How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing

Why are dalmatians often associated with firefighters and fire trucks? Is it just a mascot thing or is there more to the story? Of course, there is more to the story and this episode begins with a quick explanation. https://www.livescience.com/33293-dalmatians-official-firehouse-dogs.html The world is full of optimists and pessimists. Which is better? How do we come to be one or the other – are we born that way? What does it mean to be an optimist and are there benefits to it? These things I explore with my guest Sumit Paul-Choudhury. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of New Scientist; he trained as an astrophysicist and has worked as a financial journalist. He is also author of the book The Bright Side: How Optimists Change the World, and How You Can Be One (https://amzn.to/3W3Ndzl). Have you ever NOT spoken up at a meeting because it is just easier to go along with the crowd – even when you know you were right? It seems we have been taught that compliance and being a team player is best while defying the consensus is bad. Well maybe not. There is another way to look at this, which is why Dr. Sunita Sah is here. She believes saying no and defying conventional wisdom is often the right thing to do. And you can do it in a way that doesn’t offend. Sunita is an award-winning professor at Cornell University and an expert in organizational psychology. She is author of the book Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes (https://amzn.to/49Zecln) Keeping warm in the winter cold can be tricky and expensive. Listen as I offer some easy and practical ideas that will help keep everyone in your home nice and warm without having to turn up the heat and run up the bill. https://www.thespruce.com/ways-to-keep-warm-without-turning-up-the-heat-1388206 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! SHOPIFY: "Established in 2025". Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business! HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:28Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, why are dalmatians associated with firefighting, firehouses, and firefighters? Then, some interesting things you never knew about optimism.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  People who are strongly optimistic tend to live longer, they tend to be healthier, they tend to be more successful. People who score high on pessimism, that associates quite strongly with depression. And depression is characterized, among other things, by an inability to see that there is any other way forward.

• 1:56Mike Carruthers?

  Also, the best ways to stay warm in the winter cold, and a new way to look at defiance and the power it can give you.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  The old definition "to defy" is to challenge the power of another person, to resist boldly and openly. And my definition "to defy" is to act in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise.

• 2:21Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 2:26Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:46Mike Carruthers?

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• 4:23Mike Carruthers?

  Hi, welcome. We're gonna start today by talking about Dalmatians. You know, the dogs, Dalmatians. I imagine you've probably wondered why they're so synonymous and closely associated with firefighters, fire trucks, firehouses. Well, that tradition dates back more than a century. And today, their role is much more of a mascot than anything else. But back in the day, they played a vital role. In the 1700s, Dalmatians were the preferred breed for aristocrats. They served as carriage dogs. You see, Dalmatians get along really well with horses and form strong bonds with those horses.

• 5:07Mike Carruthers?

  So they were used to keep pace, running alongside or behind the horses on long carriage rides. In the days of horse-drawn firefighting wagons, Dalmatians were really well-suited for that job because horses are afraid of fire and they were less likely to get spooked or distracted when they were escorted by one or more of their canine buddies in the midst of a chaotic fire scene. Now, if you've ever heard that Dalmatians are kept at firehouses because they're deaf or unaffected by sirens, that is an old wives' tale. There are some hearing issues associated with that breed of dog, but it is their loyalty

• 5:49Mike Carruthers?

  and gentle disposition and proud history that has earned them a spot at the fire station and on the fire truck. And that is something you should know.

• 6:03Mike Carruthers?

  What is an optimist? Is it someone who simply looks for the good in everything, who sees the bright side, who finds the silver lining? Are you born an optimist or a pessimist? Or do you become one or the other as a result of your life experience? Are other animals optimistic? Or is this a human characteristic? Is it worth trying to be more optimistic? Well, here to discuss the science of optimism is Sumit Paul Choudhury. He is a former editor in chief of New Scientist. He trained as an astrophysicist and he is author of a book called The Bright Side: How Optimists Changed the World. Hi, Sumit.

• 6:48Mike Carruthers?

  Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me.

• 6:51Mike Carruthers?

  So what exactly is optimism? I mean, it's not an emotion. It's a... What is it?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Well, one of the reasons I kind of started looking into this subject is because actually I think we all kind of think we know what optimism is. We kind of think it's this sort of general attitude that life will go all right and things will work themselves out. But when you start digging into it, you find there are actually kind of several distinct flavors of optimism. There's a psychological version of optimism. There's a philosophical version of optimism. And then there's kind of a practical version of optimism. And they kind of flow on from each other. The psychological definition of it is essentially having expectations about the future that are not supportable by the available evidence. So you kind of have, you think things are going to go well, even when you don't have evidence that, you know, testifies to that or makes, or demonstrates that's going to be true.

