Pod Insights Good Life Project Psychology Researcher: Why Always Being Good Can Be Incredibly Bad for You | Dr. Sunita Sah About this episode Are you living a life true to your deepest values or just going along with what others expect? Sunita Sah, author of Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes https://amzn.to/40TiMyY, reveals how our cultural conditioning to comply holds us back from authenticity.
Learn the stages of healthy defiance to courageously honor your agency while navigating power dynamics. Reframe defiance as a positive force aligned with your most profound principles.
You can find Sunita at: Website https://www.sunitasah.com/ | Instagram https://www.instagram.com/drsunitasah/ | Episode Transcript https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/the-power-of-defiance-how-to-live-authentically-by-your-values-sunita-sah
If you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Zoe Chance https://episodes.fm/647826736/episode/NjI2ZjNhZDA5NzllZGUwMDEyN2Q2NjFi about influence and persuasion.
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Transcript 12,233 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Is it sometimes bad to be so good and so compliant? And how can we make it easier for people to become defiant?
0:08 Jonathan Fields? Dr. Sunita Sah is a leading authority on the psychology of influence and decision making at Cornell University, whose groundbreaking work shows us how to resist manipulation and stand our ground.
0:21 Speaker 00 I saw that nine out of 10 healthcare workers, most of them nurses, didn't feel comfortable speaking up when they saw somebody making an error. And that could be life and death situations.
0:33 Jonathan Fields? It is so interesting the way that we conflate compliance with goodness.
0:39 Speaker 00 I came to this revelation that we'd misunderstood what it means to defy. Whereas my new definition is to defy is to...
0:47 Jonathan Fields? So take me into this a bit more.
0:49 Speaker 00 When we're asked to do something that goes against one of our values, we feel tension. We need to recognize that because that could actually be...
1:00 Jonathan Fields? Hey there. Before we dive into today's show, one quick thing. If you haven't yet followed the show, it would mean the world to me if you took just two seconds to tap the follow button on whatever app you're listening in. It helps us grow our Good Life Project community and continue creating the best possible show we can for you. And it ensures you'll never miss an episode. Now on to the show. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
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4:15 Jonathan Fields? There's this notion that defiance is a bad thing, that it's inherently, it's not okay. You know, keep your head down and sort of like follow the things and that. You make this interesting argument that says effectively that we are conditioned to believe that compliance is inherently good and defiance is inherently bad. So take me into this argument more, it's so fascinating.
4:38 Speaker 00 For me in particular, as a child, I was really known as being an obedient daughter and a student. And I remember asking my dad when I was quite young, what does my name mean? And he said, in Sanskrit, sunita means good. And mostly I lived up to that. These were the messages that I received, like to be good was to do as you're told, go to school when you're told, do your homework, don't question your teachers. And the messages came from family, teachers, community, that we started to equate, or at least I certainly did, and a lot of people I know start to equate being compliant with being good and defiant with being bad.
5:22 Speaker 00 And that becomes so ingrained in us that questioning authority or trying to stand up to someone becomes really difficult. And I certainly struggled with it a lot. And I actually became really fascinated by the single powerful word defy and what it meant. And seeing people that had an easier time of being defiant really fascinated me and I wanted to explore that in more depth. I started to see situations where compliance became a serious problem when I looked into it, that being so compliant could cause so many serious problems in life. And when I looked into surveys, I saw that nine out of 10 healthcare workers, most of
6:07 Speaker 00 them nurses, didn't feel comfortable speaking up when they saw somebody making an error. And that could be life and death situations. And the same applies with crew members on commercial airlines, again, another life and death situation where a survey of 1,700 crew members found that at least half of them felt uncomfortable when they saw their superiors making an error and did not want to speak up. So I started to think like, what does it mean to be so good all the time? Is it sometimes bad to be so good and so compliant? And what do we lose? What do we? Do by, you know, going against our values so often? And how can we make it easier for people to become defiant?
6:50 Speaker 00 And that that's why I realized after a lot of studying that I came to this revelation that we've misunderstood what it means to defy. And we need a new definition of defiance, one that honors our agency and reframes it as a positive force. So if you look at the old definition, to defy is to challenge the power of somebody else boldly and openly. Whereas my new definition is that to defy is simply to act in accordance with your values when there's pressure to do otherwise. And having that positive reframe makes a big difference because these acts of consent and dissent every day live up to the society that we live in.
7:33 Speaker 00 So that's why I'm so passionate about it because it affects our work, work lives, our communities and our personal lives. And it's, it's an important factor that we need to integrate into our lives and make easier and accessible for everyone to be able to defy.
7:50 Jonathan Fields? And that makes sense. It is so interesting, the way that we can flake compliance with goodness, you know? It's like, oh, I'm, I, and I think so many of us, we aspire to be, I, I, I want to be a good person. I want to think of myself as a good person. I want others to think of me as a good person. A part of that equation is then I should just kind of comply with like whatever sort of like the norm.
8:10 Speaker 00 Yes.
8:10 Jonathan Fields? Around me. And it sounds like what you're describing also is it's, these could be the norms and expectations in your family. They could be norms and expectation in a single relationship, maybe a partner or a friend. It could be as large as like culture, society, a company you're working in, you know, like the entire country. And it seems like we're constantly scanning the way you're describing it, saying like, What are these norms and expectations? And like, how do I go along with them? So I can keep seeing myself as like that good person that everyone wants to be around, that I feel good about myself.
8:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, and it certainly, you know, the not like how you're socialized as a child certainly makes a difference, but the environment that we're currently in also makes a big difference. As you're saying, like, what does our society expect? What does my relationship with one single person expect? And having worked in different institutions, I really do see sort of how workplace culture really takes a toll on this too. Like there's some, in some workplaces, you're explicitly told this is a place where you don't speak up, you just keep your head down and do your work and you don't question. And other places have a more psychologically safe environment where you can't question, you can speak up, you can talk about things that you think are going in the wrong direction.
9:28 Speaker 00 So it is really fascinating how much there's like an inner aspect, but there's also the interaction with people that you have in your environment. Working in a business school as well, I look into sort of ethics and scandals. And I'm always so intrigued as to when people become what they call like a yes man or a yes person in a company, because you start equating how good you are with how much you follow your boss's orders and what they want, even when they go off track into sort of ambiguous areas or even clearly unethical areas. Psychologists call it ethical fading, that you start narrowing on what is your task? And looking at how good you've performed as to how well you do that task,
10:12 Speaker 00 rather than asking the bigger, wider questions as to what is this about? Who's it affecting? Is it?
10:18 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, I would imagine also that so much of this is patterned in childhood. I'm just thinking like the typical kid is going to learn really quickly. How to be in the good graces of a parent or a caregiver or a teacher, you know? And it's sort of like, as a kid, you want to be in the good graces in part because you just, it feels awesome because, you know, you're probably at an age where you want to feel like you're safe and protected. And if you, like, you're kind of running these subconscious experiments all the time with that older person, which is kind of testing, like, what keeps me in their good graces or gets me in their good graces? And if you keep getting rewarded for complying with, like, whatever the rules and the norms and the expectations are, then you learn at an early age, oh, this is how it works.
11:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:02 Jonathan Fields? This is how I stay in their good graces, this is how I feel good about myself, how they feel good about me, and this is just the way that you're supposed to be in the world.
11:10 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, that reinforcement is so powerful. If you get rewarded for being good and you don't get rewarded for anything that goes out of the category of following my orders and being good, if you don't get rewarded for that, then of course those neural pathways for being obeying are going to strengthen and become very strong. And then it's, you have to really work at rewiring, but it can be done. We can change our default. And I always say that compliance might be our default, but it's not our destiny. We can become different.
11:43 Jonathan Fields? And it is so interesting, the way that this shows up, as you described, you know, you gave the example of, you know, in the medical profession, which I know you also have personal experience in. I'm curious, in your time in medicine, is this an experience that you personally have seen in yourself?
11:59 Speaker 00 In terms of not speaking up if I see an error?
12:02 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, or that you've grappled with in some meaningful way?
12:05 Speaker 00 I remember one occasion really well where I felt very upset about that particular order, but it seemed I was lacking power in that situation to make a difference. I was a junior doctor at the time, and I remember I was concerned about a particular elderly patient, so I ordered some tests and they were refused. Another healthcare worker came along and refused to do it and asked me to delete something on the records that I had actually written, and I was in Incredibly upset about it. A doctor came and they said, yeah, I agree with you, but there was nothing we could do about that situation.
12:44 Speaker 00 And it was in that kind of environment, you feel really frustrated and just not knowing what to do when you actually had noticed something. You'd followed what you thought was the right protocol in that place. So to some extent, I thought I was being compliant. And then I was told to go in a different direction that doesn't, wasn't for the best interests of the patient. And that can make somebody quite disillusioned with how to change the environment.
13:11 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, I would imagine. You know, as you're describing that also, I'm remembering the sort of like the famed Milgram shock experiments. That I think so many of us probably learned about in college, you know, like they're in different examples. It kind of boggles my mind sometimes how far we'll go, knowing like there's a voice inside of us that says this isn't right. And yet, if we're being told by a person in authority and the culture around us seems to support the fact like, but this is just what we do. This is appropriate. And like, keep doing the thing that you know, deep down is wrong, that we, we keep complying. Even when, you know, in this particular case, you know, you probably remember the facts better than me.
13:50 Jonathan Fields? It was students in a lab where they were told that there was another student and in response to answers, they would give them brain levels of shock.
13:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:58 Jonathan Fields? Walk me through this a little bit more.
13:59 Speaker 00 The studies were conducted in the 1960s.
14:02 Jonathan Fields? They'd never be allowed now, so.
14:04 Speaker 00 And it was really Milgram, Stanley Milgram wanted to investigate the sort of claim that from the Nazis after World War Two. That I was just following orders. So that particular statement, that's all that it was doing. Was this really a psychological reality? Is that what people do? And he didn't expect that people would do that. There was a group of psychiatrists as well that predicted that it was less than 1% would go all the way up to the most dangerous shock, 450 volts, which could harm a human being or even cause, cause death. So they weren't the students, they were members of the community that were invited to come in.
14:47 Speaker 00 To the lab and it was framed as a learning, a memory experiment. It was set up in such a way that there was one person who was part of the experiment. So an actor that would always be the learner and be put in a separate room. And the real participant would see that that learner would be strapped to something that looks like an electric chair. And they were looking at the effects of electric shocks on memory and learning to see if that would improve people's learning abilities. And the participant was then designated as a teacher. They're put in a different room and they have to read out these word pairs to the learner.
15:27 Speaker 00 And if they get something incorrect, they have to start from very low voltage, around harmless fifteen volts. And then work up the scale that was shown quite prominently to the participants up to XXX dangerous fatal shocks. Most psychiatrists predicted hardly anyone would go to the top level. And yet what they found was that everybody shocked at around hundred and everybody shocked at three hundred volts even. And then about sixty five percent of people went all the way to the deadly shock of four hundred and fifty volts, which was really astounding.
