Why We Go Along With Things We Don't Like (Sunita Sah, M.D., PhD)

Listen now (58 mins) | "Often we don't think about the consequences of being compliant as well because there is a cost to always disregarding your values and bowing your head..."

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Sunita Sah is a trained physician and a tenured professor and organizational psychologist at Cornell University. She has done some of the most fascinating research on defiance, advice, and influence. And she’s distilled much of it into her new book, Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes. Not surprisingly, I find her work extremely compelling.

Today, we talk about how many of us have been conditioned to be good and quiet, and what the cost of being so compliant is. Sunita explains why she no longer sees compliance and defiance as binary. And why defiance is not a character trait, but a skill that any one of us can learn and choose to use or not. Compliance might be our default, Sunita says, but it’s not necessarily our destiny.

We also talk about why we sometimes go along with things that don’t sit well with us. And how we can use signals like nervous laughter or a crocodile smile to pause and change course. Sunita explains the phenomenon of insinuation anxiety, and false defiance. And shares a few very powerful stories of when people have used defiance in big and small ways, which can serve as a model for us all.

MORE FROM SUNITA SAH:

Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

So Sunita, this idea of defiance, defy, which is the title of your book, why that concept and why did you feel like you needed to actually expand or reimagine the definition of that word?

SUNITA:

So I've been fascinated by what that single powerful word define means for a really long time. And when I was quite young I asked my dad, what does my name mean? And he said, Sunita in Sanskrit means good. And for most of my childhood, that's what I lived up to. I did what I was told, went to school when I was told even had my hair cut the way my parents wanted me to have it cut. And these were the messages that I feel a lot of children receive, perhaps more so girls. And it's to be good, to be polite, to obey, and we end up equating compliance with being good and defiance with being bad. And I wanted to study that in more detail because I was just fascinated by people who were able to defy. And I kept thinking about all the moments, and maybe you've had them too, that you wanted to object with something or you disagreed or you just didn't want to do something, but you end up not saying anything.

You end up remaining silent and swallowing your words and going along with it. And when I looked at this in more depth, I found that there's some serious problems with being so compliant though. One is the Milgram studies with authority to obedience where many of the participants ended up obeying the experimenter and giving what they thought were harmful shocks, electric shocks to another participant just because somebody told them to. And in more recent times, a survey found that nine out of 10 healthcare workers, most of them nurses did not feel comfortable speaking up when they saw their colleagues making an error. And it's also similar for crew members. So a survey of 1700 crew members found on commercial airlines, about half of them didn't want to speak up when they saw their superiors making a mistake. So I started to wonder, is it sometimes bad to be so good and be quiet and not make a scene?

And what do we sacrifice by being so compliant? I wanted this feeling, this tension that I had between doing what was expected of me and being good, really inspired a lot of my work and research. And I came to this revelation that we need a new definition for defiance because we've misunderstood what it means to defy. So the old definition is to that, to defy. It's to challenge the power of someone else boldly and openly. Whereas my definition is that to defy is to act in accordance with your true values when there's pressure to do otherwise. So defiance is not this negative connotation that many of us think it is. It doesn't even have to be loud or bold or violent. It's actually a proactive positive force in society. And this is really important because our individual acts of consent and dissent build the society we live in. And that's why I'm so passionate about it because it affects our daily lives, our workplaces and our community.

ELISE:

And you write about this throughout the book, but there's a certain death to self when we override our values and who we know ourselves to be in order to comply or go along or not make a fuss. And you explore in detail also the factors of psychological safety and the reasons weighing the risk benefit analysis as you're assessing these situations. Is it worth it? Can I make a fundamental change? How do I do this with some grace or some opportunity for a really good outcome here? We'll get into all of that, but I think at the outset, this idea, obviously it dovetails deeply with the things that I'm interested in, this internalized pressure to be good to conform and the way that we are overriding our own deeper self or wisdom to do that. You write about your childhood, I think about my mom a lot too, and I know your mom is formative to the way that you see the world. My mom is relatively unfiltered. And so I think my ability now to hold space and say the thing and maybe be unpopular for it for a time I learned from my mom and watching her operate in the world and modeling myself after her. She wrote a lot of letters to the editor and I did too as a kid. But talk to us about your mom and the way that she informed how you see the world.