• 7:41Mike Carruthers?

  What about that idea, that attitude towards life that is often associated with optimism? That things have a tendency to turn out okay? Because as I look back at my life and the lives of people I know, that often seems to be the case. Not that things don't go horribly wrong sometimes, or that things don't work out the way you had hoped they would, but that often things have a way of turning out okay. And is that a good way to approach life? Is that a safe assumption?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  It's one of those things. It's a safe assumption, except when it isn't. So the, one of the kind of things I dug into was the evolutionary origins of optimism and where optimism, you know, why it seems to be that we have this innate, very widespread tendency to look on the bright side and why that seems to be part of the human condition. And actually goes beyond the human condition because actually you also find that animals are optimistic, or they express kind of biases in the way they look at the world that reflects what we would think of as optimism. So you can, for example, you can do an experiment with chickens, in which you train basically chicks to associate, say, a black card with food and a white card with no food.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  So you know, if they move a black card, there'll be food behind it. If they move the white card, there won't be. And once they're trained to do this, you show them a grey card and you see what they do. And what happens is that most chickens tend to go for the grey card. And that's which basically means they think, well, it's probably gonna have food. It's more likely to have food behind it than it's not, which is essentially, you know, an animal version, a chicken version of optimism. And when you start looking around, you discover that lots of animals do this. And not, you know, all sorts of animals, kind of the clever animals you might expect, like monkeys and dolphins and dogs. But also, as I say, chickens, sheep, even animals that we think of as being really simple, like bumblebees, express this kind of bias.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  And the most compelling explanation I've found for this is that essentially you need something to motivate you to take action when you don't know what the future holds. When you're presented with an ambiguous situation. When you don't know what the answer is, when you have a grey card, or in the human case, when you have a glass half-full of water. Obviously, nobody ever does that experiment, but you understand the point. If you have the half glass of water and you have to decide if it's half-full or half-empty, there isn't actually a good answer to that. There's no meaningful answer to that. You have to make a call of some decision.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  In kind of the long run, if you don't do anything every time you're presented with that kind of situation, you're gonna go extinct, you know. You're not gonna thrive if every time you don't know what's gonna happen next, you do nothing. That isn't a recipe for success. So optimism, and you know, and most of the time in life, we're faced with situations where we don't know what's gonna come next, not in detail. We may have an idea, and humans are better than most species, obviously, at figuring out what's coming next. But most of the time, we don't have enough information to know what's coming next. So you have to have something that makes you act. And essentially, if you kind of work through the logic of this, if we make the right kind of, you know, mistake, or you make the right kind of assumption, as long as the negative effects of that are small, every now and again, the positives are large.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Um. So you can think about this in all sorts of circumstances in your life, really. I mean, if you um, if you apply for many jobs, for example, um, that you're not very likely to get. Fair enough, most of the time you won't get them, um, but you haven't expended much beyond the cost of applying for those jobs. When you get one that is transformative for your life, on the other hand, it transforms your life. And so then when you look back at this, of course, you say, well, things did mostly work out. You know, things have worked out pretty well, uh, and that's kind of optimism working on an incremental step by step basis. Um, one of the psychological ways of looking at optimism is explanatory style, which is say, do you look back at your life and think? Things worked out well, or do you look back at your life and think they didn't work out so well? Um, most people tend to go for the optimistic end of things.

• 11:48Mike Carruthers?