16:08 Speaker 00 And he called those participants, the obedient ones, the ones that refused were defiant. And that is why we have our definition wrong, because the defiant, the defiant participants were actually doing the right thing and refusing to harm another person. But the obedient ones and here category of just dividing into obedient and and defiant is what we normally do. We have this binary of obedient or you're defiant. When really I've noticed that there is a scale of defiance and some of those that were classified as obedient were trying to defy, they just hadn't learned exactly how to be able to get to the final stage of defiance.
16:48 Speaker 00 So they would object, they would have had some nervous laughter or they would smile or they would ask questions. But when they were told to continue, they continued. So it was actually quite a shocking experiment and shocking results. He also looked at different conditions that would allow for more defiance, which is also really fascinating to look in what allows us to be more defiant in those types of situations.
17:11 Jonathan Fields? And just for context here, for those tuning in, the shocks were fake.
17:15 Speaker 00 The shocks were fake.
17:16 Jonathan Fields? The person thought that they were pushing a button and giving the shocks, but the actor, like the person receiving that was just an actor who was sort of like pretending to do this. So there was no actual harm. Can you even say there is no harm done? Because I often wonder what about the psyche of the person who then left that room going in thinking, I'm a good person and then leaving thinking, I've, I've just done something horrible that I don't believe is okay. Like, who am I?
17:40 Speaker 00 Yeah. So that was the, that's prob, that's why we wouldn't be able to repeat the experiment now, because just because there was no physical shocks being given to anyone, people had to live with the fact that they had indeed given someone perhaps a deadly shock and what did that mean about them? And that could affect people in numerous different ways. So that psychological effect could have been there, even though they were debriefed and is really given us a lot of insight into human behavior.
18:11 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, I remember there's this mentalist, Darren Brown, who does all of these TV specials. He's like incredible. I remember seeing one and he does these experiments that really push the envelope of human behavior. I remember seeing him effectively doing his version of this where he was inviting people at an event. Basically, he would create a scenario where he would literally get people to come up to a rooftop and eventually have to choose between pushing somebody off the roof or not. And these were people who were unsuspecting. They had no involvement beforehand. And a very substantial people did believe that they ended up pushing somebody to their death, even though it was all contrived. And it was mind blowing to just see like, these are not people where you're like, oh, they just have this secret dark side or like they're secretly evil or violent. This is you and me.
18:56 Speaker 00 Yes, exactly.
18:57 Jonathan Fields? Because how manipulable we are when the right circumstances and expectations are wrapped around us. It's like, these are us and our family and our friends. And it's so hard to wrap your head around that.
19:07 Speaker 00 Like when I read the descriptions of the participants that Milgram had written about and them sweating and. Even laughing nervously, I recognized aspects of myself and I was like, well, they're trying to defy, but they don't know how to. And we really need to learn how to defy in those situations because we get so much training. Well, I got so much training in being compliant. I say a masterclass of being compliant, but I wasn't taught how to be defiant. And we need to sort of nourish that will to defy when we really want to. And I believe people were that and they were showing so much tension in those moments, but they weren't
19:49 Speaker 00 able to act through to the end and actually defy the experimenter.
19:55 Jonathan Fields? Yeah. And, and we've just shared some pretty extreme examples, but this is also, this happens to everybody every day in all the tiniest ways. Whether you're just like a people pleaser or somebody asks a favor and you're like, it's not quite aligned with you and you don't have time and you're like, just yes, yes, yes. And as you just, you're right about, you know, this, it's almost like the, the request for defiance and the act of defiance creates this tension, like a conflict between your values and your expectations. So take me into this a bit more.
20:20 Speaker 00 So I call this, this tension, resistance to resistance, that we often feel uncomfortable when we're asked to do something that goes against one of our values, which is, you know, probably for many people, not harming another human being. And when we are asked to do that, we feel tension. In lots of situations where we want to defy, we feel that aspect of tension and it can manifest in different ways for different people. So for some people, it could be their throat closing up, or it could be a quickened heartbeat or feeling some sweat, or I have what I call my crocodile smile, which is like a spontaneous smile that comes up as soon as I'm uncomfortable because in some ways, perhaps I want to appease
21:04 Speaker 00 the other person, but I also feel very uncomfortable and I'm trying to mask that in some way that I'm really uncomfortable with what you're requesting me to do. And we need to recognize that because that could actually be a warning sign to us. It's a way of your body telling you that you want to defy perhaps before you even. And know it. And a lot of the time, we just disregard it. We sort of sweep it under the rug, or we just think it's not worth the doubt that we feel. And yet, if we did really listen to it, we could think right now, I'm feeling uncomfortable, acknowledge that to ourselves. And then the next step is is communicating that to the other person. And that's a big step. But once you can do that, you're much more likely to get to the act of
21:49 Speaker 00 defying and saying, no, I'm not going to do that.
21:52 Jonathan Fields? So I guess the big question in my head then is like, just on a practical level, you know, you described like, you know that you have this crocodile asthma. So like, you've discovered your tell, like, you're like, okay, so now my brain translates this as like, this is happening. There's something that must be going on inside of me where there's a conflict happening here between values and expectations. How might the typical person start to recognize, like, what is the signal inside of me? That should raise the question here.
22:19 Speaker 00 Well, it might be something that you are accustomed to doing. So I know about my crocodile smell. I think one of my colleagues pointed it out to me. I was like, you're right. And also laughter, I have the same nervous laughter, I think, that the Milgram participants would have in that situation. If you if you've been in a situation where you wish you had done something different and you're recalling it, you probably know how you felt. So I talk about a time that I went for a CT scan as a doctor. And having this, how could I not be able to say no in this situation? The doctor had told me to go for a CT scan. I thought it was completely unnecessary. I felt uncomfortable about it. I talk about these stages of defiance.