SUNITA:

I think it's fascinating to think about our relationship with defiance in relation to how we were socialized and our parents or our caretakers really have a great influence in that. And many people I've spoken to have stories about their parents either defying or being extremely compliant and how that's really affected their relationship with defiance. Well, I originally thought about compliance and defiance was that it was binary and I realized that it isn't. But at the time, I had completely slotted my mom in the compliant box because she was the homemaker. She did all the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry for all of the four children. And my dad and I saw her as completely compliant, subservient, serving everybody else's needs above her own and really not a defiant person at all. But there is one incident that really stayed with me for many years when I was walking home from the grocery store with her as a child, I think it was about six or seven.

And we were walking home and we had this rickety shopping cart that she was dragging that's a cart with two wheels. It looks a bit like wheeled luggage that we have in the airport today. And it was a long walk back home and we decided to go through what we call a Snicket. We call a Snicket in West Yorkshire, which is really just a really narrow alleyway. It's very small and pedestrian and a little bit dark. And we were going through that to take a shortcut. And in that Snicket, there was about six or seven teenage boys that blocked our path and they started shouting out some things to us, some racist remarks and go back home. And my reaction to that was instant. So I quickly grabbed my mom's arm and I averted my gaze. I looked down and I just wanted to maneuver as fast as possible through the boys.

And yet my mom and she was there, she's petite, she's five foot 10 at the most, and she had on a blue, sorry, and her hair back in a single plat or braid. And she did something that day that surprised me. So when the boys blocked our path and started calling out these comments, she just asked them, what do you mean? And I instantly felt fear at that point and I grabbed her arm even tighter and I whispered to her, come on ma. And she struck me off. She was like, no. And then she put the shopping cart up vertical and she put one hand on her hip and she looked back and she looked directly at the boys in the eyes and she said, what do you mean they didn't answer? They didn't say anything. And then she started saying, oh, you think you're so big strong boys, right?

Tough boys. And none of them were saying a word. And then they started looking at each other and one of them just said, let's go. And they dispersed. And my mom grabbed the shopping cart and she started walking through the Snicket really fast and left me there just looking at her frozen, wondering what just happened. And then I ran to catch up with her. And that incident stayed with me for many years because it was just so different to what I expected from my mom. I never thought that she would be able to do anything like that. And in fact, if anything, the roles had reversed. I wanted her to be quiet the way that I had been socialized to be, and she broke the mold and showed me that she was defiant. And what this really demonstrates is that anyone can be defiant. It's not a character trait, but it's a skill that we can choose to use or not. So compliance might be our default, but it's not our destiny

ELISE:

And we'll come back to these interventions. But even just that, what do you mean? Just putting it back on the boys and forcing them to reassert is sometimes enough to break a spell or an unconscious mob activity or everyone going along with what's happening. I want to go back to the Milgram experiment and people have probably heard of the Stanley Milgram experiment where people, as you said, were electrocuting what were actors, but in another room and it's a chilling study because I think is it 65% pulled the lever all the way to the deadly 450 volts following these orders. But as you looked at this study and read it more deeply, you saw something really interesting and what was actually reported, which is that yes, these people were in some ways bullied into compliance. Some were automatons mask like following orders as dictated doing their jobs. But what you noted was that there was a certain amount of tension that started to rub nervous laughter questions just a level of, you call it tension. So can you explain what that is and what that means?

SUNITA:

Yes, absolutely. And Milgram actually noticed it in his participants that so many of them didn't just automatically comply. They didn't fall into what he called the agen state, which was abdicating all responsibility to someone else. And just following the orders, which was the main reason he wanted to do the experiments in the first place was so he could really look into whether this claim of we're just following orders in World War II by the Nazis actually lived up, was it a psychological reality or not? And he found that for many people it was, they did. 65% of people did go up to the most severe dangerous shock level of 450 volts, which could cause serious harm or even depth. Now, they weren't actually given the electric shocks as he said they were actors, but he also noticed that many of the participants had this nervous laughter.