  Is optimism or your your level of optimism, is that? Set at birth, or is it formed and moved around? Over time, based on your experiences in life?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Um, a bit of both. Um, so like most psychological traits, um, or most traits in general, it's um, it's. You know, it's a mixture of your your inheritance, your genetic inheritance and your environment. Um, in the case of optimism, it seems to be a bit more about experience than it is about genetics. Um, your genetics sort of account for a decent chunk of your level of optimism as an adult, but not, um, but not the majority of it. Um, the what your experiences in your environment seem to play quite a significant role in in molding your optimism. Um, and the pattern tends to be that young children are very are hyper optimistic. And they're extremely optimistic, and you can kind of understand why that would be because. You think about the challenges a little kid face, I mean, a really small child faces.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  You know, they can't speak, they have no motor control, and they can't feed themselves, but they're essentially helpless. But from there, they have to get to a position where they can do all those things, where they can stand, they can walk, they can eat, they can talk, they can. Eventually write and tie their shoelaces and all those kinds of things. And if you did not expect that you were going to succeed, you know, in those, I mean, if you didn't think you could, you would succeed at managing those tasks. Even though when you start out, you have absolutely no ability to do them and no way to communicate with anyone about them. Um, you know, you would get nowhere, right? I mean, you know, as a, as an infant, you have to be a hyper optimistic because you have to kind of believe that you can achieve these things. So children are hyper optimistic, and that kind of tends to gradually wane over the course of our, as we get older.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  For various reasons, I mean, there are sort of a number of reasons why that might happen. One of them is just the accumulation of negative experience. Over time, it seems like we've become better understanding what negative experiences are telling us about the world. When we're very young, we tend to ignore them. We, we kind of pay a lot of attention to the, to the positives, but we brush off the negatives. And again, if you know any kids, you know that kids forget a bad thing pretty quickly, but they remember when they're successful, they remember how to build on that. Over time, we start to become better at absorbing negative information. Because as we become more independent, we're going to encounter more situations where we need to be good at handling them. That's one. We build better models of the world. We understand how the world works better.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  And we kind of get different feedback from the adults around us. We don't get told like, you know, you can do anything, like just put your mind to it. You start getting, you know, hopefully constructive criticism about what you're doing. So eventually, kind of, you know, those experiences gradually mount up and they essentially set your adult level of optimism. From there on, it fluctuates a bit with life experience and, you know, depending on how, how well or badly things go for you, it does go up and down a bit.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Trying to move the needle on optimism is not that easy. It's not a short term thing.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  I think that, and this is kind of moving away from the research really into what I, you know, what I concluded. I think that if you do various practices, you can probably improve your, the way that you look at the world. Particularly if you're looking, talking about more intellectual kind of problems rather than in, in emotional intuitive things. I think you can, but I think it probably takes a lot of repetition over a lot of time. And the chances are, if you haven't been doing it for a lot of your life already, you may not make that much difference.

• 15:10Mike Carruthers?

  One of the things I've always wondered about optimism is, is it in a sense, a self fulfilling prophecy? Meaning that if you have an optimistic view of the world, you're looking and noticing the good things that happen that supports your optimistic view of the world, that good things happen. And if you're a pessimist, you tend to notice the bad things that happen. And that supports your pessimistic view of the world.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  I think it's even more polarized than that, actually. I think the... So what I eventually concluded was that the essence of optimism is openness to possibility. Because essentially, I kind of said that optimism comes into its own when you don't know what the future holds. I think the critical thing that an optimist does, and there are kind of various studies that back this up in different ways, the critical thing that an optimist does, a strongly optimistic person does, is they remain open to the possibilities, to the idea that there are many possibilities that lie ahead of them. And optimists tend to think about the positive ones, but I think just the very awareness that there are lots of possibilities makes you more inclined to go out and look for them and to seek them.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  A pessimist, by contrast, I think it's not so much that you look at many things and look at them negatively, as so much as you just don't see alternatives. I think, really speaking, in a practical sense, the opposite of optimism is fatalism. It's this idea that actually there is nothing you can do, you can only carry on down the track that you've been, that you're on at the moment. And that is reflected in... So in psychology, for example, people who score highly on optimism tend to do well. It's not a correlation, it's an association rather than a causative thing. But people who are strongly optimistic tend to live longer, they tend to be healthier, they tend to be more successful.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  People are complicated, so there's no hard and fast rules here, but that tends to be the case. People who score very low on optimism, people who score high on pessimism, that associates quite strongly with mental illness, in particular with depression. And depression is characterized, among other things, by an inability to see that there is any other way forward, or to believe that you can do anything that would change your status or your situation. So I think that's the one thing, really. I think optimism is about being able to appreciate that there are more possibilities ahead of you than you may necessarily be able to see.

• 17:44Mike Carruthers?

  We're talking about optimism and looking at the bright side. My guest is Schumit Paul Chowdhury. He's author of a book called The Bright Side: How Optimism Changes the World and How You Can Be One. This episode is sponsored by Vinted. You know, I remember interviewing an organizing expert who offered this really clever trick for figuring out which clothes you should get rid of. You go to your closet and you look at the clothes hanging there. And chances are, the ones toward the middle are the clothes you wear most often. But the clothes pushed way over to the left or the right, some of those you probably haven't worn in years, and yet there they hang, taking up space.

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• 19:14Mike Carruthers?

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• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, people do say that, and I don't have a lot of time for realism. I think it's a fig leaf for ignorance a lot of the time. Not all the time, but a lot of the time, someone who says they're being a realist is simply saying, "I don't want to engage with the possibilities. I'm going to stick to what I know and assume that carries on." And what we know from history is that, you know, history doesn't really move in straight lines. If you look back at just, you know, the course of this past, you know, the century so far, there have been, you know, a number of epochal events since the year 2000. Most of them were not kind of straight-line continuations of where we were going or what we thought was going to happen. If you were being a realist under those circumstances, I think you would have missed

• 22:05Speaker 01

  most of the surprises that we've had in the past 25 years.

