Dr. Sunita Sah, an organizational psychologist, is the author of “Defy: The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes.” In this podcast, she explains why defiance is often thought as a negative trait, but explains that it can actually be a positive force both in the workplace and in our lives generally.
Defiance is often thought as a negative trait, but as our guest on this podcast explains, it can actually be a positive force both in the workplace and in our lives generally.
Dr. Sunita Sah, a professor at Cornell and an organizational psychologist, is the author of “Defy: The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes,” published earlier this year.
Sah’s book explores why people say yes and go along at work and in other relationships in their lives, even when they want to say no. In this conversation, she explains how most people are conditioned to see defiance as a negative trait. Instead, she argues, defiance based on deeply held values can be a positive.
She discusses how to evaluate a situation where you may want to defy, how we need to train ourselves to see defiance in a different light and why it is so difficult to make that transition. Sah also addressed defiance in the legislative workplace and the complications that can arise in a complex hierarchy.
Sah also explained that while defying is not risk free, going along when you know you should object carries its own hazards.
Sah will conduct a webinar on May 5 at noon MT as part of this year’s NCSL Legislative Staff Week.
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Ed: Hello and welcome to “Our American States,” a podcast from the National Conference of State Legislatures. I’m your host, Ed Smith.
SS: How many times have you wanted to object, disagree or opt out of something, but you end up just swallowing your words or shaking your head and just going along. And we end up being what I say wired to comply.
Ed: That was Dr. Sunita Sah, a professor at Cornell and an organizational psychologist. She is also the author of “Defy: The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes” published earlier this year. Sah will conduct a webinar on May 5 at noon mountain time as part of this year’s NCSL Legislative Staff week. Sah’s book explores why people say yes and go along at work and in relationships even when they want to say no. In this conversation, she explains how most people are conditioned to see defiance as a negative trait. Instead, she argues defiance based on deeply held values could be a positive force in the workforce and in society in general. She discussed how to evaluate a situation where you may want to defy, how we need to train ourselves to see defiance in the different light and why it’s so difficult to make that transition.
Sah also addressed defiance in the legislative workplace and the complications that can arise in a complex hierarchy. She also explained that while defying is not risk free, going along when you know you should object carries its own hazards. Here is our discussion.
Dr. Sah, welcome to the podcast.
SS: It’s wonderful to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Ed: I wonder if you could start and just tell listeners a little bit about your background.
SS: Absolutely. So, I am currently a professor at Cornell University, which is actually now my third career. My first career started in medicine largely because of expectations and compliance. So, as a child I was known for being an obedient daughter and a student and I remember asking my dad at one point what does my name Sunita mean. And he said in Sanskrit, Sunita means good. And mostly I lived up to that. I did what I was told. I got up when I was told to. Went to school on time. Even had my hair cut the way my parents insisted. And then the messages I received from not just from parents, but from teachers in the community was to fit in, to be good, to obey, not question authority, do as you are told. And we often teach our children those messages. It’s also perhaps the dynamic that is familiar to many children of immigrants. They have this strict upbringing and expectations to be high achieving. So, as I had the grades, I was told that medicine is the best thing you can do. So, that is what I did. In the UK, the medical degree is actually a combined undergraduate and graduate degree so I started at the age of 18. It was five years, but during that five-year degree, in my third year I took a year out to study psychology and I just really loved that year. And probably resulting in where I am now.
But after that year of psychology, I went back to medicine. I ended up working as a doctor and then I actually did some consulting work for the pharmaceutical industry and I became fascinated by that relationship between industry and the medical profession, how we influence each other, the conflicts of interest and I wanted to study that in more depth and so I came to the U.S. I did a Ph.D. in organizational behavior, became a professor and here I am.
Ed: Well, that’s quite a path. Thanks for running that down for us. We are going to talk today about your book “Defy,” which I think is one of the great book titles I’ve seen recently. I wonder if you could just give us a little overview of the thesis in your book.
SS: Absolutely. I mean I’ve been fascinated by what that single powerful world defy means for a very long time being that how many times have you wanted to object, disagree or opt out of something, but you end up just swallowing your words or shaking your head and just going along. And we end up being what I say wired to comply. Our brains become wired to comply because we start equating compliance with being good and defiance with being bad. And that can actually cause serious problems. So, when I delved into this, I found things such as in one survey an average 9 out of 10 healthcare workers many of them nurses feel too uncomfortable to speak up when they see a colleague or a physician making an error. So, I started to wonder is it sometimes bad to be because and what do we sacrifice by always trying to be so compliant. Because even if it is not a life and death situation like with the nurses, keeping silent when you know something is wrong can actually be quite soul destroying. And so, I spent ages studying now influence, advice and authority and what I found that is crucial and substantially changed how I think is that we’ve misunderstood what it means to defy. And I came to this revelation that we need a new definition for defiance.
