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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they could be right you know maybe i'm wrong um that i've seen happen a lot of times i often have self-doubt i also feel tension maybe um butterflies in the stomach maybe a headache something that basically signals to you that this might actually be the time you need to define so it's a warning signal but most of the time we push it away we don't acknowledge it to ourselves we just think it's not worth our doubt it's not worth our attention
because the other person must know best or we just want to listen to authority. And that's a shame because we're ignoring a really powerful signal that you might want to look at this in more depth. So that is actually the first stage of defiance, that tension, that self-doubt that you might want to think and acknowledge to yourself, I am feeling this. Something might not be quite right here.
And then that's the second stage. The third stage is to articulate that to someone else and tell them I'm not comfortable with this or ask some clarifying questions. And that stage is really important. I mean, you're still in a subservient position. You're not saying you're not doing anything. You're clarifying and you're saying what your concerns are.
And why that stage is so critical is that the research shows if you can get to stage three, you're more likely to go through all the stages of defiance and get to the end stage, your actual act of defiance.
That's certainly true. And one of the things that you need for defiance is knowledge and understanding. So the way that I look at it is that I take informed consent in medicine and I apply it to other critical decisions in our lives. And for informed consent, five elements need to be present. So first of all, capacity, that you have the mental capacity to make this decision.
You have the knowledge, which is the information and the understanding. So you know the risks, the benefits and the alternatives. And the fourth element is that you are free to say no, because if you don't have a choice, you can't really consent to anything. So you should feel free to say no. And then you can authorize either your informed consent or your informed consent.
refusal, which is the last element. Now, if you take all these factors, not just for consent, but also for defiance, that I have the capacity, this is not a knee jerk, emotional reaction I'm having to this because I want things done my way.
I have the capacity, the knowledge, the understanding, I have the freedom to actually say no in this situation, then if all those elements are present, I might want to say no.
It is a strong word. And I think people do often think about defiance as being loud and bold or violent and angry and aggressive. They either think about it in that way or they think about it as being heroic or superhuman and out of reach when they think about iconic figures like Rosa Parks, for example, refusing to move on the bus. But in actual fact, neither are true.
You don't have to be brave, a superhero, have a strong personality or be larger than life to incorporate defiance in your life. It's not just for the extraordinary people. It's available and it's necessary for all of us. We all need to learn how to defy so we don't go along with unethical practices. We allow for unfairness if we hear unfairness. a sexist or racist remark.
We all need to learn how to defy in order to live our lives according to our values. And interestingly enough, Stanley Milgram, who conducted the famous electric shock experiments where he had participants come in and give what they thought were harmful electric shocks to another person. They weren't actually giving those shocks, but they thought they were.
He actually said the people that obeyed the experimenter to give those harmful shocks, he described them as obedient and the ones that declined as defiant because we need that skill set to say no when things are very wrong.
So it's not about moral outrage, and it's not often about confrontation at all. It's determining how we want to live our lives and the type of society we want to create. Now, people have been under the influence of their peers because they're too polite to say no, and they end up in situations that they would rather not. And given that we...
value certain things such as integrity very, very highly, we might want to decrease that gap between what we think our values are and how we actually behave. So let me tell you, there's a survey of over 20,000 high school students. And in that survey, nearly two thirds of students have said that they've cheated on a test.
Nearly one third said that they have stolen something from a store in the past year. And over 80% said that they had lied to their parents about something significant. And I find that heartbreaking because I have a high school student right now. And this isn't unique to high school students. We start at an early age believing that our values are really important to us and we want to live by them.
When I ask my executive students to explicitly write out what their values are, integrity is seen again and again as a very important value. And then I ask them, so rate yourself in your level of honesty compared to everybody else in the room. If you think you're the most honest, on a scale of 0 to 100, you should put 100.
If you think you're the least honest in the room, you should put yourself at 0. And if you think you're about average, it should be 50. And guess what I find time after time? I find that most people are rating themselves 85 or over. And of course, not everybody in the room can be 85 or over, right? If the average needs to be 50. But we hardly get anyone saying 50 and no one going below that.
So we rate integrity so highly. And yet we find that we don't act in that way when the time requires it. We fail to put our values into action. And what my studies have shown time and time again is that gap between who we think we are and what we actually do is enormous. And learning how to defy, given that a lot of our behavior is influenced by other people, decreases that gap.
It sometimes allows us to put our values into action, and I think that's really important. So rather than viewing it as sort of a knee-jerk emotional reaction or reacting with moral outrage to someone and telling them that they're wrong, that's not how I view defiance. I view defiance as living your life according to your values.
Not just according to me, according to the research.
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