• 22:09Mike Carruthers?

  I've often heard the advice that people say, "If you want to be more optimistic, stop watching the news because the news by its nature tends to be bad news, you know? If it bleeds, it leads." And if you watch that, you get a very skewed vision of the world as being a bad place and horrible things happen and horrible things are likely to happen. And that if you want to be more optimistic, just don't watch the news. Do you think that's a fair statement? Can watching the news affect your level of optimism?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  I think it's more in the it seems like it might be the case. And the evidence, and this is a contentious subject, right, is the degree to which the ad media diet, if you like, is making it hard for us to see any beyond that. I think there's a, I mean, personally, I think there is a degree of truth to that. It's hard to see how being exposed to negative information, negative, bad news, terrible news a lot of the time, often about things that are happening in places and at times where we really can't, you know, at an individual level, do very much about them. It's hard to see how that doesn't take a psychological toll.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  It's, you know, it's very easy to understand how that might, very easy to think that that might have a negative effect. In terms of the causation, that is less well researched, less well attested. It's not really clear how that feeds directly into our levels of optimism or otherwise.

• 23:43Mike Carruthers?

  Isn't it true, though? I remember hearing that there are a lot of parents today, for example, who are very concerned about the safety of their children. Don't let them walk alone. Stranger danger. Always walk with a friend. And yet statistically, the world is a safer place than it's ever been. And that just random acts of kidnapping children are so amazingly rare that it really isn't something to worry about at the level that people worry about it. It's just their exposure to these anecdotal stories in the news where it occasionally happens, or it seems like it happens, that riles up people's sense of fear.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's been, I mean, there's been a lot of work done in the past kind of couple of decades by people like Steven Pinker or the Max Roser, who runs the Our World in Data website, that kind of show us that, you know, on a numbers basis, you know, it's a good time to be alive. And I think that's a good message and I, you know, and I, you know, I support it. I mean, if you look at, it is probably better to be an ordinary person today and certainly in the industrialized world than it would have been to be a monarch 200 years ago, certainly better than 1,000 years ago, you know. And we live longer, we live healthier lives, we have, you know, material standards of living that are incomparable to anybody who's come before us. And in most other respects, in things like crime as well,

• 25:10Speaker 01

  there's probably, you know, I think it's probably reasonable to say that we live in safer times. But I think that the psychological difficulty here is that those gross aggregate statistics are all very well, but they don't necessarily help me very much when it comes to what I'm going to do about my own life. I mean, you're right, there is this kind of focusing effect of, you know, a terrible story breaks in the news, and then it sticks in your head and you kind of think, I mean, even if you are, you rationally kind of think, well, the chances of that happening are very small. You still don't want to be the person who that very small probability happens to. So that's kind of one thing. Regardless, it's hard to kind of get away from, from the irrationality being, well, I mean, from

• 25:52Speaker 01

  the concern that you would feel about having been exposed to that. The other is that, of course, aggregate statistics, I mean, as I just said, that it's probably better to be an ordinary person today than it was a monarch 300 years ago. Kind of irrelevant, because I wasn't a monarch 300 years ago. I'm an ordinary person now. And whatever concerns I have about the world I live in now are the concerns I have about the world I live in now. It's not especially helpful to me, living my life, to know that if I'd been alive 250 years ago, it probably would have been worse. That doesn't really help me. You know, when I hear about an act of violence in my neighborhood, that is much more relevant to me than what the crime statistics show for the last thirty years.

• 26:31Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it is the subtitle of your book about optimists are the ones who change the world. And, you know, when you think about it, it is the optimists who, the ones who see the possibilities, who do change the world. That if you're pessimistic and you think, well, that'll never work. Well, then you're unlikely to go try and do something. But if you're an optimist, you're more likely to give something a try. So in that sense, optimists change the world.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  I don't know if I'd go so far to say it's only optimists who change the world, but certainly it's substantially optimists who change the world, I would say. Because they are the ones who find solutions, who find technologies, who find ideas that the rest of us don't necessarily, I say the rest of us, actually, I count myself as an optimist, but, you know, some people really put that into practice. I think if you look at someone like Elon Musk, I mean, set aside his, his politics, or you might think of him personally, you think about what he's achieved in terms of, you know, revolutionizing the car industry, revolutionizing the space industry, becoming the richest man in the world, and now something close to the most powerful man in the world. That's an extraordinary thing. And he is a self-described optimist.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Because he's, you know, set out to do things that most people looking at them would have said, that is, you know, out of, and out of scope. That is not something that you can do from a standing start. So, you know, I think Elon Musk is a very good example of an optimist who's changed the world.

