THE NON-OBVIOUS SHOW · EPISODE 45
with Dr. Sunita Sah
In this episode of The Non-Obvious Show, Dr. Sunita Shah discusses the concept of defiance, challenging the negative perceptions surrounding it. She emphasizes the importance of understanding our values and how they can empower us to act defiantly in various situations. Through personal anecdotes and research, Dr. Shah illustrates how defiance can be a positive force for change, both personally and socially. The conversation explores the dynamics of compliance, the role of values, and the potential ripple effect of individual acts of defiance in professional contexts.
A conversation that reframes a word most of us treat as a character flaw. Sunita Sah, who teaches organizational psychology at Cornell and spent years as a physician before studying why people go along with things they know are wrong, opens by explaining that her own name means "good" in Sanskrit, and that she spent a childhood equating goodness with compliance. Then she found the study that broke it: 9 out of 10 healthcare workers, most of them nurses, said they did not feel comfortable speaking up when they watched a colleague make an error. Her question ever since has been whether it is sometimes bad to be good. Along the way she offers a name for the thing that keeps us quiet (insinuation anxiety, the fear of signaling that we don't quite trust someone), argues that the tension you feel in a bad moment is not weakness but your values talking, and points out that whistleblowers are rarely driven by bravery. They just know what they came for. Defiance, she insists, is a practice, not a personality, and it starts with one deceptively simple question.
Cornell professor; author of Defy
Sunita Sah is a professor in management and organizations at Cornell University's SC Johnson College of Business and author of Defy. A physician turned organizational psychologist, she researches why people comply with authority against their own judgment and how they can speak up instead.
sunitasah.com ↗
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