenarios just in everyday life, you know, with tiny little things where you could potentially say, okay, so maybe I’m not in a in a place where I’m ready, or it even feels safe to stand up and sort of like, like, stake my claim to defiance here. But like, is there a quieter, maybe safer way that I can stay true to my values and not do necessarily what is the compliant option in a way that feels like it’s an easier lift for me, and maybe it feels like part of what you’re doing here also is trying to figure out how to minimize the cost, right.

Sunita Sah: [00:49:14] And I think that’s true. And that there there is one of the versions of the Milgram experiments where the experimenter gives the orders but doesn’t monitor whether the shocks are given. So he’s given the orders by telephone from another room. And the most interesting aspect about this is defiance goes up. So from about a third to I can’t remember entirely, but it could be as high as like 80%. It goes up a lot there. So reassuring the experimenter they’re giving the shocks, but they’re not actually giving the shocks. Or if they are, they’re repeatedly giving the lower level shocks around 15V and telling them, yes, I’m increasing it, I’m increasing it. And so that quiet defiance allowed them to not have that confrontation with the experimenter, but remain true to their values of not harming someone else.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:05] Yeah. I mean, which is interesting. On the one hand, you’re like, wow, you know, like really sticking to your morals and to your values, you know, that’s, you know, like go you. And on the other hand, you know, it also raises an ethical question here, you know, because okay, so that was an extreme thing where you’re like, you’re actually causing or you think you’re causing harm to it. But what about when you’re in that context where somebody else or the culture or the rules of the game actually are more appropriate, or are safer or are better? But you have a values conflict, so you end up defying in a way which allows you to stay true to you, but may actually cause harm because the way that you saw it wasn’t right.

Sunita Sah: [00:50:41] Can you describe the situation? Are you thinking about a particular situation?

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:45] I don’t have one in mind, but I’m just sort of thinking, you know, in a work situation, in a very past life, I was a lawyer and we did deals like big deals, public offerings, blah, blah, blah. And I was very junior. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had a pretty strong moral compass, and there were very likely times where I felt like I was being asked to do something that just didn’t sit right with me. I complied because back then I was like, who am I not to? And the outcome was good. And had I actually defied it would have caused harm to me, to my career. But also like there’s a reasonable chance that it would have had a negative outcome on the deal or on our clients as well, because I just like I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Sunita Sah: [00:51:28] Yes. So that that is a risk. And when I talk about what is true defiance or your true, know that having those five elements, it’s very like we want for informed consent also has to be there for design. So do we truly do we have the knowledge and the understanding because that’s really critical to get to true defiance, because if we don’t, then we should seek it out before we should wait to defy.

Jonathan Fields: [00:51:52] As we start to wrap up our conversation a bit. If we zoom the lens out a little bit and we start to think, okay, so like, what are some of the core meta skills of this new approach to defiance? What would you offer up? What should we be thinking about here?

Sunita Sah: [00:52:07] I think one of the largest sort of shifts that you can make is not thinking of defiance as being loud and bold and maybe angry or aggressive, and that you have to have like a strong personality or be larger than life, right? You don’t have to be sort of this big hero to incorporate defiance in your life. You can you can be defiant in your own way that’s unique to you with with less angst. Right? So we could all have our own unique way of being defiant. And it isn’t just for the extraordinary, the brave people, the Rosa Parks. It’s actually available and necessary for all of us. So I think that would be a key takeaway that I would love people to know. And then that we have to make defiance a practice, that we have to train for it, and we have to practice so we can be who we aspire to be in that situation. And so that training is really important. But at the end of the day, yes, there are costs for being defiant, but there are also costs for being compliant. And being defiant leaves you to have a more honest life. In a way, it can bring joy because it can be more authentic and live a life aligned with your.

Jonathan Fields: [00:53:21] That makes so much sense, and it’s a perfect place for us to come full circle. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up.

Sunita Sah: [00:53:28] To live a good life is to live a life in alignment with your values. A more honest and authentic life.

Jonathan Fields: [00:53:33] Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had Zoe Chance about influence and persuasion. You’ll find a link to Zoe’s episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle Bliss for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you’re still listening here. Do me a personal favor? A seven-second favor and share it with just one person. And if you want to share it with more, that’s awesome too. But just one person even then, invite them to talk with you about what you’ve both discovered. To reconnect and explore ideas that really matter because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.