• 28:00Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  And there are other people, you know, there are many other people who fit those sorts of templates, who've gone out for something that the rest of us would say, that's really not possible. And it turns out it is.

• 28:10Mike Carruthers?

  So do you think it's possible, and is it worth it, to try to increase your level of optimism? Or does the needle not move much? I mean, you are who you are.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  I think you can change your default level of optimism when it comes to your own life. I think you can do that. And this is, you know, I think if you kind of get into the habit of challenging yourself, and there are various ways that psychologists have proposed to do that, of challenging yourself to think more optimistically, you can do that. I think the piece that we can change, though I think all of us can change, is the intellectual part of this. Because we're not just creatures of instinct. You know, we formulate views about the world, and we assess what we know critically, and what we learn critically, and we think about what we're told, we think about how to frame it. That part, I think, is amenable to, you know, an effort of will. I think if you,

• 29:04Speaker 01

  you know, try there to think about the world in a positive light, if you try to think about what's happening in more constructive ways, there, I think it is possible to be more of an optimist. And I think that's actually where the need is. We're pretty good at being optimistic about our own lives. I think what we're not so good at is being optimistic about our social lives, about our collective lives. And I think that's kind of where we could do with, you know, putting in the practice.

• 29:27Mike Carruthers?

  Well, this has been a really great conversation about optimism and the benefits and the reasons why trying to look at the world through a more optimistic lens can really pay off. I've been speaking with Sumit Paul Choudhury. He is author of a book called The Bright Side: How Optimists Change the World and How You Can Be One. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Sumit, thanks. I really enjoyed this.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  All right. Thank you very much for having me. That was great. I enjoyed that a lot. And thank you for the interesting questions. And let's keep the dialogue going.

• 30:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 30:31Mike Carruthers?

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• 33:25Mike Carruthers?

  There's a lot of value given to the idea of being agreeable. People like it when you're agreeable, compliant, you go along with the group or the consensus. But what about those times when you're not in agreement and you don't want to be compliant because you know it's wrong, but you stay quiet anyway because, well, to speak up would be considered defiant. And whereas being compliant and agreeable is usually considered a good thing, being defiant is often thought to be a bad thing. But sometimes, speaking up, being defiant, is the right thing to do. So what do you do? Well, that's what Dr. Sunita Sah is here to talk about.

• 34:08Mike Carruthers?

  She is an award-winning professor at Cornell University and an expert in organizational psychology. She's author of a book called Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes. Hi, Sunita, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  Hi, Mike. It's wonderful to be here.

• 34:26Mike Carruthers?

  So I think everybody can relate to this issue, this dilemma of not speaking up, not being defiant. Who hasn't been in a meeting and thought, oh, God, that is a really dumb idea. I really should say something. Or a similar situation where you don't speak up, even though you know you're right. What fascinates you about this topic?

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Well, I've been fascinated by what this single powerful word defy means for a very long time. As a child, I was known for being an obedient daughter and student. And I remember asking my dad, what does my name mean? And he said, in Sanskrit, sanita means good. And mostly, I lived up to that. So I did what I was told, went to school, as expected, did all my homework. And these were the types of messages I received, not just from parents, but teachers and community. They were to be good, to fit in, obey, not make a first, don't question authority. And many of us receive these messages, and we equate being

• 35:34Speaker 02

  compliant with being good and defiance with being bad. And when I delved into it in more detail, I discovered some problems with that. For example, one survey found that only one in 10 health care workers, many of them nurses, felt comfortable speaking up when they saw their colleague making an error or taking a shortcut. And findings from another survey of over 1,700 crew members on commercial airlines, found that only 50% of them felt comfortable speaking up when they noticed a mistake. So these are huge problems. And

• 36:12Speaker 02

  I started to wonder, what if it's sometimes bad to be good? What do we sacrifice by always trying to be so compliant and so polite? And that was a question that really inspired a lot of my work and research. I often felt drained and muted by looking after everybody else's feelings. And keeping silent when you know something is wrong can become soul destroying. So I spent decades studying this. And what I found that is crucial and substantially changed how I think, is that we have misunderstood what it means to defy.

• 36:52Mike Carruthers?

  Well, what you just said is so interesting to me, because You're so right. I mean, when you think about the good kids, they're the ones that do what they're told, you know, that we equate that with goodness and compliant is good and defiant is bad. And and people kind of just accept that. I mean, this isn't really a topic that people debate. This is like, one is good and one is bad. And but when you stop and think about it in the frame that you just framed, you're right. I mean, if if people aren't speaking up, what what are the consequences of that?

