Why Having the Courage to Defy Makes us Happier (with Dr Sunita Sah)

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by the amazing Katie Milkman, behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like the power of self-control, shaping your mindset for success, navigating new beginnings, and why starting over can feel so hard. Katie talks to authors, athletes, Nobel laureates, and everyday people about why we make irrational choices and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes.

0:43You'll learn about tools and strategies to help improve your decision-making and a ton of other fantastic things about the mind. Listen and subscribe at schwab.com slash podcast or find it wherever you listen to your shows. On the Happiness Lab, we talk a lot about how real happiness isn't moments of joy. It's about creating security and peace. For small business owners, a big part of that well-being comes from helping to protect the livelihood you've worked so hard to build. The Hartford has been doing that for more than 200 years, And today, they insure over 1 million small businesses nationwide.

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2:13Pushkin.

2:20It's September. Fall is here, and that means back to school. My college students have already arrived on campus at Yale. So it's time to say goodbye to beach days with a good book and late summer nights, and hello to lecture halls, lesson plans, and an ever-growing list of priorities. The end of summer often feels bittersweet. If we're not careful, autumn life can start to move very quickly. So as we switch into this new season, I want to help you find a little more happiness. And that's why I want to spend the next few episodes sharing all the incredible insights I learned from stuff I had a chance to read on my summer break.

2:55In this upcoming season of The Happiness Lab, we'll be diving into some of my favorite new books from 2025. We'll hear from brilliant authors whose work can teach us lots of things that are relevant for feeling better, like how to make better decisions, how to improve our work-life balance, and even how to turn scary things into sources of joy. And today, we're focused on a question that I struggle with a lot. How to say no more often and how to mean it. Today's installment of my favorite books of 2025 is by a physician turned organizational psychologist who's done some great research on how to stay true to yourself and your values, even when it feels easier to stay quiet and go with the flow.

3:34Hello, I'm Dr. Sunita Saar. I'm a professor at Cornell University and the author of defy the power of no in a world that demands yes. So I want to start with how you define defiance. What does that word mean to you? If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary definition of defiance, it says to defy is to challenge the power of someone else, like openly and boldly. And I thought that was really too narrow. And it doesn't really honor our agency. I don't usually disagree with the Oxford English Dictionary. You know, I grew up in the UK, but in this case, I did disagree. My definition of defiance is that to defy is simply to act in accordance with your true values, especially when there is pressure to do otherwise.

4:23And that transforms defiance from this negative connotation to a positive, almost pro-social act in society. Today, Sunita's work explores this kind of positive resistance, but she wasn't always such a champion of nonconformity. Sunita was raised by Indian immigrant parents in Yorkshire, England. Back then, she was way more focused on blending in than standing out. I grew up with a masterclass in compliance. I remember asking my dad when I was quite young, what does my name Sunita mean? And he said in Sanskrit, Sunita means good. And I mostly lived up to that. And I interpreted being good as being polite, doing what I was told, not questioning authority and obeying.

5:11And so I thought anything that went against that was being defiant and that was bad. So I made this equation of compliance equals good and defiance equals bad. Lots of people grew up with the same ideas about compliance that Sunita's describing. I know I did. I definitely tried to be the obedient kid. I always wanted to please my parents and my teachers and pretty much every other authority figure in my life. Which kind of makes evolutionary sense, right? Without some level of compliance, society would fall apart. So it's not surprising that so many of us feel a natural pull to conform. I mean, one of the reasons why I say that we're wired to comply is that we do get rewarded for compliance.

5:50You know, as children and even as adults in workplaces, we are expected to be a good employee, which means, again, doing what you're told and towing the party line in a way. If you do what you're told to do, then people like it and it meets everybody else's expectations. It could give us a dopamine rise. It could make us feel great. But the problem comes when it's not good for us to comply, when it's actually bad for us to be so good and compliant. That's when the problems start arising in that our compliance is going to hurt ourselves or it's going to hurt other people. And here we need to learn how to defy because if we've only been trained in compliance as children, then it becomes really difficult when we become adults to learn that skill set.