23:02 Speaker 00 And stage one is that tension, you know, feeling that tension, which could be different for many. You have your own unique sign that you might be able to recognize from having been in these situations. But I certainly felt uncomfortable straight away and I felt some anxiety and I just swept it away. I didn't even try to acknowledge it to myself rather than communicate to the other person. I think I said, the most I said was, oh, is it's only a small amount of radiation? And I knew full well how much radiation was in there, but I thought that. Was enough for the other person to realize that I was uncomfortable and it wasn't. What I realized then is that even if I get to the point of saying I'm uncomfortable,
23:42 Speaker 00 you need to repeat it several times to be able to then say you're not going to go along with it. So I think learning, thinking about situations where you wanted to be defiant or you wanted to refuse something but weren't able to, you can start thinking, why didn't you? What was it that you felt in that situation? Because what I feel when I end up going along is that tension doesn't go away. It actually increases and then it makes me think and ruminate about, why did I do that? When I didn't want to, so I start thinking about it afterwards. Why did I just go along with that?
24:19 Jonathan Fields? That lands so strongly with me. I'm thinking about what are my tells, what are my internal signals? And I'm pretty sure for me, it's actually my gut is the place where that lands. Where when I sense a conflict like this, that tension, like I know it's right here and I'm not doing it in some way, shape or form. It often lands, it's embodied for me before it's cognitive. Like it starts in my body and then like my body's kind of twisting or spinning and often in my gut. And I feel like my brain then sort of like even subconsciously is like, ooh, what's happening here? It's almost like it goes from the gut up into my brain and my brain starts to ask the question, like, what's this signal about? What's actually happening?
24:56 Speaker 00 Happens to me too. Like I feel like, oh, something feels wrong, but I don't know what it is. I have to try and then figure out like, what is it exactly that feels wrong about this situation?
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28:20 Jonathan Fields? So you described this sort of like the stages of defiance, starting with this early tension, this signal. Walk me through the progression here.
28:27 Speaker 00 So stage one is that tension. And then it's an important step is that next thing about acknowledging that tension to yourself. So stage two is acknowledge it. Tell yourself you feel tension, something feels wrong, you feel uncomfortable, rather than just disregarding it, which so many of us do. Then stage three is articulating that tension to someone else, like perhaps the person who is asking you to do something that you think is wrong. So telling them that you're not comfortable with that. And that stage three is actually a critical stage because if you can get to stage three, you're more likely to get to the end stage, stage five and defy.
29:08 Speaker 00 Stage four is to continue saying that you feel uncomfortable and threaten to set, you know, you basically threatened and to defy that I can't go along with that, you know? So it's remaining, sometimes I get to stage three and I go back, but that's, if you can get to stage three, you can just repeat it. So stage four is saying that you don't think you can comply with this, or you're not going to comply with this. And then stage five is the actual defiant act. And the most interesting aspect about that is that once you do get to stage five, a lot of that tension that you're feeling just evaporates.
29:45 Speaker 00 And you actually feel great about being able to, to go along with, with your values and what you thought was the right thing to do in this situation.
29:55 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, I mean, even knowing that there may be repercussions, you know, because if you have just, you know, like stated your defiance and then made an act that is perceived as being a defiant act within a system or a culture where it's like, they like, you know, that's not okay. It's not accepted. That's so interesting, right? Because on the one hand, you may be feeling this internal alignment where the warning signals internally are kind of calming down and your mind is like, yeah, like that was the right thing. But then externally. Like you may have to pay a price for that. And this is some of the, some of the things you write about, you know, like it's, and it goes to, you know, it starts to speak also to power differentials and who really, who gets to defy and when?
30:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, so a couple of things, I want other costs of defiance, which a lot of people think about, right? It's one of the things that keep, keeps us so compliant is that we fear the costs and they might be consequences. There usually are consequences of being defiant. So you might not get promoted, you might lose your job, you might damage a relationship. And these are the things that are often on our minds when we think about defying. But we don't think about the costs of continually complying with other people. And because there are large costs of that, if you are not living in alignment with your values and you're constantly bowing your head to other people and disregarding your value, it can be soul crushing. And that can affect you both psychologically, spiritually, physically.
31:21 Speaker 00 It takes its toll as well, so we do need to take that into consideration. And then there is a defiance hierarchy where it's easier for some people to defy and live in alignment with their values and for others that are not of the dominant class. So there's more of a backlash, there's more consequences for defying, especially in certain situations. I mean, we know that black people are more likely to experience severe consequences if they refuse to give over their sort of cards or if they refuse to comply with the police, even if the police are wrong in conducting a search of any kind.
32:02 Speaker 00 The students that I've spoken to, my African American students, my black students, they will say, you know, they comply because they want to go home, they want to go home. That is not the time to defy. The time to defy is later, but not when you could be physically unsafe. So we need to make assessments as to how safe this environment is. And also another good one is to think about what impact is it going to have? And we can think about time, not just so we remain compliant continuously, but that we find. The right time to defy when it's going to be both safe and effective.
32:38 Jonathan Fields? That lands us so true. There are certain systems or cultures, whether it's work or whether it's society, where if you say like, I can't just go along anymore, like it's time for me to actually do some act of defiance. And you think about the cost benefit analysis there and you're like, okay, because I get to be true to myself. I know what's right and I need to stand in my values. All right, that will make me feel so much better. And on the cost side, there may be times where you're thinking to yourself, this may effectively get me cast out from the culture, from the family, from the company, from like whatever it is. Like I literally may not be able to, that door may be closed to me, you know, and I may have to find a new
33:20 Jonathan Fields? culture or place or family. But then there are moments where you've got to still live in that world, no matter what. It just is what it is, you know, and it's awful. But like on the cost side is like, I'm then going to have to sort of like stay in this community, this society, this culture, because effectively there's no real easy way out and pay that price in various different ways, maybe indefinitely. And that's got to be such a brutal thing to grapple with.
33:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, it really is. And I heard some fascinating stories about how people manage this in different ways. So one was a police officer that I spoke to that he trained during the time of the George Floyd incident. And he saw how the rookie officers were so compliant to their training officer in restraining George Floyd. And he didn't want to be like that. And he, there was a situation where they were late at night investigating some bicycle thefts. And he was a rookie police officer himself. And he was with some veteran police officers that wanted to search the garage of someone
34:30 Speaker 00 because they suspected, I think that there might be some bicycles in there. And he knew that, he knew his law, that this could not be, that they didn't have any standing to go in there, right? Nobody was screaming, there was no blood on the floor and they needed the homeowner's permission. And the veteran police officers were kind of annoyed that this rookie police officer had called this out and they said, okay, get permission. And he knocked on the door for a really long time. The homeowner's car was there, but he was probably fast asleep and he didn't answer the door. And the senior police officers were like, F it, I'm going in. And he refused to go in because he was just imagining a situation where they're
35:10 Speaker 00 searching this garage and the homeowner would come out and think somebody was in there and perhaps take action and something terrible could happen. So he was motivated by the worst case scenario and he just didn't want to be involved. So he decided not to comply with his senior officers. And the only reason he could actually do that, which is a very difficult situation to be in and to do that, is because he had thought about it before he joined the police force. You know, his father was a police officer and he said, I knew this job was going to be difficult. He told me, I knew this job was going to be difficult and I was going to see some unethical things and I just didn't want to be the
35:50 Speaker 00 person that just followed orders and did the wrong thing. So he'd already thought and contemplated those situations where he imagined this. But the consequences for him were pretty high. Like as soon as the journey back to the police station, everybody was really quiet. And then within an hour, he was in the office of his superiors and they were telling him that he was wrong and his voice was stuttering, but he was glad that he did it. But word went all around and he was basically ostracized. In the end, he ended up getting referred to another unit, which was much better. But there were consequences for him and he said that he was fine to take them on because that's what was important
36:34 Speaker 00 to him. But it takes a lot of thinking through and knowing that this is the time to act.
36:41 Jonathan Fields? And also real clarity and self-awareness, you know, to sort of like say, you know, like, I'm going into a situation where who knows what may happen in sort of like pre-thinking, you know, like, what are the some of the most likely situations that'll come up, you know, against on maybe just a daily basis even, and how might I handle them? And like, what are the values that I would bring to it? Is this kind of, you describe this phrase that you call sort of like your true no.
37:06 Speaker 00 Yes.
37:07 Jonathan Fields? Sort of like, you know, like, are we kind of talking about like this in a roundabout way to a certain extent?
37:12 Speaker 00 There is a true no and a true yes that I refer to, which is often when we comply, we just go along with what somebody else has asked us to do. It's really dependent on the external circumstances and somebody else asking us. It's not in alliance with our true values. Whereas what I call consent, I take informed consent from medicine and the definition of informed consent there, which has five elements, which is that you have the capacity. So you have the mental capacity, not impaired by disease, sickness, drugs, or alcohol. So you have the capacity to make the decision. You have the information, the knowledge, and the understanding of that knowledge. You know the risks and the benefits
37:53 Speaker 00 and the consequences. And also, you have the freedom to say no, because often, if you don't have the freedom to say no, then you can't consent. It's simply compliance. If you have those four elements, capacity, knowledge, freedom to say no, then you can authorize you're either true yes or you're true no. But often, we just end up complying with things, even though all those factors are present, because we're being very conscious. It's not an eager compliance, but it's what I call conscious compliance, that we comply with it because the costs of defiance are too great in the moment. So we're just putting our defiance on hold. We're not planning never to defy. We're just putting it on
38:34 Speaker 00 hold in the moment. But when you mention pre-thinking, that's something else in terms of preparing for how to defy, because a lot of the situations that we face could be predictable. So we might know that this particular friend or this particular work colleague They're always going to make some kind of sexist remark. And if you let it go in every encounter or meeting, you feel bad about it and you want to do something different. So you can predict some of the things that would happen. So like Kevin, the police officer could predict something was going to come up. And how would you like to respond? For me, it was the C T scan that I I went along with that and I regretted it. And so I was like, next time this happens, I want to do something different.
39:19 Speaker 00 And so the first thing we want to do is think about those situations and visualize, anticipate it, visualize it and then pre-script or pre-think, what is it that you would like to say? What would be your aspirational self? That who would you like to be in this situation? And then practice it, because if you do all of those things, your neural pathways change. So even if your default was compliance, you can now become through a new default of becoming defiant. So that practicing that skill is really important because we can get our mouths used to saying the words and our ears used to hearing it
39:59 Speaker 00 because we're not used to being defiant or we might not have been trained to be defiant. And there's this wonderful quote that's often attributed to Bruce Lee, but it was actually a Greek poet that said, under duress, we don't rise to our level of expectations, we fall to our level of training. And that's why it's so important to train for defiance. You know, it's a practice, not a personality.
40:25 Jonathan Fields? And I would imagine part of that training also is the reframing of what defiance really is and what isn't. As you offered like early in our conversation, like it's to sort of like offer yourself and remind yourself of that alternate definition of what defiance is, which is really, can you share that again once more? Just sort of.