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Which is why I came to this revelation that we need a new definition for defiance. So the old definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is to defy is to challenge the power of another person to resist boldly and openly. And I'm not one to usually disagree with the Oxford English Dictionary. I was raised in the UK after all. But I think that definition is way too narrow. And my definition is that to defy is to act in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise. So defiance is actually reframed as a proactive, positive forces in society.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Because if you think about it, Mike, all our individual actions of consent and dissent, they create the society that we live in. So it affects our lives, our workplaces, our communities. And that's why I'm so passionate about it.

• 38:35Mike Carruthers?

  So let's talk about why people have trouble speaking up, saying no, being defiant. What's like, what is the fear of what might happen?

• 38:50Speaker 02

  What I've found is that we tend to actively resist defiance. And there's three key reasons for why this happens. So first of all, we feel enormous pressure to go along with other people for a variety of reasons, like we're conditioned to comply. And we also have some distinct psychological processes, which I can go into, that make it very difficult for us to reject another person's recommendation or suggestion. So that's the first one, this pressure to go along with other people. Second, we don't really understand what compliance and defiance actually are. So I've given you my new definition of defiance, which really helps.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  But once we totally understand what's involved in complying, consenting and defying, that helps us determine when we need to defy. And then the last one is, once we decide that we should defy in this situation, or we want to defy in this particular situation, we don't actually know how. We don't have the skill set or the ability, and we're not practiced enough, to put our values into action.

• 40:03Mike Carruthers?

  Again, I guess, like, why is that? What is it we're so afraid of by speaking up what we believe to be correct?

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Sometimes it's fear that's keeping us from speaking up. So we might fear the consequences, for example, oh, I don't want to lose a relationship. Maybe I'll lose a job or I'll be embarrassed. And we very much think about the costs of defiance. But we don't think about the costs of actually complying as much as we should, because they are costs from bowing your head to other people continuously, from disregarding your values. It can leave you drained and muted and not being able to live your own authentic, honest life. So they could be fear, it doesn't need to be fear. And in fact, what I've found in some of my interviews is sometimes

• 40:54Speaker 02

  fear allows us to defy, fear of terrible consequences of not Motivates us. So there is that aspect, the fact that we are so strongly socialized. And let me tell you about this psychological process that I've discovered in my research, which also keeps us compliant at times. So it's one that I call insinuation anxiety. And this is a very distinct type of anxiety that arises when we worry that our non-compliance with another person's wishes may be interpreted as a signal of distrust. So it insinuates that the person is not whom they appear to be or should be. And that increases the pressure for us to comply.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  So for example, if your boss tells you to do something and you don't think that's the right way to go. It's hard to insinuate that they're incompetent a lot of the time, especially if everybody else is agreeing around you. Insinuation anxiety could explain why some of the nurses didn't speak up when they saw medical errors. Because it's difficult to tell another nurse or a doctor that you're doing that wrong. It should be this way. And it's also the same with with crew members on commercial airlines, why the co-pilots don't speak up to their pilots. So it is this aversive emotional state where we become so concerned with offending the other person

• 42:20Speaker 02

  that these relationship concerns, which I found arises even in one-off situations with strangers, is so powerful, it keeps us compliant and it keeps us silent.

• 42:31Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it also seems like when I think about times where I haven't spoken up, a big part of the reason I don't speak up is self-doubt, like, well, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they really are doing it correctly and I'm incorrect.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's such a great point and. I actually define that self doubt or some kind of tension as the first stage of defiance. So when we feel uneasy in a situation, when we feel that there's some tension between what's expected of us and what we think is right, this tension can manifest in many different ways. So for example, like you're telling me that you feel tension as some kind of self doubt. Well, they could be right, you know, maybe I'm wrong. And that I've seen happen a lot of times. I often have self doubt.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  I also feel tension, maybe butter flies in the stomach, maybe a headache, something that basically signals to you that this might actually be the time you need to defy. So it's a warning signal, but most of the time we push it away. We don't acknowledge it to ourselves. We just think it's not worth our doubt. It's not worth our tension because the other person must know best, or we just wanna listen to authority. And that's a shame because we're ignoring a really powerful signal that you might want to look at this in more depth. So that is actually the first stage of defiance, that tension, that self doubt,

• 44:03Speaker 02

  that you might want to think and acknowledge to yourself, I am feeling this, something might not be quite right here. And then that's the second stage. The third stage is to articulate that to someone else and tell them, I'm not comfortable with this. Or ask some clarifying questions. And that stage is really important. I mean, you're still in a subservient position. You're not saying, you're not doing anything. You're clarifying and you're saying what your concerns are. And why that stage is so critical is that the research shows if you can get to stage three, you're more likely to go through all the stages of defiance and get to the end stage, your actual act of defiance.