They were questioning, they were groaning, they were swearing sometimes and asking them, is this really okay? Because they had this tension between what they thought they were doing, which was harming someone else, and then also not wanting to disobey somebody telling them to do something. So that tension, I call our resistance to resistance, which comes up when we feel two different forces. One is what we is the right thing to do, which is not to harm someone else and feeling pressure and expectations from someone else to do the opposite to what you want to do. And that tension can be a powerful signal. It can be a warning. It's a warning sign to us that maybe now we need to think about defying because we're not comfortable with this. And it comes out in different ways. It manifests in different ways. So it could be nervous, laughter. I certainly have that. I have a smile I call a crocodile smile, which is instinctive when somebody asks me to do something that makes me uncomfortable and it's really to appease someone else or to get rid of some of the discomfort that we have when we're doing something that we don't really want to do.

ELISE:

This skillset is so important, as you mentioned, to build to even note what's happening in your body and then recognize you can respond differently because as the Milgram Experiments show or our long history is that we are very quick to assert our values and state the type of people who we are and who we would have been. I would never have been an enslave Sunita. I would've been an abolitionist. I would never have crucified Jesus. I would never have murdered the prophets. Our whole human history is full of a read of litigation of the past and an assertion that our level of consciousness would have dictated different behavior, and yet we're shown again and again that we are participating in things that we do not necessarily choose. Interrupting this cycle is so incredibly important and a skill I think that we all need to build the study that you write about too, where you could say, right in these millgram experiments that you could abdicate responsibility or say, they made me do it. It wasn't my fault. I was just following orders. But you and is it Caitlin Woolley? You did a study where it's actually the opposite. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SUNITA:

Sure, absolutely. In that study, we were looking at first of all, what do people predict? If somebody tells us to do something that goes against our better judgment, you should take this option rather than that option. And you're thinking, well, actually, I think the other option is better. You predict in advance, if I just asked you, we predict in advance that if somebody tells us and advises us to do this, we're going to blame them. If something goes wrong, we're going to feel less responsible because somebody else is telling us to do something. So if our boss tells us to do something, even if we think it's not the right way to go, it's like, well, that's up to them. But when something goes wrong, we actually find that people blame themselves. So they're not blaming any advisor. If you know better and you do something and a bad outcome occurs, what we find is that there's more self blame.

There's actually more regret and you feel more responsible when you go along with what somebody else told you to do than if you had made that decision without anyone telling you to do it. So we can't just push our responsibility onto other people because we actually do feel worse when these things happen. And it's going back to what you were saying of I would never have done, we rewrite the past in our armchair, we can sit there and why did that person do that? I wouldn't act in that way. And again, my other research has shown me that again and again, someone believes their values to be is quite different from how they actually behave because we're very good at predicting our consent to something but not our actual compliance. And I distinguish between the two because we end up just going along with things that somebody else tells us to do, but we might not be consenting to it in that we truly understand it. We have the capacity and the knowledge, the freedom to say no, we're not authorizing it. And that pressure is so great. We end up going along with things in the situation even though we predict that we won't.

ELISE:

Yeah, I loved you write about essentially reconstructing an experiment with your class, for example,

Where you structure something that's equivalent. They don't realize that they're deciding to launch Challenger, the space shuttle that exploded. But you construct a parallel situation in which you write that all of your students voted to race. So all of your students would have sent Challenger, which was obviously a tragedy and complete disaster. Just as another example of let's pause before we judge our predecessors and give ourselves too much credit. So I love that example, and I love the story of the people who also were trying to defy, like Alan McDonald. There were scientists and engineers who were waving their hands and saying, absolutely not. You cannot launch or more or less something's wrong.