40:43 Speaker 00 So the old definition of defiance is to challenge the power of another person, to resist boldly and openly. Whereas my new definition is to defy is to act in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise.
40:59 Jonathan Fields? Right, so to remind yourself that that's what defiance really is. And that also brings up another question, which is, we have, we've talked around this notion of values a whole bunch in this conversation. But let's just dive right in, because I think values is one of these phrases where people have heard them in so many different contexts. Almost anyone who's been sort of like in the world of work for more than a hot minute has probably done some form of values exercise at some point as part of an offsite or an onboarding process or something. And a lot of people probably roll their eyes at the notion of values these days too. Take me deeper into what we're actually exploring here when when like that values.
41:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, so values, the most powerful interpretation of values are words such as integrity, fairness, equity. What's really important to us, it's not something like homosexuality is wrong or abortion is right. Which they're subjective stances and there's two answers, right? And that's why it becomes devices. But for values, when I do ask my executive students to list their values, most of them will list integrity now, because it's a value that is very highly rated in our culture. That if anyone says that our character lacks integrity, it's a huge insult.
42:20 Speaker 00 Nobody wants to be known for lacking integrity. So I actually asked my students to conduct this exercise. So when they're in the room, I ask them to rate their honesty in comparison with other people in the room on a scale of zero to a hundred, where zero is you think you're the least honest in the room, a hundred, you think you're the most honest in the room, and fifty, you're about average. I asked them to write their number down, so they can't change it. Can you imagine what they say?
42:49 Jonathan Fields? I would guess most people think that they're more honest than the typical person, which also has like an embedded assumption, which means like they're also assuming that most other people are sort of like a little bit bizarre.
43:00 Speaker 00 I mean, actually, the results year after year are pretty extreme that they rate themselves, pretty much all of them rate themselves as eighty or above, which is Possible, right? Because if the average is fifty, half the class needs to be below fifty. But yet hardly anyone says fifty and pretty much no one is gonna go below. And so that, of course, is impossible. So on one hand, we're rating our values very highly and what we think, how we live up to our values. But what my research has shown again and again is what somebody believes their values to be is actually quite different from how they actually behave. And this starts at quite a young age. So I'm always astounded by the survey of over twenty thousand high school students.
43:46 Speaker 00 That's because I have a son at high school. So this survey stays in my mind or not, because in that survey, nearly two thirds reported cheating on a test. Oh, that's a lot. And nearly one third admitted to stealing something from a store in the past year. And more than eighty percent, this is heartbreaking, more than eighty percent said that they had lied to a parent about something significant. So these figures are likely to be conservative as well, because one in four of the confessed that they'd lied on at least one question in the survey. So and it's not unique to high school students, because even though they're saying those things, they're saying they're happy with their ethics and integrity. Our actions are not aligned with our behavior.
44:29 Speaker 00 So we need to become, first of all, more aware of when that happens and how we can resist unwanted influence. Because so much of our behavior is influenced by other people and what they ask of us. And learning to defy is one important way to be able to resist that. And so we can start to decrease the gap between who we think we are and what we actually do. And that becomes really important to put defiance into practice if we want to stay true to our values. I also think with the values exercise, writing your values down and explaining why they're important might, you know, it might lead us to roll our eyes because it's hard.
45:12 Speaker 00 But what the research shows is if you actually do that, first of all, your intended behaviors are more likely to follow. And if you clarify your values. You actually feel less stress going along with them in these situations. There's a lower biological stress reaction, lower cortisol levels. If you are very clear about your values and who you want to be. So coming back to your aspirational self, if we want to live our life aligned with our values, we want to be fair, we want to have integrity, we want to show benevolence. All of those things, if they're important to us, why not live a life aligned with them rather than just going along with what somebody tells us in a situation?
45:50 Jonathan Fields? I wonder also with sort of like the values, the typical values exercise, if the knowledge that at some point you might need to share what you wrote down on your piece of paper with other people in that room makes it an act of compliance. Because you're like, you know, you're going to be judged for what you write down. And you want to be seen as the, quote, the good person in the room. So you're like, what are the top five values that a person like me, who's a good person and a hard worker and wants the career path? Like, what would that person write down? Let me write these things down. And even if you think you're writing down what's true to you, there's like a subconscious script that might be running, nudging you towards writing down the values that are really like the, the subject or the, the external expected values rather than what's true to you.
46:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, that certainly could be possible. They don't share with the, the students, but they are sharing with me, right? So it could be, I wonder what my professor wants, wants, wants to hear here. But maybe I will do an exercise where they don't, they don't have to share it with anyone. They can just do it for themselves. Do you remember an exercise that I did this summer where we, we did get a little bit deeper about sort of not just values, but how they want to live their lives? And I did have a student come up and say, once you've read these, can you please delete them off of the? And I was like, that's absolutely, it's going to go no further.
47:10 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, years ago, I was working on a book on how people handle uncertainty, sort of like unquantifiable uncertainty, where you've got to make a decision or take an action. And, you know, there's no easy way to actually define the probability of things going off the rails or succeeding, and even what the stakes would be. And this is sort of like a classic variation of what often became known as the Ellsberg Paradox, where you've got two urns next to you, and one has 50 black marbles and 50 white, and the other has a blend of 50 black and white marbles, but you have no idea what the distribution is. And you have to make a gamble, saying, I'm going to wager all the money in my bank account. And then pick a marble from one, and you have to guess, like, do I want to pick from the urn that is where there's a known distribution, 50/50, or just random?
