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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Appearances
in advance, we do feel less trust in the advice. If you have an opportunity to change your mind, in some of my experiments, that shows that's one of the most powerful things. So even though there's high compliance in front of the advisor, it drops a lot once the advisor is not in the room and you can make the decision in private or you can change your mind. And some of those results were
very striking and shows us what we display publicly is not really our private preference.
These are three questions that James March came up with with regards to decision making in general in any situation. And the three questions are, who am I? What type of situation is this? And what does a person like me do in a situation like this? And I apply these three questions to situations that might require defiance.
That even though we might ask these questions all the time when we're making a decision and we often ask them implicitly, it's really good to make them explicit and think of them as some type of compass. So they go around in a circle. Who am I? What type of situation is this so we can assess the situation for safety and impact? And what does a person like me do in a situation like this?
What is my responsibility? And then how we act feeds back again into who you are.
I find that very powerful because a lot of us have values, but we don't make them explicit. So we have values that we might say is integrity, equality, compassion. But just saying those values and not living by them day to day. is often what happens, like there's a large gap between who we think we are and what we actually do. And that starts at a really young age.
There was a survey of over 20,000 high school students that showed that nearly two-thirds of them said that they had cheated on a test. Nearly one-third said that they had stolen something from a store in the last year. And more than 80% had said that they had lied to a parent about something significant. That breaks my heart because I have a high school student.
And yet, you know, we say that we're happy with our ethics and integrity. So even though we rate integrity very high, we often don't live by the values that we rate. And so asking ourselves, what does a person like me do in a situation like that? We can get to our aspirational selves. If you think you are this type of person, what would I actually do in this situation?
How is it that I would like to act? And this is the type of person I am. I am the type of person that would say something.
Thank you so much.
Because you've been here for 16 years. Oh, my goodness. Has it been that long?
That's no wonder my son says that he's American now. How long has he been? He moved when he was one. We almost went back to the UK in 2020 during the pandemic. So I got offered a position at the University of Cambridge. We were all like, let's go. And then he said, no, I am American. Oh, he really planted a flag, literally.
We went back when you said 2008. So that last year, I finished my PhD and I was doing my postdoc down at Duke. We were living in Chapel Hill. And then you get one year of this extra, you can stay. And then the second year of my postdoc, my family didn't get visas. So they went back to London and I was going back and forth.
Utica and Roosevelt Island. Oh, wow.
It's about four hours between. Oh, gosh. And you're doing that at the same time? Occasionally. It hasn't worked that well. Now, just one semester in one place and one semester in another place because going back and forth is too much. That's a lot.
Yeah.
I was one when I came to England. I grew up my whole life there and also in Scotland. So my dad first came to England from India and did his PhD, then went back to India and then brought the family.
So in our community, medicine is one of the best things you can do, right? So I had the grades. I was a good kid. I asked my dad when I was young, what does my name mean? And he said in Sanskrit, Sunita means good. Oh, wow. And so I mostly lived up to that. I was a good girl in their eyes. So I did exactly what I was told. I did all my homework as expected.
I was what in Yorkshire they call SWAT-y, which means you're a SWAT. You work really hard. You do all your homework. Maybe it's equivalent to nerd here.
I don't know. But when you talk about SWOT now, especially at business schools, it means something totally different. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. That's not what it means when I was growing up.
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