So, the Oxford English Dictionary definition of defiance is to challenge the power of another person to resist boldly and openly. Now I grew up in the UK, so I’m not one to normally challenge the Oxford English Dictionary, but my definition is that to defy is simply to act in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise. So, we reframe this from a negative connotation to a proactive positive force in society. Because if we think about it, every individual act of compliance, or consent of descent they create the societies that we live in.
Ed: You make a distinction between the words comply and consent and I think most of us use those words pretty interchangeably. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why you differentiate between them.
TM: 6:30
SS: Yes. Compliance and consent are often conflated with each other, but they are actually fundamentally different. Compliance is simply going along with something. We can either slide into it without thinking or it’s externally imposed by somebody else’s suggestion, an order or society’s expectations. Consent is not compliance. True consent or what I call a true yes, five elements must be present and I take this from the definition of informed consent in medicine, but we can apply it to other decisions that we make in our lives. So, the five elements are first of all, capacity. So, we need to have the mental capacity to make the decision so we are not sick, we are not under the influence of drugs or alcohol. We need information or knowledge. We need to be given information about our decision. Then we need understanding of that information so a true grasp of the risks, the benefits and the alternatives. And the fourth element is the freedom to say no because if we don’t have the freedom to say no then that is merely compliance; it is not consent. So, if you have those four elements the capacity, the knowledge, the understanding and the freedom to say no then the fifth element is your authorization if you want to say yes as your informed consent, your true yes. If you want to say no, it is your informed refusal. It’s your true no. So, consent is a thoroughly considered authorization that’s an active expression of your deeply held values.
Ed: Now you mentioned before that many of us are raised to see compliance going along as to be a good thing. That’s a positive value and defying is not. And I wonder if you think it makes it difficult for people when they come into a situation where they think that goes along with what you’ve just described and they think that they shouldn’t comply, but that they just can’t bring themselves to do that.
SS: Right. Absolutely. I think the way that we are socialized makes a big difference as to how difficult we find it to defy when we are older. If we become wired to defy then defiance becomes really difficult not just because of its negative connotations, but because we haven’t practiced for it. We are not trained for it. And so, one of the biggest things is if you were raised with a vast class of compliance like I was, it’s to stop practicing and start training for it because that’s the only way to change those neuropathways and make it easier for us. It feels so unnatural for many of us because we have been raised to be so obedient, so compliant that it actually feels really unnatural to defy.
Ed: I wonder in the course of your research I know you’ve interviewed many, many people, are some people more naturally inclined to defy than others?
SS: Well yes. If they have been trained for it, for sure they are. But the three key reasons for why people actively resist defiance what I’ve seen, we often feel enormous pressure to go along with other people and that social pressure is real for many people. And there’s a particular psychological process which I can delve in a little bit more which I call insinuation anxiety that some people feel high levels of everyday and some people do not. So yes, it is more natural for some people to defy authority than others. There’s also a couple of other reasons and that’s also misunderstanding of compliance and defiance and I’ve spoken a little bit about that. And then the third one is when we decide to defy, do we actually have the skillset. Do we know how to do it.
Ed: Our primary audience for this podcast is legislative staff members and they work in a maybe not unique, but an unusual situation where there’s really two levels of hierarchy. One is the one that they report to their supervisors and that sort of thing. And that kind of fits in with what I think we’ve been talking about. But the other level is they are working with elected officials who I think it’s fair to say expect a certain amount of deference from people, particularly the staffers who work in the legislature. Do you think that complicates this capacity or the ability of people in the legislative staff situation to defy the conventional expectations?
TM: 11:03
SS: I think the psychological process is involved a very similar. It’s just a different power dynamic. So, power dynamics in the context can change and there is a hierarchy of who is allowed to defy. Who gets to defy and what are the consequences for defying for sure. But in cultures and institutions or situations where a high level of difference is expected, you see this it becomes a small difficult to say no because that is the norm. So yeah, we need to think about sort of the workplace culture and how hierarchical it is and what amount of difference is expected.
Ed: So, I spent quite a number of years in managerial roles in my work life both in the newspaper business and working at NCSL. And I would say that maybe like a lot of managers I wasn’t always very happy when people didn’t agree with what I asked them to do or defied me. Do you find that a lot with people who are managers?