• 44:45Mike Carruthers?

  There's a difference between that's not the way I would do it and you're doing it wrong. I just may have a different way, but doesn't mean you're wrong. It just means that's not the way I would do it, but you know, so maybe it's not worth speaking up because there can be two paths to the same end.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  That's certainly true, and one of the things that you need for defiance is knowledge and understanding. So the way that I look at it is that I take informed consent in medicine and I apply it to other critical decisions in our lives. And for informed consent, five elements need to be present. So first of all, capacity, that you have the mental capacity to make this decision. You have the knowledge, which is the information and the understanding. So you know the risks, the benefits and the alternatives. And the fourth element is that you are free to say no, because if you don't have a choice, you can't really consent to anything.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  So you should feel free to say no, and then you can authorize either your informed consent or your informed refusal, which is the last element. Now, if you take all these factors, not just for consent, but also for defiance, that I have the capacity, this is not a knee jerk, I'm an emotional reaction I'm having to this because I want things done my way. I have the capacity, the knowledge, the understanding, I have the freedom to actually say no in this situation then. Then if all those elements are present, I might want to say no.

• 46:21Mike Carruthers?

  When you use the word defiance, though, there's something about that word that not only implies that I don't agree with you, but it's not that it's a violent word, but it implies almost disobedience. Like it's, it's not just saying you're doing it wrong, or this isn't wrong and this is how we should do it. It's condemning and you know what I mean? There's defiance is a strong word.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  It is a strong word and I think people do often think about defiance as being loud and bold or violent and angry and aggressive. They either think about it in that way or they think about it as being heroic or superhuman and out of reach when they think about iconic figures like Rosa Parks, for example, refusing to move on the bus. But in actual fact, neither are true. You don't have to be brave, a superhero, have a strong personality or be larger than life to incorporate defiance in your life. It's not just for the extraordinary people. It's available and it's necessary for all of us.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  We all need to learn how to defy so we don't go along with unethical practices. We allow for unfairness if we hear a sexist or racist remark. We all need to learn how to defy in order to live our lives according to our values. And interestingly enough, Stanley Milgram, who conducted the famous electric shock experiments where he had participants come in and give what they thought were harmful electric shocks to another person. They weren't actually giving those shocks, but they thought they were. He actually said that people that obeyed the experimenter to give those harmful shocks,

• 48:11Speaker 02

  he described them as obedient and the ones that declined as defiant because we need that skill set to say no when things are very wrong.

• 48:21Mike Carruthers?

  What about though? I mean, I can imagine as you're talking about this, about the people speaking up every time they hear something offensive or every time that that's the person I don't want. I don't want to be the killjoy who's outraged every time anybody does anything that might possibly be offensive or incorrect or maybe different. Boy, I don't want to be near that. I don't want to be near that person, nor do I want to be that person.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  So it's not about moral outrage and it's not often about confrontation at all. It's determining how we want to live our lives and the type of society we want to create. Now, people have been under the influence of their peers because they're too polite to say no and they end up in situations that they would rather not. And given that we value certain things such as integrity very, very highly, we might want to decrease that gap between what we think our values are and how we actually behave. So let me tell you, there's a survey of over 20,000 high school students.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  And in that survey, nearly two thirds of students have said that they've cheated on a test. Nearly one third said that they have stolen something from a store in the past year. And over 80% said that they had lied to their parents about something significant. And I find that heartbreaking because I have a high school student right now. And this isn't unique to high school students. We start at an early age believing that our values are really important to us and we want to live by them.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  When I ask my executive students to explicitly write out what their values are, integrity is seen again and again as a very important value. And then I ask them, so rate yourself in your level of honesty compared to everybody else in the room. If you think you're the most honest, on a scale of zero to 100, you should put 100. If you think you're the least honest in the room, you should put yourself as zero. And if you think you're about average, it should be 50. And guess what I find, time after time? I find that most people are rating themselves eighty five or over. And of course, not everybody in the room can be eighty five or over, right?

• 51:00Speaker 02

  If the the average needs to be fifty. But we hardly get anyone saying fifty and no one going below that. So we rate integrity so highly. And yet we find that we don't act in that way when the time requires it. We fail to put our values into action. And what my studies have shown time and time again is that gap between who we think we are and what we actually do is enormous. And learning how to defy, given that a lot of our behavior is influenced by other people, is decreases that gap. It sometimes allows us to put our values into action, and I think that's really important. So rather than viewing it as sort of a knee jerk emotional reaction

• 51:45Speaker 02

  or reacting with moral outrage to someone and telling them that they're wrong. That's not how I view defiance. I view defiance as living your life according to your values.