6:39You've talked about some of the dangers of compliance being at the personal level. What do you mean there? My first career was as a physician in the UK. So at the personal level, You know, when I started looking at this, what really shocked me as a junior physician was, first of all, I was seeing patients agree to treatments and procedures that they didn't necessarily want or would be even good for them. I saw junior doctors like myself not being able to say anything when we noticed people making an error. And in fact, one survey found that nine out of 10 health care workers, most of them nurses, do not speak up when they see a colleague or a physician making a mistake.

7:21Wow. Nine out of 10. That sounds very dangerous. I know. And these are life and death situations and people are struggling. It doesn't have to be like some of my research when I started delving into it in terms of compliance. Even in very simple experiments from like a stranger coming along and offering you one of two different options and recommending the inferior one. In certain conditions, we see compliance as high as 85 percent. And people don't want this. If they're allowed to make the decision in private or if they're not giving any advice, then over 90 percent will choose the other option.

7:55So what is it? Why are we so compliant? And it's because of this aspect of being socialized that it's a good thing to do and just feeling very uncomfortable and feeling social pressure from other people. You just mentioned this idea of anxiety, and I know that's one of the other reasons you talk about for why people comply too much. Explain this idea of insinuation anxiety. Insinuation anxiety is a distinct type of anxiety that we feel when we become concerned that if we don't go along with somebody's order or suggestion or even expectation, that it sends a negative evaluation of that person to that person.

8:35So it basically signals that the person cannot be trusted, is incompetent, is biased, is even sexist or racist. These are things we don't want to imply about anyone else. And so in order to not send this negative evaluation, we end up not saying anything. It keeps us compliant and silent. We end up going along with something that our boss tells us to do. We don't speak up when somebody says something that we think is wrong because it's so difficult for us to insinuate or imply that somebody cannot be trusted. So that aversive emotional state that we have is actually quite powerful. And it comes up in small situations, such as you could be at the hairdressers and they're saying, you know, trust me with this new cut and they're cutting away and cutting away and you're thinking no no no just stop but you find it very hard if you're like me to actually say stop and and then you might just even pay them and tip them and leave and then cry at home like what's happened so it can happen in those small stake situations but it can happen in those much larger stake situations so it could be the reason why I mentioned that nurses don't speak up to physicians or doctors when they see them making a mistake.

9:52It could be why co-pilots don't speak up to their pilots when they make an error. Like in these life and death situations, this insinuation anxiety can be really powerful because it becomes so difficult for us and for some people more than others, becomes so difficult for us to send that negative evaluation to someone else to say that they can't be trusted or that they're wrong. I'm thinking of also some of the more personal costs, like kind of not just what it feels like, but what it does to our values, too. So how does complying too much affect our values and our sense of purpose? When we think about what our values are, we value so much integrity and honesty, but when it comes to our day-to-day behavior, we don't implement that.

10:36So there's this gap between who we think we are and what we actually do. And that is what I'm trying to sort of decrease that gap between how much we believe our values to be influencing us and then how we actually behave. So if we value integrity or benevolence or justice or compassion, why is it that we can't behave in that way? And this is where we get that social influence. We don't know how to stay in alignment with our values when it actually comes to that moment. We freeze or we just don't put our values into action and we need to learn how to do that. And that seems to have a big effect on our happiness.

11:17You know, so much of what we know from the positive psychology literature is that it's kind of acting in alignment with our values that seems to really matter. They're just kind of feeling just like not the sense of dissonance that like I'm acting in this way that doesn't really fit with what I care about. So it seems like this act of complying too much must have some big implications for just our overall well-being. Absolutely. I mean, people always think about the costs of defiance when they're thinking about, oh, you know, it's too hard because it's going to cost me my job. It's going to cost me a relationship.

11:45But what they don't think about is the cost of compliance. And if you're constantly bowing your head to other people, if you're constantly disregarding your values, then it does take a toll on us, you know, psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, and even physically. So when you have that chronic compliance, it can eat away at your soul quite a bit. and I've spoken to people who have, you know, had burnout, stress, anxiety, chronic inflammation, all of these things because they could not implement their values. And so those are some of the personal costs of kind of complying too much. What are some of the societal costs?

12:23And I'm guessing based on the fact that, you know, in your own clinical practice, you saw, you know, 90 % of nurses not speaking up when they saw something going wrong, 80 % of people kind of complying in these awful situations. Like, what's the real societal toll of that? You know, it's huge because history even tells us like that there's terrible consequences of just going along with things because we're afraid to speak up or we don't know how to speak up even if we want to. And so society as a whole, we could just descend into high levels of compliance with things that we really feel very strongly about, but we can't enact.

13:05And that sort of suppression or oppression is something that nobody really wants or votes for in a way. But it comes along if we keep silent and we don't say anything or we don't take action. Any of your worst examples of compliance in history that have negatively affected us? I mean, one of the most infamous series of studies on compliance was the Milgram experiments. And that was really done to investigate why Nazis behaved the way that they did in World War II. And they came up with phrases such as, I was just following orders. And that is, I think, one of the worst examples that we see time and time again is that, you know, this idea of I was just following orders, displacing our responsibility onto someone else.

13:54Ah, yes, the Milgram experiments, a set of studies that are now infamous for revealing the dark side of human nature. The Milgram studies are often cited as proof of the dangers of blind obedience. But Sunita argues that they show something different. What does she think these notorious experiments really tell us? Well, we'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns from the break.

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17:38Cornell professor Sunita Saw is on a mission to teach the world how to defy better, how we can stick to our values even when that might be awkward, scary, or disappointing to others. Sunita first began studying defiance as a young medical student, a career path that, for her, perhaps ironically, was an act of compliance. I remember thinking at the time whether medicine was the right thing for me. And I got told, well, you have the grades. What else would you do? It's the best thing you can do. And so I did follow everybody else's expectations and even society's expectations that being a doctor is the best thing that you can do.

18:14And I went to medical school. But Sunita wasn't completely compliant. She still wanted to carve out something for herself. So she took some courses in psychology, the field she actually felt passionate about. And that's when I came across Stanley Milgram's experiments that were conducted in the early 1960s at Yale. That's right. Milgram's legendary studies on the banality of evil were carried out at the very same institution where I teach today. Like Sunita, I've always found Milgram's experiments to be endlessly fascinating, especially when you not only read about his studies, but actually listen to the original experimental recordings, which they happen to have available in the library at Yale.

18:58Here's a taste. That's all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart's starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. In her book, Sunita describes Milgram's most well-known study. He brought 40 men between the ages of 20 to 50 into the lab. The men were recruited through newspaper ads and direct mail solicitations. They represented a wide range of occupations and education levels. In other words, the participants were what Milgram called ordinary individuals. Milgram really conducted these experiments because he wanted to investigate whether this phrase of I was just following orders was a psychological reality or not.

19:40And so he had participants come in, community members, that thought that they were going to take part in a learning experiment and whether giving someone an electric shock helps them learn and improves their memory far more than anything else. One theory is that people learn things correctly whenever they get punished for making a mistake. The project is bringing together a number of adults of different occupations and ages, and we're asking some of them to be teachers and some to be learners. We want to find out just what effect different people have on each other as teachers and learners, and also what effect punishment will have on learning in this situation.

20:18And so the participants would come in and they would be introduced to someone else that they thought was a participant but really was an actor, who they saw being placed in another room and kind of strapped to something that looked like an electric chair. And what I'm going to do is strap down your arms to avoid any excessive movement on your part during the experiment. And then they were taken to another room where they sat in front of this elegant machine that had markings from 15 volts going up in 15-volt increments all the way to 450 volts. That was labelled XXX, severe shock. When you press one of the switches all the way down, the learner gets a shock.

20:58When you release it, the shock stops, you see. Like that. So those participants were called teachers because they were reading out word pairs to the learner in the other room, the actor. And if the learner got the word pair wrong, then the teacher would have to give an electric shock and then increase in these increments. Incorrect. You'll now get a shock of 75 volts. He kind of did some yelling in there. Continue, please. Hard stone head bread work. Incorrect. You'll now get a shock of 105 volts. Just how far can you go on this thing? As far as is necessary. What do you mean, as far as is necessary?

21:48Complete the test. uh brave woman soldier dog horse incorrect 150 volts that's all get me out of here i told you i had heart trouble my heart's starting to bother me now get me out of here please continue my heart's starting to bother me i refuse to go on let me out i think we ought to find out what's wrong in there of course and if they protested the experimenter who was in the room with them, with a lab coat on, would give them four prompts, which were, please go on. The experiment requires you to continue. The experiment requires that you continue, teacher. Well, the experiment might require that we continue, but I still think we should find out what the condition of the gentleman is.

22:39It's absolutely essential that you continue. It's absolutely essential that you continue. And you have no choice. You must go on. And if after four prompts, they didn't want to continue, then the experiment would end. And in advance, a group of psychiatrists predicted that very few people would go up to 450 volts. But what Milgram found was that two thirds of participants went up to the extreme dangerous shock of 450 volts. And he was astounded by those results. He was not expecting them at all. And he called the participants who obeyed and went up to 450 volts the obedient participants. And those who didn't, those that declined to give the electric shock, the defiant subjects.

23:33So again, now we're seeing defiance as actually a positive aspect. You know, it's a positive thing that you're not going to harm or potentially kill another human being by giving them shocks. But what fascinated me was I didn't think the people that went up to 450 volts were moral imbeciles, as Milgram described them. Because if you look at what they were actually saying, they were showing signs of distress. They were questioning. Even in their holler and he can't stand it. What if something happens to him? They were stuttering. The experiment requires that you continue, teacher. And if you look at their non-birthual behavior as well, they were sweating.

24:14They looked like they were in distress. They had nervous laughter. Wrong. 75, old student. And I recognized all those signs because there's many times I've been in those situations where I felt the same thing. And so I recognized these are people who actually want to defy, but they're finding it very difficult to do so. Yeah. It feels like they were just going through this awful feeling that I know well, too. which is like they wanted to give a no, but they were giving a yes. And that just gave them so much dissonance. It just felt so yucky. Yeah, absolutely. How many times have we been in that situation where we want to say no and we just end up like swallowing our words?

24:59It's a horrible feeling. One reason that people comply that Milgram talked a lot about was this idea of the agentic state. What did Milgram mean by that and how should we understand it? What Milgram meant by the agentic state was that we have become agents of somebody else, that we have given away all our responsibility and our power to someone else. Whatever they want, we are going to do and we're going to comply. And it might be because we think they're an authority figure and know best, but sometimes we know best and yet we give that away so easily. In some participants, he did notice that people really evaluated their behavior on how well they were following orders.

25:44But in many of the others, there was that actual tension there, which I call the first stage of defiance. That tension was clearly visible in that they wanted to defy, but they didn't know how. And that tension actually is a signal of our agency, because if we had given away all our power, then we wouldn't feel any tension. We would be in that agentic state that he's talking about. We would just go along with it. But if we feel that tension, that is actually a strength, not a weakness, because it alerts us to something is wrong here. And I wonder what that is. And that is what we need to focus on, not sweep it away just because we have some anxiety or doubt or that we're confused.

26:29It's really to focus on why is it that I feel that tension, acknowledge it to ourselves, and then tell somebody else about it, vocalize it to the person that is asking you to do something that you don't think is the right thing to do. All you have to do is say, I'm uncomfortable with that. What do you mean by that? Can you clarify? You're still in a subservient position at this point, but you are making it known externally, this is not something you're comfortable with. If you then complied later on, you can't have that cognitive dissonance of saying I was fine with it because you put it out there.