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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Hidden Brain · Marching To Your Own Drummer · 24 Feb 2025 podcast

I was working as a junior doctor in the UK and I received an invite to meet with a financial advisor for free at work. So I agreed to meet with this financial advisor and I remember that meeting very well. So it was in the hospital's posh meeting room, a room that I didn't even know existed. And I walked in and there was this blue plush bed

In contrast to the stone-cold tiles of the floor, this was a nice change.

He was very tall, big smile, handsome, very sharp suit. And he shook my hand and he spoke to me for a very long time, about an hour, mostly about my finances, which was surprising because I had a very limited disposable income at the time working as a junior doctor. He built up this fantastic rapport with me.

And at the end of an hour, he said that I should invest in a couple of funds and that he would write a report for me about my finances and all this would be for free. So I was impressed. It sounds great. And since I was tired, I did blurt out, what's in it for you? Well, he responded with, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

And I remember being surprised then because I was working as a junior doctor and we got free lunches all the time from the pharmaceutical reps.

I'm going to receive a commission if you invest in the funds that I'm recommending today.

Yeah, I mean, that disclosure of the conflict of interest changed the dynamics of the situation for me. So I did feel less trust in the advice that he was giving me to invest in these funds. But at the same time, I didn't want Dan to know that I no longer trusted him.

I didn't want him to know that his disclosure had corrupted the good rapport that we'd built up and this relationship that we now had over the last hour. And so I started to feel more uncomfortable. I actually felt more pressure to sign and say that I will take the fund's advice, I will invest in the funds that he is recommending.

Because if I don't take his advice now, I'm essentially depriving him of his commission. So both I felt that pressure to be helpful, but I also felt a lot of pressure not to signal distrust.

So insinuation anxiety is a distinct type of anxiety that arises when people worry that their noncompliance with another person's wishes may be interpreted as a signal of distrust. insinuating that the person is not whom they appear to be or should be.

So we don't want to insinuate that, for example, our advisors, our co-workers, or even our friends and our family are not trustworthy, that they're incompetent or they're biased or even corrupt. And this anxiety increases the pressure to comply with another person.

We had a middle-aged white man go up to passengers, just over 250 passengers, to ask them to fill out a very short survey. So it was an innocuous survey just asking them, was the ferry running on time? How clean is the ferry? How many people are you traveling with? And for filling out this survey, they would get $5 in cash. So people agreed to fill out this survey.

And once they had finished the survey, the man asked them, well, you know, I can give you the $5 as promised, or I can enter you into this lottery, which pays out somewhere between $0 and $10, but the average payment is usually less than $5.

pretty much everyone went for the cash. Only 8% chose the lottery.

Exactly, yeah. So it really shows that the preference for nearly everyone was the $5 cash, you know, the certain $5 bill. But when the man gave advice, I think you should go for the lottery, that went up to 20%.

But even more surprising, there was one condition where the man had to reveal his ulterior motive for recommending the lottery, that he would receive a bonus, a commission, if you took the lottery. And so in that way, he was disclosing his conflict of interest, much like Dan, my financial advisor, had disclosed to me.

In that condition, compliance with the lottery advice went up to 42%. It more than doubled the advice alone.

That's right. And people are suspicious. They trust the advice less. And some even said that they like the man less because of that. But they still went along with it. And the reason is insinuation anxiety. They didn't want the man to know that they trusted his advice less.

So in this particular experiment with insinuation anxiety and the man giving advice, this insinuation anxiety on compliance occurred only in the women participants. We didn't see it in the men. And we were surprised because other experiments that we had run in different contexts showed no gender difference. But in this one, there was a clear gender difference. Women felt insinuation anxiety

much more than men did. And that increased their compliance.

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