SUNITA:

This is one of my favorite exercises and cases that I do in my class because that's also something that is a transformative moment for the students. When I reveal actually the case about challenger, because originally they read a case about a car race and it has similar data in there to the challenger data. And I asked them, first of all, to make an individual decision about whether they want to race or not race, which is actually equivalent to the decision of should we launch or not launch. And then I put them into groups. So it becomes group decision making. And what I said, there's going to be just one spokesman when you come back in the room and that person is going to tell me whether you decided to race or not race. That's all I want to know, which is replicating the situation a little bit from Morton Thal, which was then the contractors, the engineers that were hired by NASA to really build their rocket boosters.

And the engineers were the one that noticed the problems with the O-rings and the rubber seals. And what happens in this case is even if there's initial dissenters, so even if some students are not sure about racing and they want to say no, they're either outvoted because it goes like this is a vote. So they're either outvoted or they're pressured into going along with it. So pretty much here up to year, what I see is have the number of groups should we race or not? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But what's going on behind the scenes is really fascinating and it's hard for those people to actually speak up about it even though they feel strongly that something's wrong and we shouldn't be racing. And yeah, the engineers in that situation think there was about five of them that adamantly said that we shouldn't be launching.

There's something really terribly wrong about this, but even the NASA scientists, even the engineers in this case, they didn't look at the data in the best possible way at that time. There was a time pressure that the launch was the next day. It was basically a lot of pressure. There was visibility, the launch was going to be televised. The first teacher in space, there was a lot of goodwill around launching, which made it very difficult to call it off. It's a really interesting one where we think about, oh, this is what we would've done in the situation, and yet when it actually happens, we go along with it and the students often end up quite sad that they made that decision, but it's a big learning point.

ELISE:

Yeah, I would imagine. So in those moments when you feel this tension, this resistance to resistance, when you feel this isn't right, you recommend and I try and do this too, before I say yes to anything, I pause,

SUNITA:

Yes,

ELISE:

Pause, take some psychological or physical distance. Can you talk a little bit about how that brief break can give you a little bit more perspective or strength?

SUNITA:

A lot of the pressure comes from that interpersonal interaction. And so I talk about the concept of insinuation anxiety in the book where we don't want to insinuate that somebody else could be biased or corrupt or prejudiced or incompetent. And so that's one of the forces that keeps us from speaking up. And yet when we do feel pressurized, we don't want to send a signal of distrust to somebody else. It's very difficult for us to do so, but if we can just pause and disrupt that social relationship for a little bit and think about what is the right thing to do in this situation, that tension can help us figure out maybe this is telling me that I need to acknowledge what this tension is and say something about it. I feel uncomfortable because of this reason. So I call it the power of the pause because getting some physical distance makes it easier for us to not simply comply. And if we can't get physical distance, the psychological distance or research by Ethan Cross and others have shown that if you can just talk to yourself in the third person, maybe close your eyes and talk to yourself in the third person and ask what is it that you would really like to do in this situation? So that can also help.

ELISE:

Yeah, and as mentioned, just those, let me get back to you. I'm not sure if this feels like a yes, I need to think about this. And then when you're challenging to even put it back on the person, I'm not sure I heard you correct. That's one of my favorite things to do. I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I think I might've misheard. Can you say that again? Particularly if it's something before jumping down someone's throat, I just want to give them an option or an opportunity to catch themselves in a moment. They might be out of integrity or sometimes reframing something or having to rephrase it is enough for you to be like, whoa, that is actually not what I meant. Thank you for the opportunity to say that again.

SUNITA:

Those are really powerful statements. I really like that my mom used the one, what do you mean? Yeah, did you really say that? Is what you're asking, right? Did you really say that? Michelle Lamont, in her book she called How Professors Think describes a situation, which just resonates with me so much because I think a lot of people can imagine being in this situation where there was a young professor with I think four or five senior white men in the room assessing grant applications. And there was one applicant where they started discussing and it turned more into gossip rather than quality of the application. And she was saying that she really wanted to say something, but her quote was, the one thing I could not do is what I wanted to do, and that was to challenge them. But there's four people in the room and she doesn't want to question their integrity because again, that's the insinuation anxiety. You don't want to insinuate that somebody doesn't have integrity or that you don't trust them. And so it becomes really hard, but just asking, what do you mean? Are we assessing on the quality of this application or taking it down to some level of curiosity might be very helpful in those situations.

