Dr. Sunita Sah

speaker

332 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 6 Feb

Dr. Sunita Sah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing · 8 Jan 2025 podcast

Hi, Mike. It's wonderful to be here.

Well, I've been fascinated by what this single powerful word defy means for a very long time. As a child, I was known for being an obedient daughter and student. And I remember asking my dad, what does my name mean? And he said, in Sanskrit, Sanita means good. And mostly I lived up to that. So I did what I was told, went to school, as expected, did all my homework.

And these were the types of messages I received, not just from parents, but teachers and community. They were to be good, to fit in, obey, not make a fuss, don't question authority. And many of us receive these messages and we equate being good. compliant with being good and defiance with being bad. And when I delved into it in more detail, I discovered some problems with that.

For example, one survey found that only one in 10 healthcare workers, many of them nurses, felt comfortable speaking up when they saw their colleague making an error or taking a shortcut. And findings from another survey of over 1,700 crew members on commercial airlines found that only 50% of them felt comfortable speaking up when they noticed a mistake. So these are huge problems.

And I started to wonder, what if it's sometimes bad to be good? What do we sacrifice by always trying to be so compliant and so polite? And that was a question that really inspired a lot of my work and research. I often felt drained and muted by looking after everybody else's feelings and keeping silent when you know something is wrong can become soul destroying.

So I spent decades studying this and what I found that is crucial and substantially changed how I think is that we have misunderstood what it means to defy.

Yeah, absolutely. Which is why I came to this revelation that we need a new definition for defiance. So the old definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is to defy is to challenge the power of another person to resist boldly and openly defiance. And I'm not one to usually disagree with the Oxford English Dictionary. I was raised in the UK after all.

But I think that definition is way too narrow. And my definition is that to defy is to act in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise. So defiance is actually reframed as a proactive, positive force in society. Because if you think about it, Mike, all our individual actions of consent and dissent, they create the society that we live in.

So it affects our lives, our workplaces, our communities. And that's why I'm so passionate about it.

Well, what I've found is that we tend to actively resist defiance. And there's three key reasons for why this happens. So first of all, we feel enormous pressure to go along with other people for a variety of reasons, like we're conditioned to comply.

And we also have some distinct psychological processes which I can go into that make it very difficult for us to reject another person's recommendation or suggestion. So that's the first one, this pressure to go along with other people. Second, we don't really understand what compliance and defiance actually are. So I've given you my new definition of defiance, which really helps.

But once we totally understand what's involved in complying, consenting and defying, that helps us determine when we need to defy. And then the last one is once we decide that we should defy in this situation or we want to defy in this particular situation, we don't actually know how. We don't have the skill set or the ability and we're not practiced enough to put our values into action.

Sometimes it's fear that's keeping us from speaking up. So we might fear the consequences, for example, oh, I don't want to lose a relationship. Maybe I'll lose a job or I'll be embarrassed. And we very much think about the costs of defiance, but we don't think about the costs of actually complying as much as we should, because they are costs from compliance.

bowing your head to other people continuously from disregarding your values, it can leave you drained and muted and not being able to live your own authentic, honest life. So there could be fear. It doesn't need to be fear. And in fact, what I've found in some of my interviews is sometimes fear allows us to defy. Fear of terrible consequences of not defying motivates us. So there is that aspect.

The fact that we are so strongly socialized and let me tell you about this psychological process that I've discovered in my research, which also keeps us compliant at times. So it's one that I call insinuation anxiety. And this is a very distinct type of anxiety that arises when we worry that our noncompliance with another person's wishes may be interpreted as a signal of distrust.

So it insinuates that the person is not whom they appear to be or should be. And that increases the pressure for us to comply. So, for example, if your boss tells you to do something and you don't think that's the right way to go, it's hard to insinuate that they're incompetent a lot of the time, especially if everybody else is agreeing around you.

Insinuation anxiety could explain why some of the nurses didn't speak up when they saw medical errors. because it's difficult to tell another nurse or a doctor that you're doing that wrong. It should be this way. And it's also the same with crew members on commercial airlines, why the co-pilots don't speak up to their pilots. So it is this aversive

emotional state where we become so concerned with offending the other person that these relationship concerns, which I found arises even in one-off situations with strangers, is so powerful, it keeps us compliant and it keeps us silent.

Yeah, that's such a great point. And I actually define that self-doubt or some kind of tension as the first stage of defiance. So when we feel uneasy in a situation, when we feel that there's some tension between what's expected of us and what we think is right, this tension can manifest in many different ways.

So for example, Mike, you're telling me that you feel tension as some kind of self-doubt. Well,

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