SS: Its one of the things that we worry about a lot and what keeps us silent and compliant is how much are we going to offend the other person. And one of the things when you were asking about how natural is it, it’s more natural for some people than others. Well, people can differ on whether they feel this psychological process called insinuation anxiety. And this is a distinct type of anxiety that we have where we worry about rejecting somebody’s advice or order or suggestion sends a negative evaluation to them, a negative signal. So, we don’t want to imply that managers are incompetent or they can’t be trusted you know. It becomes very, very difficult and for some people with high levels of insinuation anxiety, it becomes even more difficult if everybody else is following your manager’s suggestion and you think it’s wrong, it is very difficult to point that out. There are ways it can be done with what we call constructive voice and it really depends again going back to the workplace culture the level of differences expected and whether it’s an expressive culture or not. Whether you can question or not and but in terms of whether managers are actually offended or not, that also varies on an individual level. So, you might know that you have a manager that if you point anything out, they are going to fly off the handle. In which case then is what I call not psychologically safe to speak up. It might not even be financially safe right. You might lose your job or something. So, these are the questions that you need to ask. Is it safe and is it effective for me to speak up. And remember that defiance is not completely risk free. If something is really going against your values or there is some unethical behavior and you can’t along with something, sometimes even if it is not safe, people will speak up. So, it’s an individual choice.
Ed: So, when we talk in workplace about defying, certainly many times it’s a moral or ethical disagreement, but is it also a situation where you simply think someone is wrong in what they are suggesting as far as a business operation goes?
SS: Yes, because you do want to save the organization from making costly errors and you also one aspect about innovation and creativity is that you need to be a little bit defiant to be creative. You know compliance is somewhat the death of creativity. If the structure is so rigid and compliant, that’s going to stifle any innovation. So yes, defiance is disagreeing with a business decision too that someone is suggesting. It doesn’t need to be confrontational. I think one of the myths about defiance it has to be loud and aggressive and violent. But no, you can have quiet defiance. You can have just simply curiosity or clarification that can produce different and creative business ideas without being confrontational.
Ed: So, I think people probably don’t have a hard time imagining what the downsides are of defying – maybe not getting a promotion, not getting a raise, being seen as a troublemaker and that sort of thing. But what are the downsides of not defying if indeed someone is in the situation that you’ve described and they see a real something that just is not aligned with their values. What are the downsides of them going along?
SS: Yeah, you are right that we often think about the consequences for defiance. But if you are constantly putting aside your values for other people and constantly bowing your head to others, it really can have an impact on your health and wellbeing. You know of course people immediately identify with some of the emotional and psychological consequences of that. But there is also physical consequences if we feel that we can’t live alignment with our values, it can lead to a lot of stress and anxiety and burnout and dissatisfaction and chronic inflammation. So, it really does take a toll that we often don’t take into consideration because we focus so much on the consequences for defiance and yet we don’t consider these costs for not acting in alignment with your values, your ethics.
TM: 16:47
Ed: So, I think we’ve been talking maybe not entirely, but this we were talking about business situations and I wonder as I mentioned before about the legislature, is it different in public government sorts of jobs. I know you said you’ve spoke we talked a little bit before that you’ve spoken with people in law enforcement and that kind of thing. Do you see a distinction there. Is there a different way that people should act depending on whether they are in a private business situation or a public government situation?
SS: No. I think there’s certainly similarities right in the approach that you take because values are really not context dependent. If you value integrity. If you value fairness. If you value equality that probably applies in your private life as it does in public and government surface and in private business because they are your personal values. So, I think this approach is actually applicable in all areas of our lives whether we are at a parent meeting at the school or whether your child is facing bullying in the schoolyard or whether you are in law enforcement. Whether you are in a corporation or a different type of institution, this approach is extremely helpful.
Ed: And as we wrap up, Dr. Sah, I wonder if you have any other thoughts you would like to share again thinking of this audience of legislative staff.
SS: I think one of the things is really first of all to have a mindset shift about what we think about defiance because it is often associated with this negative connotation and we think of it as bold or angry. Or we might think about it as heroic or superhuman and how to reach. We think of it as a personality trait and it is not. It’s a skillset. You don’t have to be brave. You don’t have to be a superhero. You don’t have to have a strong personality or be larger than life. It’s available and necessary actually for all of us and we can do it in our own unique way with far less stress, far less anxiety, far less angst that we used to have. As long as we view defiance as acting in alignment with our values when there is pressure to do. Otherwise, there’s many different ways to do it. It doesn’t have to be loud or public.
Ed: Well, Dr. Sah, thank you so much for taking the time and I know people will certainly enjoy your webinar when you do that for the legislative staff group. Thanks a lot.
SS: Thank you very much.
Ed: I’ve been talking with Dr. Sunita Sah, the author of “Defy” about the power of saying no. Sah will conduct a webinar on May 5 as part of NCSL’s Legislative Staff week. Thanks for listening.
You can check out all the podcasts from the National Conference of State Legislatures by searching for NCSL podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast “Our American States” dives into some of the most challenging public policy issues facing legislators. On “Across the Aisle” host Kelley Griffin tells stories of bipartisanship. Also check out our special series “Building Democracy” on the history of legislatures.