ELISE:

I think too of Loretta Ross who's been on the podcast, I don't know if you're familiar with Loretta, and she works on calling in. And what she likes to do, particularly in really heated situations, is to go to a place of connection and say, uncle Leroy, I know you're the type of person who would run into a burning building to save a cat. I know how much you love people. I'm struggling to follow this line of reasoning about fill in the blank because it doesn't seem to align with who I know you to be. So help me understand. And when you go into situations like that, wanting to believe that someone has maybe misspoken or isn't thinking about what they're saying or if they could see, I watched this culture of polarization and I feel like one of the things that's happening is that people feel attacked.

They cannot hold these feelings of badness, and so then they project them back and we have this ricochet happening, which is only escalating. But before we move on, I want to just double click on insinuation anxiety because it was so thrilling to get a name, to have you name something that I think we all feel, which is that pressure in the moment to go along with someone else's interests when it does not align with your own. And you give examples like tipping for a terrible haircut, sometimes you overcompensate. Somehow I find myself doing this all the time. I don't want the other person to feel judged by me. Or yes, you're like, I guess I'll buy this car because I know that this person, maybe they need this commission. I'll take this terrible deal.

SUNITA:

Yeah, I would love to talk more about that. But just very briefly on Loretta Ross since you mentioned, I love that aspect of calling in rather than calling out. And also what you said about identifying, oh, I don't know you to be that type of person. And what's happening there is you're getting the person to connect with the values, that identity that they aspire to be, which can be very powerful because again, nobody wants to think of themselves as not having integrity or having good characteristics. And so I think that's a very powerful way to do it. So with insinuation anxiety, there are times when I've felt this so often every day where it comes into kind of a dance of conditioned politeness where nobody is really saying what they think because you could get a bad haircut and maybe the hairdresser knows that they've messed up as well.

And yet you're going to say, okay, yes, that's fine, because you don't want to say, Hey, this is completely uneven. Some people might feel freer to do that than others, but certainly it's been a powerful force where we think about we don't want to tell the other person that they're not competent or that they're prejudiced. And it could be why the nurses don't speak up when they see someone else making a mistake, even though it's life and death. And the same with the copilot to their pilots. And it happens so often that one of my colleagues was telling me about the contractor wanted to build his kitchen in a certain way, and they didn't want it that way, and yet they found it too difficult to say no. And then they have to live with that choice. There's a number of these social pressures that we feel, and insinuation anxiety is particularly strong. So again, if we can get that distance, we can get the power of the pores that would help mitigate that to a little bit.

ELISE:

As I'm listening to you, I'm thinking too about, and I'm thinking about this in a gendered way, but how these stereotypes about women too also enforce our compliance. Obviously we know the stereotype or the trope of the angry black woman, even though studies suggests that white women are actually angrier. Now we have the Karen. And so I think for a lot of women, there is anxiety about ever complaining or appearing to be defiant in some way publicly because you will get that back potentially regardless of what might be happening. I'm sure there are other stereotypes particularly about women who are expressing their dismay with stic, that

SUNITA:

Expectation right to the women, to be nice, to smile and just to be nice, how many times be nice to people. We get that message so often that actually saying something is not right feels very uncomfortable for a

ELISE:

Lot of women.