• 51:55Mike Carruthers?

  Which according to you, not many of us seem to do.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  Not just according to me, according to the research, we often.

• 52:01Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that's what I mean, yeah.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely.

• 52:04Mike Carruthers?

  There's some clear evidence.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  There's a large gap. There's a large gap between who we think we are and what we actually do.

• 52:11Mike Carruthers?

  Well, why is that? I why? I guess, you know, in order to get up in the morning, you have to think good of yourself. You can't think you're not, or you wouldn't get up. I mean, you so you I imagine we're all deluding ourselves a bit, some more than others.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that that we do have what is called positive illusions that helps us live in the world at times. But also, we have what is called an empathy gap. So if we see someone behaving badly, we think, oh, I would never do that in that particular circumstance. Oh, I would be able to have said no. I wouldn't have listened to my boss asking me to do something unethical. I would have said no. And it's easy for us when we're not in the situation to say how we would react. But we actually don't know. Sometimes we enter that situation and we end up freezing or we're confused and we're unprepared.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Because we don't have an action plan of defiance. We don't know how to defy. Because we've spent our whole lives complying and we don't have any training in defiance at all. So we need an action plan long before the moment of crisis. So when we really need to, we can defy.

• 53:27Mike Carruthers?

  And so how do we do that? I mean, if you're someone whose tendency is to be compliant and go along and have a really hard time speaking up and saying, hey, wait a minute, well, how do you get good at that?

• 53:40Speaker 02

  One of the things is that we can start anticipating because there's numerous times where we've complied. And we wish we defied and we know those times are going to happen again. So all we have to do is anticipate it. Some of these things are really predictable because we know what factors enable our defiance and what factors disable it. And we can get explicit about them, write them down. So we can anticipate what's difficult for us. Then we visualize it, we picture it and we practice by scripting and role playing and repeating it. And the reason we have to do those things is because we have been so trained for compliance that those neural pathways are really strong. We need to now start practicing for defiance

• 54:26Speaker 02

  and building those neural pathways. And there's a wonderful quote that's often attributed to Bruce Lee, but it comes from a Greek poet that says, "Under duress, we don't rise to the level of our expectations, but we fall to the level of our training." And that is why it's so important to practice and train for defiance. Because once we're in the situation, we can't just wish ourselves to speak up. We might predict that we would do that in advance, but we know there are times when we often comply and we need to practice for defiance.

• 55:02Mike Carruthers?

  I think there is this image, though, that you can't be defiant and polite at the same time. That defiance is not the opposite of polite, but they're not compatible. But it seems like that's not necessarily true.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Right. So I always say when we get to stage three of defiance, which is basically saying you're not comfortable or you're clarifying. And that doesn't, as you said, you definitely don't need to be a jerk. You can approach with curiosity rather than confrontation. Like, what do you mean by that? Help me understand. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that. Oh, I have some concerns. There's just short little things that you can say to put your concern on the table. And it's not even leaving that subservient position at that point. All you're doing is clarifying before you move to stage four and say, I'm not sure I can do that.

• 55:57Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I really like this idea of taking defiance out of the closet and really reframing it, not as a bad thing, but as something really quite necessary in so many situations. And it doesn't mean you have to be a jerk about it. It's just a matter of speaking up and doing what's right. I've been speaking with Sunita Sah. She's an award winning professor at Cornell University, and she's author of a book called Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Sunita, thank you. Thanks for coming on today.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. It was wonderful to speak with you.

• 56:40Mike Carruthers?

  In the cold of winter, it can be difficult and expensive to try to keep warm. So here are some suggestions. Use a humidifier in your home because humid air feels warmer. Make sure all the heat vents are clear of obstructions like furniture and rugs. Otherwise, the heat doesn't get into your room even though you paid for it. Run ceiling fans in reverse. That pushes the warm air back down from the ceiling. Use rugs on bare floors and always wear something on your feet like socks or slippers because if your feet are warm, you feel warm all over. Go upstairs if you have an upstairs because heat rises, so it's usually warmer up there.

• 57:25Mike Carruthers?

  And if you're cooking, leave the oven door open after you're done to let the heat into the house and help heat things up. And that is something you should know. And while you're staying nice and warm inside your home this winter, maybe you could take a few moments and share this podcast with someone you know, a couple of people you know, tell them about it so they too will listen and become regular listeners, hopefully just like you. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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