Marching To Your Own Drummer
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What are the moral dilemmas discussed in this episode?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. What would you have done? It's one of the most enduring questions in psychology. If you were a German soldier in the 1940s, would you have followed orders? If you were a member of a Hutu militia group in 1994, would you have killed your Tutsi neighbors in the unfolding genocide in Rwanda? If you were a son or daughter of a slave-owning family in 18th century America, would you have spoken out against racial injustice? What would you have done? The question is compelling because while we all like to think we would have done the brave thing, the right thing, many of us have the sneaking suspicion we might not. We fear that we might have fallen in line like everyone else and done what we were told to do. Today on the show, we explore the reasons many of us fail to stand up to unjust rules and authority. Not just to dictators or people perpetrating crimes against humanity, but to petty tyrants in the workplace, unfair rules in our cities, even mean-spirited gossip in our circle of friends.
Why we silence ourselves and how we can align our words and actions with our values, this week on Hidden Brain. All of us can remember moments when we stepped up to do the right thing. Maybe we helped a fellow student who was on the receiving end of hurtful barbs. Maybe we defied orders that we knew were wrong. Looking back, we remember these moments with pride. But all of us also remember other moments, moments of silence, of cowardice. We don't post about such moments on our social media feeds, but we do ask ourselves afterwards, why didn't I say something? Why didn't I do something? At Cornell University, psychologist Sunita Sa studies why we stay silent when we know we should speak and how to rediscover our voices. Sunita Sa, welcome to Hidden Brain.
It's wonderful to be here. Thank you.
Sunita, I want to take you back to your days in Pittsburgh. There was an evening one day when you felt a sudden pain in your chest. Can you tell me what happened?
Yes. I had this immense chest pain. And it was a pain that I had not felt before. And so I thought I should do something about this. And I ended up going to the emergency room in Pittsburgh, which is one of my first experiences of the health care service in the U.S., having moved from the U.K., And it was very efficient. Within minutes, I was actually through triage and a nurse had whisked me into an examination room and they did a lot of tests, including an electrocardiogram to make sure there was nothing wrong with my heart, which was my primary concern. And everything was fine. So I was relieved and my pain was going down a little bit. And I told the doctor and I thought I was about to get released from the emergency room. And she said, well, actually, just before you go, I would like you to have a CT scan. And so I was like, oh, I wonder why? Why is that? And she said, just to make sure that you don't have a pulmonary embolism.
Sunita had worked as a doctor in the UK before moving to the United States. She knew the symptoms of a pulmonary embolism, which is a blockage in the lungs that's caused by a blood clot.
A pulmonary embolism causes what we call pleuritic chest pain. And this is a sharp pain. It catches your breath when you inhale and exhale. That was not the type of pain that I was experiencing. just did not think that I had this embolism in my lungs. And so I did not think the CT scan was necessary and I didn't want it because why expose yourself to ionizing radiation if you don't need it? I mean, with a CT scan, it's about 70 times more on average than the radiation you get from an x-ray. It's still small, but why have it if you don't need it? And so I should have said no to the CT scan, and yet I didn't.
Moments later, Sunita found herself getting prepped for the scan. She turned to the tech and asked how much radiation the scan entailed. Sunita didn't need to ask the question.
I knew how much radiation was in the CT scan. And so I wanted her to say, oh, are you comfortable with that? I wanted her to ask me so I could say, actually, no, I'm not. Do I really need this? And she didn't. She didn't. She just hesitated and then...
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