You write insinuation anxiety encourages us to act against our values and preferences in order to protect another person's feelings. We do not want to insinuate that we think the other person may be biased, corrupt or plain incompetent. So we often comply with a suggestion, keep silent or accept a bad piece of advice just so that the very person who is hurting us, costing us or putting us at risk can save face. And in some ways, and you write about this, it's deeply human and in some ways quite loving that we would prioritize other people above ourselves. It's part of our pro-social wiring. And yet there's a line, right, with all of these things,

SUNITA:

Right? Because we have few selves, right? So Hazel, Marcus and Cher Nobu and Kitti have talked about the ideal independent self and the ideal interdependent self. So our independent self is the one that we want agency, we want to be able to do and act on our own preferences, and yet our interdependent self wants harmonious relationships. We want to get on with people and neither ideal we can attain because they're separate things, so they're always in conflict with each other. And we want these harmonious relationships, which is why insinuation anxiety occurs because we don't want to disrupt that harmony, that we want to save the face of the other person and not make out there something different from whom they should appear to be. So if your doctor is telling you something, you don't want to say anything and imply that you disagree because they're the doctor or they're giving you advice. And so those two selves are always going to be in conflict. We just need to be aware of it because sometimes we do want to just have the harmony, and if it's not a value that's that important to us, maybe we can live with a bad haircut and give them a tip and we can outgrow our hair. But in other times, it is really important to say something if we want to live up to our values and challenge people that are doing things that we think are unfair or unjust.

ELISE:

Yes, exactly. And it's interesting, even thinking about the tipping for poor service, one of my values I think, is that I really want to be, I try to be a generous person in ways. And so I could say actually to punish this person for poor service is not me. That would not be in alignment with my values. And what is it to me? Some people have bad days. I'm not going to penalize this person. So you can imagine it. You write out you have this defiance complex model, who am I? What type of situation is this and what does a person like me do in the situation such as this? And so there are ways to examine that too from, well, what a person does in a situation like this is just assume someone's it. It's not their day, but I am going to compensate them for their energy and time anyway.

SUNITA:

Right? Exactly. And where it becomes difficult is figuring out, well, who am I? The first question what our values are? People don't often think about what their values are until they're explicitly asked to. And I do ask my students to tell me their values and also write them down because that can be really clarifying. And actually the act of writing them down and knowing what they are helps guide us so much, and it actually decreases our stress level. So we get lower cortisol if we are very clear on what our values are. And then when it comes to what does a person like me do a situation like this, we need to connect with those values. So we need to take responsibility, but then we also need the ability to defy, so we need to practice it because if we don't know how to defy, you can't live up to those values. So that's a skill that we have to learn.

ELISE:

I think it's so powerful, and I think observing the culture that I exist in, particularly here in la, which is wash with progressive values, many of which are quite beautiful, this idea of the statement of values I think is really helpful, particularly when I see, and we've been witnessing, I think this for years, and I see it everywhere. I see it at my kids' school, I see it amongst friends. And one of my favorite things to do is remind people of their values. And if your values are progressive and you believe in the tenants of DEI, for example, then that requires a tolerance for diversity of thought. You don't get to morally exclude. And we see that all over our culture, and I think many of us want to pat ourselves on the back for being on the right side. And yet I watch friends trespass their own values all the time and the way that they show up in the world, which is punishing and sometimes bullying actually, and wanting to sanitize the world of anyone who doesn't have the exact same frame on life. Just to say, we all fall into this unconscious, I am enacting what I perceive to be a value set without recognizing how I've maybe gone astray of my own values. So let's talk about Clayton Ray Mullins, who was apparently known as a nice and kind man, a Christian who is now serving time in federal prison for dragging a police officer down the stairs during the capitol, the riots on January 6th. Can you tell us his story because it's such a good example, I think, of being completely swept away in your own sense of righteousness.

SUNITA:

Yeah, so Clayton Ray Mullins. Yeah, so he was 52 at the time. He is a white devout Christian, and that's how he described himself. He did vote for Trump, but he wasn't known for being particularly political, and he actually believed the election to be fair. And as you said, he was kind. His family described him as mild-mannered, peaceful nonviolent. And yet on January the sixth of 2021, he did go to the Save America march mainly he said he went because his wife and sister wanted to go, and Trump told them that the election should be overturned and people needed to show strength and fight for their country. And so he marched with everybody else to the capitol. He bypassed the security and attacked police officers and the video footage of him just have him pulling one police officer down the stairs and pushing others in a crowd.