47:53 Jonathan Fields? And most people default to the known distribution, even though there's no rational basis to do that. We just, we don't want to be seen as choosing wrong. But when that experiment was repeated, and there was a variation that was really interesting, where they set it up so that the expectation of the person who had to make a choice, they were confident that that choice would never be known by anybody else, including the experimenters. The bias away from the uncertain option completely vanished. What they start to realize is there was a massive social context, you know, in that scenario. And I wonder if like a similar thing happens with values. Like, if you just said, do this exercise at home, write it down for yourself, never show another person, would somebody come up with a different answer?
48:34 Speaker 00 I wonder how we would actually investigate that.
48:37 Jonathan Fields? You'd have to find out, right?
48:39 Speaker 00 I love that aspect of, and the known versus unknown, right? It reminds me of a study that I've done with Kate and Molly at Cornell, where we look into if somebody tells you to do, to make a decision, that goes against your better judgment. We predict that if somebody tells us to do that, where if something goes wrong, we're going to feel less blame, less responsible. But what I find when it actually happens, they're more likely to blame themselves, and feel more responsible, and feel more regret than if they'd made their decision on their own. And that's because they went against their better judgment, and did something just because somebody else was telling them to, when they kind of knew better. And then if something goes wrong, they actually blame
49:22 Speaker 00 themselves. It is really fascinating when you look into these things. And the social desirability of what you're saying, with the high school students, I'm surprised we got so many admitting those things, and then saying, well, actually, you know, I also lied, didn't want to admit some things.
49:38 Jonathan Fields? Right, it's amazing. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall, that cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scars. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2% daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases.
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51:40 Jonathan Fields? Girl, Life Project is sponsored by Vinted. So here's a question that I have been sitting with. How many things in your closet were bought for, let's say, a version of you who never quite showed up? Maybe it's the tailored jacket for the dinners you were gonna go to, or someday pieces with the tag still on them. They're lovely clothes. They're just not yours anymore. That's where Vinted comes in. So Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where everyday people sell the clothes that they're not wearing to people who actually will. Listening on Vinted is quick and simple. You take a few photos, write a short description, and you're done. Once something sells, Vinted creates the prepaid shipping label for you. There are also no seller fees on Vinted. So whatever your piece sells for, you keep.
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52:49 Speaker 00 So false defiance can often look like true defiance in that it could often be even loud or rebellious. And it could be like just going along with perhaps a political crowd because everybody else in your community is doing so. It could look like reacting to something on social media again because you want to be seen as right. Or you want... I think about false defiance a lot with my teenage son. When I ask him to do his homework and he's playing video games, and he'll say, "Oh, I was about to do my homework, but now that you've told me to, I'm not."
53:30 Speaker 00 And he thinks he's being defiant if he doesn't do exactly what I say, or he does the exact opposite. But that just shows if you're doing the exact opposite of what I'm asking you, you're actually listening entirely to me, right? You're totally dependent on what I want. You're not doing what you want to do, and you should. So I call that false defiance because it doesn't... It's not a thoroughly considered decision that is going along with your values. It's reacting to something else externally. So we want to be careful that we don't fall into that false defiance trap.
54:07 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, it's really, it's like it's performative defiance.
54:09 Speaker 00 Exactly.
54:10 Jonathan Fields? Doing it, in fact, because you want to comply with whatever is really the, the culture is around you that you want to see as be seen as fitting into.
54:17 Speaker 00 Yeah.
54:17 Jonathan Fields? Which also brings up another phenomenon that I was really, which is this notion of, of what you define as quiet defiance. I, I thought it was really interesting, especially in the context of over the last years, we've heard this term in the business world, like as we were sort of emerging from the pandemic, quiet quitting.
54:31 Speaker 00 Yes.
54:31 Jonathan Fields? And I was like, oh, that's an interesting potential overlay there.
54:35 Speaker 00 Yeah. So I mean, my understanding of quiet quitting, if I'm right, is that it's doing your job, but not, not going overboard with your job. So you're doing what's required of you, but you're not going out of your way. And something that came up during the pandemic, when people actually could reflect on their values and what was really important to them. It's, you want to be defiant, but you can be defiant in, in different ways. And this one is by not publicly saying no, but you are being defiant and staying true to your values. So there's many different ways that quiet defiance can come into play. And there was the story of Matthew, who's one of my students, who'd been deployed to Iraq.
55:20 Speaker 00 And he had experienced some encounters where his immediate superior, he hadn't exactly agreed with it. Whereas before, he just went along with everything. And in the military, you know, it's all yes, yes, yes, you have to, because that's what you've been trained to do. And it could be very dangerous not to follow orders. But there was one particular incident where they were in the desert and they heard some gunfire and they stopped, but they couldn't see where it was coming from. And he told me that the rules of engagement is that you need to have a clear line of sight. You can't just spray and pray. And that's exactly what they were ordered to do, was just spray and pray, because you could hurt citizens. And in that moment, he turned around and he didn't fire.
56:03 Speaker 00 And he said it was like half conscious, half unconscious, but it was due to previous sort of incidents that had happened before that he hadn't agreed with. When his superior, when things calmed down, his superior asked him what he was doing. He didn't say he was defying the order because then he would have been in serious trouble. He said that he was providing security. It was the only reason he could think of of why he didn't spray and pray. His sergeant said, well, I didn't order that, but it was actually a good idea. So he let him go. And that little bit of quiet defiance made it easier for him to actually be a little bit more defiant in the future. When they had a mission that they had to go on a night mission, which he thought was very, very dangerous, he did go to his sergeant
56:48 Speaker 00 and say, you know, I think this is going to be too dangerous. We're going to lose a lot of men. And he wasn't rewarded for that. You know, he did go, he was going up for promotion and he was denied. But they did actually have to call off that mission half an hour into it because it was so dangerous. So even though he was right, he did suffer in his career for that. But his goal in the military is to make sure that his team remained safe. That was the most important thing. And that became priority to him over his career. So he said he never got to the point where he would openly defy an order. But quiet defiance helped him at least remain true to some of his values.