And so he was charged, and even though he ended going along with the crowd that day, he doesn't know entirely why he did that. So even though it looked like defiance, it didn't go in alignment with his values of being a peaceful and mild mannered man that actually thought the election was fair. And now he's serving I think a 30 month sentence in federal prison. And if you look at the video footage, you might see him as an angry, aggressive, defiant person, or maybe depending on what side of the political spectrum you're on, as somebody who's saving the country and being positively defiant. But according to him, that's not what he believed as he left the capitol, he basically said, we should never have come here. I should never have come here. He doesn't know why he did what he did, and maybe it was partly peer pressure getting swept up to the crowd, obeying instructions, but whatever it was from what he's saying and what people are saying about him is that this doesn't look like true defiance.

It looks like what I call false defiance, which is acting not based on your own true values and in alignment with your true values, but the values of somebody else. And so you're taking them on board. And then so it could end up just looking like compliance or conformity to the crowd. And that's something that we do have to be aware of that we don't fall for false defiance, but we really are acting within our own values rather than else's values, and that we are not incorporating what we think is defiance for performative reasons. So on social media to get the most likes or to be seen as being right rather than actually true defiance, which is acting alongside your values.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, and I think it's an example of sort of the essential-ness of that pause and running this through your body and is this me or am I being swept up in some sort of unconscious mob action where suddenly I'm on the other side of this thing wondering what just happened and I don't recognize myself.

There are stories in the book of people we know, and then there are people who are not as well known, although I know that Angel Rose Gomez has told her story, her kids, her students at Uvalde. I think her story is powerful, obviously for many, many reasons. Her heroism, her defiance, her ability to think quickly and move quickly. And also because I think that channeling people like her or that parental, you can see how she's outsourced her power in that moment through her children or through care for other people. And that I think can be a powerful way to find courage to defy. So can you tell her story?

SUNITA:

Yeah, absolutely. This was one, I believe one of the powerful stories in the book that resonated with so many people. So she had a second and a third grader at Rob Elementary School at the end of the school year, it was May, 2022, and she had just gone there to go to their graduation ceremony and then she'd gone back to work at the farm. So she's a farm supervisor. And 10 minutes after she got back to work, she received the call, I think from her mother basically saying that there's a shooting at the school. So within seconds, she was back in her car driving as fast as she could right down to the school again with just a narrow focus of getting there as fast as she possibly could. And when she arrived, all of a sudden her car was surrounded by police officers and US marshals in full gear and telling her that she couldn't park her car there and needed to move.

And she opened the door and she could see the other parents all shouting, is anyone going in? What's happening? And the police all stood on the outside. And so she started asking them, are you going to go in? Is anyone going in there? My sons are in there. What are you doing? And because of that disruption in the minds of the police officers, she was handcuffed and told to be quiet, and she begged and pleaded with them to do something, but nothing was happening. So she took a different tact and she lowered her voice and she said very calmly that she would cooperate. So they took the handcuffs off her and within seconds she decided to sprint. I think she just had a few seconds lead on the offices that were following her, but she was nimble and she leapt over the fence that some of the other parents had been trying to also do the same and had been pepper sprayed.

She leapt over the fence and she ran to her son's classroom and she banged on the door saying that you can get out now if you want. And all the time she was listening out for gunshots, and if they were far away, she felt safe enough to do this. So the teacher opened the door and the kids came out and they ran away from the school, and then she had to go and get her other son, so she couldn't go and hug her older son. She had to go and get her other son, and she started running towards him. She knelt down on one knee at one point and did a quick prayer, and then she went and she got him and she got both of her sons out of the school as well as other school kids that were in those classrooms and thankful that they were unharmed, but many children were.

I think there was two teachers that were killed and about 11 children were killed in that shooting, which was really tragic in that situation. What was on her mind, I believe, was that her children came first. That was the most important thing. And often when we go along with what other people tell us to do, especially people in authority like the police we're saying, they're telling us to do something and we abdicate our responsibility as the participants in the Milgram experiment did. Somebody else is telling us what to do, and so we're not going to connect with our values or our responsibilities. Where Gomez was able to do that. So Angel Gomez was able to put her children first and think, this is why I want to do the most important thing is that I don't want them harmed, and I'm willing to risk my life so I can save my children.

Often we feel that if we find it difficult to defy for ourselves, it's often easier to defy for a loved one. We feel less angst. I certainly feel like I can speak up at my son's school or seek a second medical opinion far more easily than I can for myself because I feel so responsible for my son. It is just easier and more natural for me to defy in the moment than it is for ourselves. Sometimes telling into that energy is really quite powerful. If we feel responsible for a loved one, we can learn how to defy for them, and we can take that on board and learn how to defy for other people and ourselves.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, and I think in the story too, by running into the school, angel drew the police into the school as well who were pursuing her ironically, and then there were repercussions for her. Ultimately a judge, they were threatening her because of a past arrest or a probation to be quiet, and ultimately a judge limited that so that she could speak out into the press. But then she was harassed. And you tell a lot of these stories, there are costs besides social anxiety, there can be repercussions. Obviously you write about psychological safety and to say something at work could risk your job, your livelihood, your reputation, it could incur harassment. So this is brave action, but it's also, again, who are we if we're not ourselves, and how do we start building this muscle to have faith in ourselves that we will be who we need to be in these moments that are so important.

SUNITA:

Yeah, we do need to take the consequences into account. And it isn't, as you said, just insinuation anxiety or the pressure, social pressure to comply. We're often thinking, are we going to lose a job? Are we going to lose a relationship? Are we going to be ostracized for this? And these costs are very real. Rosa Parks had a lot of costs for her defiance of refusing to move on the bus. She lost her job, she was unemployed for a decade. She developed a heart condition, she got death threats. And that's not to discourage people from defying, it's just being aware of the true consequences. But often we don't think about the consequences of being compliant as well, because there is a cost to always disregarding your values and bowing your head to other people. And that cost can also be pretty intense and soul destroying when we constantly give away our values. So we need to understand those costs and know when we're ready to take them on board.

ELISE:

Beautiful. Well, thank you. Thank you for your book, and thank you for your time.

SUNITA:

Thank you so much, Elise. This was wonderful to chat.

ELISE:

We didn't get to this in today's conversation, but this is another really interesting anecdote which I've been thinking a lot about. So she talks about, and this is in the context of the Challenger case, that she explores and defy about this idea that of going with your gut or gut instinct. And as you can imagine, Alan McDonald, one of the engineers, he talked about sort of this gut feeling that he had, that things were going to go wrong. And I obviously care deeply about intuition. It's one of the primary mechanisms by which I make decisions, the balance of intuition and discernment. And she does issue a caveat, which I actually really like. She writes, as a psychologist, I've always worried about these phrases like, go with your gut. They imply an unthinking reliance on instinctive reactions, a kind of first thought, best thought approach to life doesn't leave room for more nuanced reflection.

And while the microbiome of our large intestine is indeed an important part of our physiology, we sometimes overestimate how much it should affect our decisions. An instinctive gut feeling often comes from past experiences, which are sometimes relevant to the current context and sometimes wholly irrelevant. And so in the context of Alan McDonald, she writes, “his gut feeling was most likely the product of what psychologists call expert intuition, an accelerated cognitive process, born of a high level of experience and knowledge, many thousands of repetitions and a stable environment that provides immediate feedback. McDonald and the other engineers had spent years developing and studying the physics governing their rocket if they felt something was off. That feeling was in many ways the product of earlier deep thinking, practice, and feedback.” So she qualifies that expert intuition needs at least three conditions, a predictable environment, immediate and unequivocal feedback and repeated practice.

So that's interesting. I'm not going to defy her here because I think that makes a lot of sense. And as always, I'm all about refining our intuition, but I do think it's a practice, it's a feedback mechanism, and I think the more we use it, the sharper it becomes. If you like today's episode, please, please rate and review it and share with a friend.