57:28 Jonathan Fields? Yeah. And I mean, you know, again, that's sort of like a very big, you know, like lives on the line example, but you could imagine scenarios just in everyday life, you know, with tiny little things where you could potentially say, okay, so maybe I'm not in a place where I'm ready or even feel safe to stand up and sort of like, like stake my claim to defiance here. But like, is there a quieter, maybe safer way that I can stay true to my values and not do necessarily what is the compliant option in a way that feels like it's an easier lift for me? And maybe it feels like part of what you're doing here also is trying to figure out how to minimize the costs.
58:08 Speaker 00 Right, and I think that's true. And there is one of the versions of the Milgram experiments where the experimenter gives the orders but doesn't monitor whether the shocks are giving. So he's given the orders by telephone from another room. And the most interesting aspect about this is defiance goes up so from about a third to, can't remember entirely, but it could be as high as like eighty percent. It goes up a lot. They're so reassuring the experimenter, they're giving the shocks, but they're not actually giving the shocks. Or if they are, they're repeatedly giving the lower level shocks around fifteen volts and telling them, yes, I'm increasing it, I'm increasing it.
58:50 Speaker 00 And so that quiet defiance allowed them to not have that confrontation with the experimenter, but remain true to their values of not harming someone else.
59:00 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, I mean, which is interesting. On the one hand, you're like, wow, you're like really sticking to your morals and to your values, you know, that's, you know, they go you. And on the other hand, you know, it also raises an ethical question here.
59:11 Speaker 00 That's right.
59:12 Jonathan Fields? Because, okay, so that was an extreme thing where you're like, you're actually causing or you think you're causing harm to them. But what about when you're in that context where somebody else or the culture or the rules of the game actually are more appropriate or are safer or are better, but you have a values conflict. So you end up defying in a way which allows you to stay true to you, but may actually cause harm because the way that you saw it wasn't right.
59:36 Speaker 00 Can you describe a situation, like you're thinking about a particular situation?
59:40 Jonathan Fields? I don't have one in mind, but I'm just sort of thinking, you know, in a work situation, in a very past life, I was a lawyer and we did deals, like big deals, public offerings, blah, blah, blah. And I was very junior, I didn't know what I was doing. But I had pretty strong moral compass. And there were very likely times where I felt like I was being asked to do something that just didn't sit right with me. I complied because back then I was like, whom am I not to? And the outcome was good. And had I actually defied, it would have caused harm to me, to my career. But also, like, there's a reasonable chance that it would have had negative outcome on the deal, or On our clients as well, because I just like, I didn't know what I didn't know.
1:00:23 Speaker 00 Yes, so that that is a risk. And when I talk about what is true defiance or your true know, that having those five elements, it's very like we want for informed consent also has to be there for defiance. So do we truly, do we have the knowledge and the understanding? Because that's really critical to get to true defiance, because if we don't, then we should seek it out before, we should wait to defy.
1:00:47 Jonathan Fields? As we start to wrap up our conversation a bit, if we zoom the lens out a little bit and we start to think, okay, so like, what are some of the core meta skills of this new approach to defiance? What would you offer up? What should we be thinking about here?
1:01:02 Speaker 00 I think one of the the largest shifts that you can make is not thinking of defiance as being loud and bold and maybe angry or aggressive, and that you have to have like a strong personality or be larger than life. Right? You don't have to be so this big hero to incorporate defiance in in your life. You can, you can be defiant in your own way that's unique to you with with less axed, right? So we could all have our own unique way of being defiant. And it isn't just for the extraordinary, the brave people, the Rosa Parks. It's it's actually available and necessary for all of us. So I think that would be a key takeaway that I would love people to know.
1:01:46 Speaker 00 And then that we have to make defiance a practice, that we have to train for it and we have to practice. So we can be who we aspire to be in that situation. And so that training is really important, but at the end of the day, yes, there are costs for being defiant, but there are also costs for being compliant. And being defiant leaves you to have a more honest life in a way. It can bring joy because it can be more authentic and live a life aligned with your.
1:02:16 Jonathan Fields? That makes so much sense and it's a perfect place for us to come full circles. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
1:02:23 Speaker 00 To live a good life is to live a life in alignment with your values, a more honest and authentic life.
1:02:29 Jonathan Fields? Thank you.
1:02:31 Jonathan Fields? Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode, say that you will also love the conversation we had with Zoe Chance about influence and persuasion. You'll find a link to Zoe's episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young. Christopher Carter crafted our theme music, and special thanks to Shelley Del Bliss for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube, too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did, because you're still listening here. Do me a personal favor, a second favor, share it with just one person.
1:03:14 Jonathan Fields? And if you want to share it with more, that's awesome, too, but just one person even, then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered, to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Today's episode is sponsored by NerdWallet Wealth Partners. Are you on track for financial independence? If you're on track, the same way you're getting back to the gym, as in, maybe next year, then this one's for you. NerdWallet Wealth Partners offers free tools for high earners who'd like an actual answer instead of a vibe, like their calculator that estimates if you're on track for financial independence.
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Previous How to Make Every Moment Count (Without Changing Your Whole Life!) | New Beginnings Pt 5 Next Leading Neuroscientist: Turn Anxiety and Anger Into Peace and Power | Ethan Kross Page updated November 4, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated