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Afford Anything | Make Smart Money Choices
The Hidden Psychology of Financial Pressure, with Dr. Sunita Sah
01:31:22
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- [00:00]
Paula Pant
What would you do if someone in authority told you to do something that felt wrong? Most of us like to think we'd speak up, push back, stand our ground. But research tells a very different story. In fact, when Yale researchers conducted a famous experiment in the 1960s, they found that 65% of people would administer what they believed to be deadly electric shocks to another human being just because someone in a lab coat told them to. Today's guest has spent over 15 years studying why humans comply with authority, even when every fiber of our being is screaming that we shouldn't. Because when it comes to our money, the tendency to comply with authority figures, from financial advisors to real estate agents to car salespeople to insurance salespeople, the tendency to acquiesce can cost us dearly. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything, but not everything. Every choice carries a trade off. Every time you give in to authority and say yes to something, you're accepting a trade off. And that applies to your money, to your time, to your focus, to your energy. It applies to all these things that you'll never get back. Now on this show, we cover five financial psychology, increasing your income, real estate, investing, and entrepreneurship. It's double I fire. Today's episode is about that letter F Financial Psychology. I'm your host, Paula Pant. I trained in economic reporting at Columbia, and I help you understand money so you can make smarter choices. Today's guest, Dr. Sunita Sa, began her career as a physician in the UK's National Health Service. While she was a junior doctor, she agreed to meet with a financial advisor, and that meeting sparked conversations that would shape the rest of her career because she felt pressured to trust this financial advisor even after learning that he had a conflict of interest. Why? Today she's a tenured professor at Cornell University, where she does groundbreaking research in the pursuit of answering that question. Her research on compliance, defiance, and influence has been featured in Scientific American and the New York Times. She's served on the National Commission on Forensic Science. She's advised multiple government agencies, and she helps leaders understand the psychology behind why we say yes when our gut is actually indicating no. In this conversation, Dr. Saab breaks down the science of defiance and teaches us how to get better at standing our ground when it matters most. Whether you're meeting with a financial advisor, as she did, negotiating the price of a home, or discussing rates with a contractor, understanding the psychology of compliance could save you thousands of dollars and help you make better financial decisions. Today's conversation isn't Just about financial psychology and compliance psychology. It's also about protecting your wealth by learning when and how to say no. Dr. Saul, thank you for joining us. It's wonderful to have you here.
- [03:13]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here.
- [03:15]
Paula Pant
Tell me about the first time that you met with a financial advisor.
- [03:18]
Dr. Sunita Sa
I remember that meeting really well. I was in my first job, which was a junior doctor in the UK's National Health Service. I was working really long hours, what we call a one in two. So I was working from 8:00 in the morning right through the night, the whole of that day, the night and the whole of the next day till 5pm, then going home, getting some sleep for one night and then repeating the whole thing. This is the first role after graduating from medical school. We don't get paid very much yet we're working so many hours in the day. I was absolutely exhausted, as you can imagine, and I didn't go out or do anything. And I received an email at work to meet with a financial advisor for free. And since I wasn't doing anything else other than working and sleeping, I thought, why not? I'll go along and meet this financial advisor. So I agreed to this meeting. When the meeting happened, I was sort of sent to this room that I didn't even know existed in the hospital because it was really fancy, well, as fancy as you can get in the UK's National Health Service. It actually had a sofa, it had carpet on the floor rather than the stone cold floor that we had in the wards. And it had a plush blue carpet, really comfortable. And I just sank down in the chair and I was like, this is so wonderful. And then Dan, the financial advisor, when he arrived, he was tall, handsome, big smile, looked really sharply dressed, kind of the opposite to how I was feeling. And he greeted me with this big smile and shook my hand and we sat down and he asked me many questions, mostly about my finances. And we spoke about for about an hour, which seemed like a really long time, to discuss my extremely limited disposable income at the time. And at the end of that whole hour, he'd build up this great rapport with me. And he then recommended that I invest in a couple of funds and that he would write a report for me on my finances and deliver it within a week. This all sounded amazing to me. So since I was tired, I blurted out, what's in it for you? I couldn't understand why he was doing all of this.
- [05:35]
Paula Pant
It's a very direct question.
- [05:36]
Dr. Sunita Sa
It was. It's not like me at all. And he said, well, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And I remember feeling a little bit surprised. I think my eyes widened a little bit, because as a junior doctor, we're often approached by pharmaceutical reps to buy free lunches so they can market their products to us. And I had had many of these free lunches, so. But he said, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and I will receive a commission if you invest in one of the funds that I'm recommending. He disclosed his conflict of interest to me, and that disclosure changed the dynamics of the situation. I felt less trust in his advice, which is arguably the intended purpose of disclosure. So now that I've been alerted to some uncertainty as to the quality of advice, I know he has an ulterior motive. Perhaps we want people to feel less trust in the advice. Perhaps that's the intended idea. But at the same time, I didn't want to signal that distrust to Dan, my financial advisor that had just spent an hour with me building up this really nice rapport. I didn't want him to know that I didn't trust him anymore. And so I started to feel quite uncomfortable. And I actually felt more pressure than to just sign and say, okay, yes, that's fine. I accept your advice. I will invest in these funds than I did prior to the disclosure. And I felt really uncomfortable. And that meeting and that pressure that I felt has led to some of my research and the studies I've done to really identify what was it I was feeling at that time, and what does it actually mean in terms of the decisions that we choose and the choices we make?
- [07:21]
Paula Pant
Interesting. So in that moment, when you learned about his conflict of interest internally, you knew it sent up a little bit of a red flag. Hey, there's a conflict of interest here. He was not upfront in disclosing it. He waited for an hour. In fact, he may not have even disclosed it had you not asked such a direct question.
- [07:40]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Right.
- [07:41]
Paula Pant
And that sent up a red flag. And yet you felt even more pressure to go along with buying these mutual funds.
- [07:50]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yes.
- [07:50]
Paula Pant
Why happening under the hood?
- [07:54]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yeah, well, there's a couple of psychological processes that I've identified in my research. For example, this doesn't just happen with financial advisors. It happens with a lot of the advice that we receive. Imagine you're a patient, and you're going to see your doctor, and they recommend that you enter a clinical trial, and they disclose the receipt of a referral fee if you enter the trial. Before that disclosure happened, As a patient, you might come up with a number of reasons for why you don't want to enter a clinical trial. Oh, I don't like the side effects that you're talking about, or it's just too risky. You know, I don't know which arm of the trial I'll be in, or I'd just rather stick with a standard drug that I've had in the past. But now that the disclosure has become salient, it's more likely to be interpreted that it's because of the disclosure that you are rejecting the advice and that signals distrust. It insinuates that the doctor or the financial advisor is biased or corrupt or that you have basically been influenced by their conflict of interest. They're going to be biased to recommend that particular product or the clinical trial because of this conflict of interest. And so you feel you can't reject the advice because that would tell them that you think that they are biased or corrupt. It insinuates that they're not trustworthy. And we feel this sometimes, whether disclosure is there or not, if your boss tells you to do something and you don't want to signal like you think he or she is incompetent, you feel this, what I call insinuation anxiety, the anxiety not to insinuate that the person is anything other than whom they appear to be, that they have your best interests at heart, they know what is best, they are competent, they're full of integrity. And so it becomes really difficult to turn down bad advice. So that's one of the psychological processes. Insinuation anxiety, this reluctance to signal distrust to another person, to not trust them. There's one other one as well I can tell you about.
- [09:57]
Paula Pant
Sure. What else is going on.
- [09:58]
Dr. Sunita Sa
So this effect I call the sales pitch effect, which is the pressure to not appear unhelpful. The first one is the pressure not to appear that you don't trust someone else, that the other person is untrustworthy. Here this is a pressure to appear helpful to someone else. So I experienced both insinuation anxiety and the sales pitch effect with Dan. So, first of all, I did not want to insinuate that he could have been biased by his conflict of interest. So I felt more pressure to go along just to say, okay, yeah, I trust you. But at the same time, now that he's disclosed that he's going to gain if I do x sign the funds rather than not sign the funds, by not doing it, I'm effectively depriving him of his commission and of Course, I should be thinking about my own financial interests at the time, not his. But sometimes when you're tired and you're thinking, it's like, it seems almost like you're asking me to do you a favor and I'm going to say no to that. So it adds to the pressure of going along with advice. Both of these psychological processes increase the social pressure to comply with other people.
- [11:12]
Paula Pant
Right. So with the sales pitch effect, there's almost a sense of, all right, you and I are a team working together so that you can get this commission. And so if I deviate from that, then we're no longer a team now. Now it's you versus me.
- [11:26]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Right? Exactly. And it's difficult. Right. We've all been in that situation, maybe even going to a store to buy some clothes, you know, that they might work on commission, and they're handing you the really expensive items and telling you it looks really great on you, and you don't say, is that just because you're on commission or is that because you really have my best interests at heart? Right. It becomes difficult to say no in these situations, and we need to find ways to decrease that social pressure so we can make decisions based on what's best for us in that moment or aligns with our values. That's basically what I would love, people to make, choices aligned with their values and their true. Yes, right.
- [12:10]
Paula Pant
But there is, as your research has shown, there is so much pressure to comply that we often don't necessarily even know when we are in a moment in which defiance would be desired or appropriate.
- [12:26]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yeah, often we grow up being so socialized to comply. Well, at least some of us. I always say that I grew up with a masterclass in compliance. So even my name, I asked my dad when I was young, what does my name Sunita mean? And he said, oh, in Sanskrit, sunita means good. And so mostly I lived up to that. I was known for being an obedient daughter and student. I did what I was told, did all my homework as expected. I even had my hair cut the way that my parents wanted me to. And that was the messages I received, not just from my parents, but from the community, from teachers. Everyone was to comply. So you start thinking that compliance is good and defiance is bad and don't recognize the situations where that could be flipped, where defiance could actually be good and compliance could be bad.
- [13:19]
Paula Pant
What would be some examples of situations in the everyday lives of the people who are listening in which defiance might be a good thing?
- [13:28]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Well, say, for example, your boss asks you to do something that you think is not the right way to go. So it could just be another idea that would be better, you know, better for you, better for the company, better for the boss, better for everyone involved. Or it could be something that they're asking you to take, a shortcut. This happens. Do something that's unethical. In those situations you need to think, if you only think about your morality in terms of how well I obey my boss or how well I please this other person, then we lose the bigger picture where you might get caught up in something that you rather would not have done, or that you do something that's not great for a client or someone else. And in these situations it becomes really difficult. Let me give you some other examples that people might relate to as well, especially when we talk about insinuation anxiety. So the more I looked into this and I was looking at nurses, and in one survey it found that 9 out of 10 health care workers, most of them nurses, did not feel comfortable speaking up when they see somebody making an error. And that's like really important, right? And it's not just in healthcare. Another survey of 1700 crew members found that 50% of them did not feel comfortable saying something when they saw their superiors making an error. Crew members like in commercial airlines, so co pilots speaking up to their pilots, that type of situation. So these are life and death situations. But even when they're not, if you don't say no or you don't question or speak up when it matters, you often feel self destroyed. You know, if you're continuously doing that. And I often felt drained and muted by going along with what everybody else wanted me to. And that's what led me to really do the research and study defiance and compliance for the last like 15 years.
- [15:31]
Paula Pant
In the examples that you shared, a crew member on a commercial airline noticing something wrong but not speaking up, or a nurse noticing something wrong but not speaking up. What strikes me is that those are episodic. They are isolated events that might happen at a given moment in time. But could there, or are there also bigger picture situations that are more chronic rather than episodic, such as being a nurse or a crew member in the first place when your actual dream is to be a stand up comedian.
- [16:10]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm a good person to ask for that now that I'm on my third career, because my first career in medicine was mainly due to expectations. So I was told, you have the grades, why would you want to do anything else? Medicine is the best thing you can do. I remember that statement really well, medicine is the best thing you can do. And so why would you want to do anything else? And as I said, it's you decide at a young age in the UK, so it's about 16 or 17. And I remember having these discussions because I actually wasn't that into blood and gore and cutting people open. And I remember people saying, well, you're very analytical, so you'll do the first two years pre clinical, fine, just get through the clinical years and then you can do research. So that had been the plan and I did get through medical school and I graduated, but there wasn't a lot of career advice at the time. So I ended up working as a doctor. The research aspect I came back to later on after working as a doctor, then working as a management consultant and then that led me to the path of, of now being a professor. So, yeah, all perfectly planned.
- [17:20]
Paula Pant
Paula. Well, and you and I, we were talking pre show about how both of us are South Asian children of immigrants.
- [17:29]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yes.
- [17:30]
Paula Pant
And as I told you pre show, when I was growing up, nobody asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? They said, are you going to be a doctor or an engineer?
- [17:38]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yes.
- [17:38]
Paula Pant
Right. And that was a question I heard throughout childhood.
- [17:41]
Dr. Sunita Sa
And I think that's a dynamic that's familiar to many children of first generation immigrants. You know, you sort of be hardworking, strive, get good grades. There's all these expectations of us because we often have opportunities that our parents did not have and they want us to see and fulfill those opportunities. And it's a loving burden in a way that we have the love of our parents, but also the very high expectations to do what in their eyes would be the best thing. Although when I did eventually end up doing academia, I said, oh yeah, that's the right thing. You're so analytical, that's the right thing. So it would have maybe helped to have been more defiant at the time and say, you know, actually this is a better way for me.
- [18:26]
Paula Pant
Right. And so I'm thinking about large number of people who are listening to this episode are in careers that they're not necessarily satisfied with. There we have a large segment of our audience that's interested in early retirement. They're interested financial independence. Oftentimes that interest is generated when a person isn't completely in love with their career, that they're in a career that is not necessarily their calling.
- [18:53]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Right. And being able to first of all get clarity on what you really want and what your values are and how you would like to spend your time. It just makes such a difference to your life to have a career and something that you're doing on a day to day basis that aligns with who you are. And I certainly can attest to that. And now I have a son thinking about college soon. He's basically found his own passion, which is fantastic because many of us don't really find that till later on in life. So it's great that he's found his own path. Giving some thought to that really makes a difference to your life. But I still tell him, in your first jobs and things, the best you can aim for is about a 60% match between what you like and what you don't like. And hopefully over time we can do more of the things that we like.
- [19:42]
Paula Pant
Right in the framework of certain things are bigger picture and chronic and other things are momentary and episodic. I want to take us back to that as well, because in your story about the financial advisor, even the segment of this audience who loves their current job and wants to work in their role or in their occupation forever, they'll still encounter the high pressure sales tactics from a financial advisor or from a real estate salesperson or a car salesperson, or, you know, managing your financial life means in those moments being able to not go with the flow, which is a difficult thing to do when you've been trained to go with the flow for your entire life. Let's first establish why we are so trained to go along with that. There was some research by Stanley milgram in the 1960s at Yale that really established human nature when it comes to compliance and defiance. Can you tell us about this?
- [20:44]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Stanley Milgram's experiments, now almost infamous studies, so conducted first of all in a basement in Yale, was really, he wanted to study whether the sort of statement that Nazis in World War II were using that I was just following orders, was actually a psychological reality or not. And so what he did was he advertised, first of all for participants to come in for a study on memory and learning. And he had people come in and they believed that they were taking part in this experiment on learning or memory. And they were either going to be randomized to be a learner or a teacher. In fact, everyone who came in to do the experiment became a teacher, and the learner was actually an actor. And so they were separated. The learner went into a room where the teacher saw him being strapped into what looked like an electric chair. And this was whether punishment is going to help learning or not. And the punishment was electric shocks that the teacher had to inflict if the learner got something wrong. Now, just to clarify, there was no actual electric shocks being given because it was an actor that was pretending to receive them and had like a script of what to cry out and say. But the teacher was in another room and speaking over audio to the learner and reading out these word pairs. And if the learner made a mistake, they had to start at sort of a harmless 15 volts that they could see on the equipment and then work themselves up each time a mistake was made, up to 450 volts, where it was labeled XXX Dangerous Severe Shock, which could be deadly to a human being. And in advance, they had some psychiatrists predict what would people do in this situation if they were told to take part in the experiment. And the experimenter who's in the room is telling them to continue. And they said, well, hardly anyone's going to like, maybe 1 in 1,000 will go up to like 450 volts.
- [22:57]
Paula Pant
That was their guess.
- [22:58]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yes. And what happened was pretty shocking. Yes. Milgram was actually shocked by the results because when it came to 150 volts, every single person pressed the lever for 150 volts. The experiment 300 volts, every single person pressed the lever. And after this moment, that's when nothing else would be heard from the learner. They didn't answer any further questions. They had even said before the experiment began that they had a heart condition and a whopping 65% of people went all the way to 450 volts. That was so surprising to Milgram, he wrote a letter about it to the National Science Foundation. He never expected these results, that this would actually happen, that people would be so compliant just because an experimenter was telling them to.
- [23:58]
Paula Pant
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- [27:39]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Exactly. So this is what I found the most fascinating when I pored over milgram's results is that, first of all, the experimenter had four prompts which were along the lines of statements such as, if any of the participants questioned whether they should carry on, you just said, no, you must continue, or, please continue. The experiment requires you to continue. And the last prompt was, you have no choice. You must continue. And if they objected four times, then the experiment would then stop. When you look at the actual participants, Milgram also noted this. They were showing signs of stress, so some of them were sort of just squirming in their seeds. Some of them were sweating, Some of them were swearing. There was nervous laughter in many of them, which he thought was quite odd. In fact, I have recognized when I feel tension, I sometimes have nervous laughter. So when I saw this, that they were actually protesting in a way, they just didn't know how to get to the final stage of defiance and defy. I recognized myself, these subjects are just like me. They don't want to press the lever for more and more shocks, but they just have an underdeveloped ability to defy. And if we nourish that ability, we can live more in alignment with what we would actually like to do and what we think is the right thing to do.
- [29:09]
Paula Pant
If they had objected four times, that fourth one would be the charm.
- [29:13]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yeah. In that particular experiment.
- [29:16]
Paula Pant
Wow. And what's interesting about the framing of they have an underdeveloped ability to defy is the suggestion that defiance, therefore, is a skill that can be trained and can be learned.
- [29:26]
Dr. Sunita Sa
I absolutely do believe that. I remember my editor asking me, you know, who is it in your life that you see as a role model for defiance? And I went away, and I started thinking about it, and I didn't have a single person that I could say, yes. They're always defiant. They always know the right thing to do. But I had particular moments in my life that I remember. Like, I remember really vivid episodes of Defiance from my mother, from my father, from a friend that really stayed with me, and especially with my mother. If I had, like, thought about compliance and defiance as binary, which I did at the time, I had completely put my mother in the compliant box. Like, she was the homemaker. She did all the cooking, cleaning, laundry. She was subservient to everybody's needs. But the day I saw her being defiant made me realize, wow, that's amazing. Defiance is actually a skill that we can choose to use or not. It's a practice, not a personality. And we can all gain the ability to defy.
- [30:33]
Paula Pant
We'll talk in a moment. About how to develop the skill of defiance. But first, while we're on the subject of Milgram, what else can we learn from his experiment and from subsequent experiments in this arena?
- [30:45]
Dr. Sunita Sa
With Milgram's experiments, what I find fascinating is that he conducted various variations on his original experiment. He also had an experiment on all women. Just I would like to mention that the results were the same. Right. It wasn't that women were more compliant or less compliant. In his studies, there were no gender effects. What is also fascinating in some of these variations, there are a few that really stand out for me. One is when the experimenter goes out of the room and gives the orders to the teacher, who's the participant given the shocks. When he gives the orders outside of the room by a telephone, the amount of obedience just drops quite a lot, to about 20%, if I'm remembering correctly. And what's really interesting about this version is that they sometimes reassure the experimenter. If the experimenter asks, are you given the shocks? Are you increasing? They'll say, yes, but they are actually given the lowest shock each time. So they are defying the experimenter, but they're not confronting the experimenter. And I call this quiet defiance.
- [31:56]
Paula Pant
Right.
- [31:56]
Dr. Sunita Sa
It's the ability to defy without actually saying the word no. And it can really help us in some situations where the costs of defiance might be too great if you were to confront somebody else with it.
- [32:10]
Paula Pant
So they're quietly subverting the project.
- [32:12]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Exactly. And there you can sort of question, are they really living in alignment with their values? You know, because there's some deception involved in this aspect. So if you value integrity, can we still say they're living their lives with integrity? Well, then we have a value conflict. Because if lying means not harming another person, maybe that value of not harming another person should be greater. Right. So that's a really fascinating aspect of one of the variations, which I call quiet defiance. And I've interviewed people about expressing quiet defiance in certain situations. Another one is when there is somebody else in the room, like another teacher. Say, one is reading out the word pairs and another one is actually pressing the lever for the shocks here. When there's an ally, defiance increases as well. So having someone there with you who objects can allow you to object as well. And Milgram also had a different type of setup, which I also find really fascinating, where instead of the learner being in a different room, he brought the learner into the same room as the teacher, so the teacher could look directly at the learner, see that this was Another human being that they were shocking. And in one experiment, we call that the proximity experiment. In another variation of that, we have the touch proximity, where they actually had to touch the learner's hand and put the hand on the plate for the electric shock. And again, defiance increases in those situations because when you make the other person humane, there's less of this pressure from the experimenter, but you're looking directly at the person that you're harming, so you're bringing them closer and the experimenter further away, which decreases some of that pressure.
- [34:03]
Paula Pant
So you're more confronted with the consequences of the actions.
- [34:06]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yes, absolutely right.
- [34:08]
Paula Pant
Okay, so having an ally who also stands in defiance with you helps being closer to the consequence.
- [34:15]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Exactly. Helps.
- [34:17]
Paula Pant
And being further away from the source of the pressure.
- [34:22]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yes, yes. And that last one is so important because I call this the power of the pause. Because what happened with Dan, my financial advisor, was that I was actually saved by my pager going off. So it started bleeping. Just as the silence between us was so uncomfortable and I felt the pressure to write on the form, my pages started bleeping and I was like, I'm so sorry, I have to go. And I was at the door and he was like, well, no, don't worry, I will send you all the papers and you can sign them afterwards. And I was like, yes, of course. And I disappeared down the corridor. And then when I did get the reports and the forms, I wasn't directly face to face with him anymore. And that decreased the social pressure so much that I could just say, my income is too limited at this time. I can't invest in these funds, and I'm not even sure they're the right ones for me. You know, I'd have to do some more research.
- [35:16]
Paula Pant
Right.
- [35:17]
Dr. Sunita Sa
So then I was able to just throw those away for the time being. You know, that's not something I can do right now.
- [35:23]
Paula Pant
Wow. How do you know when it's a pause versus when it's avoidance? What's the distinction?
- [35:30]
Dr. Sunita Sa
The distinction is that you still make a decision at some point when you're avoiding something. It's almost like you're distracting yourself from ever having to make that decision. A pause is that you don't answer immediately in a situation. And it's possible to do in some situations, like in many of them, that require defiance, that we can just say, we need some time to think about it. So you can say to your financial advisor, you can say to any other salesperson, give me a chance to think about this. And what I've found in the experiments I've conducted myself, where I have people giving bad advice to another person is that two things happen. One is when they can make their decision in private. Again, compliance decreases huge amount. So if the advisor goes away. Yes, less compliance. The second is they make a decision, the advisor goes away, and then they have an opportunity to change their mind. And that one was like one of the most striking results I got in one of my experiments where originally the compliance was about 90%, it was really high. It's what you call a ceiling effect. Pretty much everybody's complying with this bad advice. Is it because they really want this? When the advisor goes away, oh, you have an opportunity to change your mind. What would you like to do? It went down to about 50%. It was a dramatic drop as to what people actually chose in the absence of the physical presence of their advisor. So asking for some distance is really great. There are times when we do need to act in the moment, otherwise you lose your opportunity. And here I give guidance on how to practice beforehand because many of these situations are predictable or we can just start nourishing our ability to defy. But that action plan has to come long before the moment of crisis. We can't just wish ourselves to be a defiant person in the middle of a crisis. We have to start practicing for it in advance.
- [37:29]
Paula Pant
Tell me about some of the research that you've done yourself in this field.
- [37:33]
Dr. Sunita Sa
So I was just telling you about some of the bad advice experiments where I would give people really obviously bad advice. So one of the experiments, for example, had we basically approached passengers who were on a ferry going from Long island to Connecticut. And we had a middle aged white man, smartly dressed, maybe a bit like Dan, my financial advisor, approach these passengers on the ferry and ask them to take part in a very short survey, like less than 5 minute survey about the ferry. Like just innocuous questions. Do the ferry run on time today? Are you traveling for business or pleasure? You know, how clean is the ferry? Just really innocuous questions. They finished the survey and they were told, like, if you fill out this survey, we'll give you $5 in cash. So they finished the survey and then the supposed employee of the ferry would, would say to them, you know what, I can give you the $5 as promised, or you can enter this lottery which will pay you somewhere between zero and $10, but the expected payout is less than $5. So when it was just presented like that, with no advice whatsoever, most of the people took the $5 in cash. So I think it was over 90%. So that was the preferred option of most people. Just give me the DOL all I want. Right. But when this experimenter, the survey requester, when they said, actually I recommend that you take the lottery, then it went up to about 20% or something. But when they said, oh, you should take the lottery, and they disclosed their conflict of interest, that I will receive a commission if you take the lottery, then we saw that double.
- [39:27]
Paula Pant
It went up to 40%.
- [39:29]
Dr. Sunita Sa
It went up more than 40%. This was again really interesting for us to see that why are people complying more? And again, it wasn't that they wanted to help out the person, the survey request, it wasn't that they wanted to help this experimenter because they said that he didn't trust him, they didn't even like him, but they felt more pressure to go along with it. And here both insinuation anxiety and the sales pitch effect were enforced. So when I measured those after the survey, both were higher. What is interesting in this one, and that we didn't expect, was that we did find a gender effect. So the people that were most affected were women. And that could be because the experimenter, the guy asking, was a smartly dressed white man. There could have been a number of reasons for this. Perhaps the men on the ferry didn't feel they were showing any distrust just by saying no. Right. Perhaps they didn't expect that the advisor would have their best interests at heart. So there could be a number of reasons for that. But that was one of the studies where I noticed gender effects in many of the other ones for insinuation anxiety and the salesforce effect. I also didn't see gender effects the same as Milgram, but this one was starkly different in that effect. This pressure to comply when somebody is present is really great. In similar studies like this, as I said, if you have a cooling off period or if you can make the decision in private, that really helps. We also really delved into some of the nuances in these studies. So sometimes we gave the disclosure from a third party, which really helps because if you know about the conflict of interest, and this is one way that could be used in financial advice, is to know about it in advance is helpful, but not directly from your advisor in the moment. So from a third party decreases the pressure a lot. But what is most important is that sometimes we gave that information from a third party and we said, your advisor knows that we've given you this information and as soon as that's there that, oh, you know, that they know. Then again, the pressure is still there. Right. Because it's still a signal of distrust. If we say, your advisor does not know we've given you that information, then that signal of distrust is mitigated. There's many variations I've done in terms of looking at how to implement disclosure of conflicts of interest to sort of mitigate this social pressure. I've also looked at nurses speaking up in hospitals. So I've interviewed nurses and nurse managers. And what is fascinating is that when you ask questions to really delve into what are the reasons that prevent you from speaking up when you see an error, what the nurses will say is actually very different from the reasons that nurse managers give for why nurses don't speak up when they see an error. And I call this the voice empathy gap, which is, first of all, nurse managers. If you ask them, why are the nurses on your units not speaking up when they see an error, they will say a couple of things. They don't have the confidence to speak up. That's one thing. So they blame it on the characteristics of the nurses. So they don't have the confidence or they don't feel responsible enough. They don't think it's their responsibility. So both of those things is really focusing on the character and the personality of the nurses. To a certain extent, the nurses say something starkly different. They say it's not safe to speak up, there might be consequences of speaking up. So they're looking at either psychological safety, that they're not going to be penalized for speaking up, or there's not going to be consequences for them speaking up. Or they say, I have spoken up and nothing happens, so there's no positive impact from speaking up. So they're talking more about the environment, whereas the nurse managers are talking about the characteristics of the nurses. And that gap keeps the status quo, because if they are coming up with different reasons, they're not going to change the environment. So it does become easier and more comfortable for people to speak up.
- [43:44]
Paula Pant
Interesting. Okay, so the nurses are talking about the environmental conditions that either encourage or discourage speaking up. Their managers, however, make it a referendum on their character.
- [43:55]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Absolutely, yes.
- [43:57]
Paula Pant
Why do you refer to that as the voice empathy gap? Where did that nomenclature come from?
- [44:01]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yeah, so the empathy gap in general is that we often find it very difficult to predict what somebody else will do or feel alike or their perspective when we're in a different situation from them. So that could be interpersonal, that you cannot imagine, for example, being a junior doctor, because You've not been a junior doctor and how you would react in that situation, or I cannot imagine being a financial advisor because I've never been in that situation. That's the interpersonal empathy gap. There's also intrapersonal empathy gap that when we're in one state, we can't predict how we will behave in another state, which is, say, for example, I'm not hungry right now. I might make some healthy food choices, but if I go shopping when I'm hungry, I'm going to make some unhealthy food choices because I'm in a completely different state at that point. And that's why it's really important for consent, and what I call your true yes or informed consent, which I take from medicine and apply to our everyday decisions, is that we often predict that we will consent in a situation or that we will defy, but we actually do something very different when we're in that situation because we've not experienced it before. So we're very good at predicting consent, but not predicting compliance.
- [45:31]
Paula Pant
What is the difference exactly between consent and compliance? Because informed consent is a big part of medicine.
- [45:36]
Dr. Sunita Sa
That's right. So compliance is simply going along with something. Right. And it's often imposed externally by another person, an authority figure, situation, or an expectation. So we just go along with something, and it can be sometimes pretty passive the way that we go along with something. Consent is a thoroughly considered authorization of our deeply held values. And in medicine, informed consent consists of five elements. And it's sometimes useful to think about this when we're making decisions in other aspects of our lives. So the five elements in form Consent in medicine is first of all capacity that you have the mental capacity. You're not under the influence of any drugs, medication, illness, or anything that would really diminish your capacity to make a decision. So that's the first one. That's what doctors must assess in their patients. You know, do they have the capacity to make a. A decision? And then you need the knowledge of the situation, you need the information before you can make, before you can give any informed consent. And not only do you need the knowledge or the information, you need to understand it, which is the third element. You need to thoroughly understand the risks, the benefits, and the alternatives. And then the fourth element is that you need the freedom to say no. Because if you don't have the freedom to say no, you can't really consent to anything. You can comply with someone else, but informed consent, you need that freedom to be able to say no. And if those four Elements are all present. And yes, you have the capacity, the knowledge, the understanding, the freedom to say no, then you can have the final authorization, the fifth element, to either give your informed consent or if you don't want to go along with it, to give your informed refusal.
- [47:25]
Paula Pant
It sounds to me to that fourth element, the freedom to say no. When we talk about defiance versus compliance, we're talking about the perceived psychological barriers around that freedom, right? And I can hear there are going to be voices that say, well, but there are no logistical barriers. We're not going to throw you in jail, therefore you have the freedom. But this is really a discussion about the psychological barriers.
- [47:50]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yes, often it is, right, that we don't feel that we have the freedom to say no. In many situations there are times when you could get thrown in jail, right? So some of my executive students, my MBA students, the African American students in my class will talk about how they must comply with the police because if they don't, they might not get to go home. So there are situations where it is really not safe to defy and we have to think about those situations. And in those types of situations, maybe when the costs are too great. For example, another student of mine was telling me about that he just got his his job after graduating, he had a family to look after a newborn baby, and he discovered some corruption at work. Now what does he do? Because he can't lose his job and financial security, health insurance, everything that comes with it. But what does he do? Does he report his boss or not? And that dilemma is huge in certain situations where it's not safe. I have a tactic that I call conscious compliance. So you have all the five elements for informed consent or informed refusal. You have the capacity, the knowledge, the understanding, the freedom to say no, possibly, but you make an active decision to say yes in that situation. So it's different from sort of knee jerk compliance where you just simply go along with it, your default wiring, the way that we were socialized to do. Without thinking here, you're making an active choice to comply. For now. It's not that you will do this forever, but you will do it when the situation is safer or more effective. And so you're just deferring defiance to another day. You're not saying no forever. You're just taking a step to figure out when is the best time to do this. That makes it safer for me and more effective. And one of my students described this just perfectly when he said that he was stopped and there was traffic stop in California, what they call a Californian stop, which I hadn't heard of before, which is that you slow down, but you don't completely stop at a stop sign. And he got pulled over for that. And he was sure that he had stopped, and he was looking around to see if there was any cameras that could prove his case, and he couldn't. But he had learned from his dad, who had also had the talk with him, that if you're stopped by a police officer, just comply with them. Don't do anything that might look threatening. Keep your voice calm. Say, yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. And he did everything that he learned. He got home, and even though he was trembling and he felt he was in the right, he just complied. But then later he did go to court to try and fight this case. He said that was the time to do it in the safety of court, but not there on the roadside. So he consciously complied and deferred his defiance to another time. Right.
- [50:41]
Paula Pant
So conscious compliance is on the other side of deferred defiance.
- [50:46]
Dr. Sunita Sa
It is deferring defiance. Right. It's one aspect of that. So if we look at. Yes, it would be wonderful to defy. Every time we feel that something goes against our values, we might not get much done in life. Right. So we need to assess for safety, for impact, and decide is this the best time to defy.
- [51:08]
Paula Pant
Right. It's sort of a choose your battles type of thing.
- [51:11]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yes. But if you do it too often, right. There's costs for both compliance, conscious compliance, and defiance. And we need to be aware of both sides, the costs on both sides, because we often think about the costs for defiance. We think about that we might lose a job, we might lose a relationship. It's too scary to do it. We're thinking about the consequences.
- [51:32]
Paula Pant
Right.
- [51:32]
Dr. Sunita Sa
But we don't think about the consequences often of conscious compliance. What if we go along continuously? What if we go along with incompetent bosses all the time? Or what if we go along with something unethical that's asked of us? Or what if we let those sexist remarks in a meeting go every single time? And continuously bowing your head to other people and disregarding your own values, it takes a toll. So emotionally, spiritually, and even physically, it can take a toll. So we do need to be aware of implementing conscious compliance for a very long time, because we can do it for a little bit, but sometimes we need to break out of that cycle.
- [52:10]
Paula Pant
But the defiance itself, as you've said, can also take a toll in the consequences. You tell a story, and I'd love It. If you could repeat this story in audio format. But you told a story about a gentleman who worked for a cigarette company who had some very extreme consequences as a result of being a whistleblower for the cigarette company.
- [52:33]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yes. So that's Dr. Jeffrey Wigand. He's a scientist, and he went to work for a tobacco company, which in itself was like, took some mental gymnastics to overcome the fact that he was a scientist, really fundamentally working for Big tobacco. But he thought that he could overcome that. It was a big paycheck. It was great for him and his family. One of his daughters had spina bifida, the health insurance that came with that was amazing. And he could work in the lab and develop a safer cigarette. So that was his plan. And yet once he got there, they didn't want to make a safer cigarette, because if they did, they would have to admit that cigarettes were not safe in general, and they didn't want to do that. So he basically pivoted, and he started looking at some of the ingredients in cigarettes, and he discovered some of them had carcinogenic properties, in other words, that they caused cancer in mice. And he was concerned about many things, and he went to his boss to basically publicize these results to say, there's some harm from our cigarettes. And he wasn't rewarded, obviously, for doing so. And lots of things started happening. So the minutes from meetings kind of disappeared, and results from labs went overseas, and he grew more and more concerned about this. And ultimately, the more of a fuss that he made, he ended up getting fired from his job. And he was so concerned about this and losing the health insurance, he signed an NDA that meant that he could not talk about some of the things that he found. But it didn't sit well with him at all. And it took him a long time, but eventually he decided to tell his story on 60 Minutes and reveal everything that the tobacco company was doing. And that was like a major, major news story in that for the first time, somebody who worked inside Big Tobacco was revealing that cigarettes were harmful. And the companies could no longer deny that they were not safe, that there were real health risks that came from this and that made such a difference. Like, then there had to be warnings on cigarettes. They had to meet lots of major changes. And one of the biggest whistleblower settlements in all time that cigarette companies had to pay to many different states due to the detriment to health that they'd caused to many, many people. And so he ended up being this whistleblower. But the costs were not easy. There were many things that went on. The tobacco company went after him. They left a bullet in his mailbox. His marriage disintegrated. They revealed his problems with his anger and some of his high level of drinking. All this was on public display to try and discredit him. But 10 years. Yeah, the smear campaign. And he talks about the fact 10 years later that he's still glad that he did it, that he's at peace because he could not live with himself knowing what was happening and not being able to talk about it. Interestingly, the same thing with Rosa Parks. You know, people talk about Rosa Parks heroic moment that day that she said no to moving on the bus. But they don't see some of the costs behind it. And there were severe costs for her and her family. She suffered from an ulcer. She was unemployed for over a decade. And also there was great strain on the marriage after she made that iconic no that she gave on the bus. But she will say even though there were costs, she would do it again. So it came into her defiance calculus. She made that decision. There are costs with being defiant, but there's also so many costs that she's taking from not making a stance, not doing something about the situation that she's in right now. And maybe she can create some positive change. And she certainly did. And so they're the assessments that we have to make. Because even though I don't give like all these costs as a reason for people not to defy, I give them so they can think about the full human picture of this and make a really clear assessment as to whether or not they want to defy and when. When can they defy? When it's less costly or more effective and safe?
- [57:07]
Paula Pant
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Dr. Sunita Sa
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Paula Pant
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- [59:34]
Dr. Sunita Sa
The Laurel Road Very High Yield Savings.
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Paula Pant
Account Variable Annual percentage yield APY is.
- [59:40]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Subject to change at any time.
- [59:42]
Paula Pant
No minimum balance required. Fees may reduce earnings on the account. For full terms and conditions, see LaurelRoad.com Savings LaurelRoad is a brand of KeyBank Member FDIC I want to go back to something you said earlier when you were talking about nurses and the reasons that a nurse might not speak up when they see something wrong in the care of a patient. There were a variety of reasons that that might occur and we talked about environmental reasons as well as referendum on character. But there was one element of it that we didn't discuss that stood out to me and that is what to do when you're not sure if something that you're seeing is wrong. If you have expert intuition. But at the same time you also doubt Your intuition. So you don't want to make a fuss of it if in fact you're also second guessing yourself. And maybe it's something, but maybe it's nothing.
- [60:48]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yeah. What's interesting about defiance, and I break it down into five stages of defiance. You might not go through this in a linear order. You might go back and forth, or you might skip some stages. Was this really useful framework? Because what you're talking about there, Paula, is the first stage of defiance, which is some element of tension that when we need to defy, we often feel some tension. And that tension can manifest in different ways for different people. So for some people, it could feel like anxiety. For other people it could be doubt. Did I really see that? Was it really right? Surely they know what they're doing. It could be that type of doubt, the second guessing yourself. Or you could just feel something queasy in your stomach. That's kind of a feeling I often get. You could feel like your throat constricting or a headache or punch in the stomach. You could feel it in many different ways. And knowing what your own sign is or signal is is really important because it's your body's way of telling you that this might be the time where you need to defy. And for many of us, we ignore that first stage. We just say it's not worth our doubt. We sweep it under the rug. We think about, oh, it's going to be okay. And we don't really register it to ourselves. But if we can get to that second stage where we acknowledge that I feel tension, I feel some even resistance to resistance. You know, I don't want to resist, I don't want to defy because it's incredibly hard to do it at times, or it's difficult and I don't know how to do it. But if we can acknowledge that to ourselves, we can then go up to stage three, which is to acknowledge it to somebody else. And that stage doesn't need to be a threat. It could just be a vocalization of your discomfort, of the fact that something doesn't feel quite right here, or even your doubt, or to say, I'm not comfortable with this situation, so you don't need to challenge or threaten the other person. You could still be in a submissive position in stage three, all you're doing is vocalizing it. And what's really interesting about stage three is that the research shows that this is actually a very critical stage. Not because so much that you're saying it to someone else, but the fact that you say it out loud means that you cannot in your own mind, then go back and rationalize that it was, okay, you've said it out loud, and now you're much more likely to continue and get to that stage five of defiance.
- [63:32]
Paula Pant
So stage three is when those questions, or even if you are questioning yourself, right, because it happens so often. Surely they know what they're doing. So I kind of have this sense that maybe what's going on is wrong, but they're the expert in the room, and I'm not. And you second guess yourself, you doubt yourself. But stage three is where you at least make those doubts heard.
- [63:57]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Exactly. And what's interesting here is often the nurses are experts in certain situations, Right. So they've administered medication many, many times before. You know, they could be dealing with a junior doctor like me who's just started on the wards. Right. So sometimes that when we talk about expert intuition, we're not talking about trust your gut type of thing. We're talking about something somebody has experienced many times over in a stable, predictable environment with immediate feedback and something that they know that comes to them instantly, that you shouldn't give that large amount of dosage to someone else. It could be a mistake that the physician is making in that moment, and it just requires the nurses to sort of point that out. And so that vocalization is important for many different reasons. And even if you have the knowledge and understanding, people do find it difficult to get to that stage. And then moving up to stage four is a little bit about what we spoke about with the Milgram experiments, which is repeating it over, because I often get to stage three, and then I'm given an explanation, and then I go back to stage one, just sitting in my tension and feeling it and saying, okay, and now I recognize that I'm doing that. But if we can sort of hold on to that, say, no, I really am not comfortable. You're going to have to explain more to the point where it gets to, you know, now it could be a threat. I don't think I can go along with that. I don't think I can comply with that. Then that is, you've got to stage four, and then stage five is your active defiance.
- [65:37]
Paula Pant
Wait, you said that expert intuition comes in situations in which you've done the same thing in a controlled environment over and over and over. And so you have the expertise, you have the practice to be able to notice when something is askew, even if it's subtle.
- [65:52]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Right?
- [65:53]
Paula Pant
Right. So in the case of administering a medication, right, you Tell the story of the Challenger space shuttle. And that's. That's a case in which experts are involved, but the specific thing that they're doing, which is going to space, is not something that you do every day. Can you talk about that?
- [66:10]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yes. So there's a couple of things here. So one is, what is this expert intuition? Because people often say, trust your gut. And I often pause when I hear that because it's. What does that really mean? Like, your first thought is your best thought. That's not often right, you know, and your gut can tell you things. So certainly if you've been in a situation that made you feel uneasy, perhaps you're in another situation and it makes you feel the same way. It might remind you of something. And sometimes that same feeling could be the same tension that we get when we need to defy. But what we want to distinguish is whether it is just your gut, which could be influenced wholly by biases. Right. Your past experience, which could be right, or it could be completely inaccurate, or whether it's your expert intuition, which arises when there's three main things. One is that it's a predictable, stable environment. For example, with people who play chess, chess grandmasters, they've seen a situation over and over again. It's predictable. They know the patterns. And you get immediate feedback when you do something. So you learn from that and you've got repeated interactions of it. Many of us don't have that. But the engineers from Morton Thiokol, which was a firm that NASA had hired to make the rocket boosters on their spaceships, they had expert intuition that something was wrong with the O rings. But that's not even the tension that I'm talking about, whether it be your gut, your expert intuition. I'm talking about the tension that comes, our resistance to resistance when we want to do something that we think is right. So the engineers, maybe based on their expert intuition, knew that there was a danger in the shuttle launch of the Challenger due to their problems with the O rings. But they were feeling pressure to go along with what NASA wanted, which was to make the launch happen. And it's that tension between those two forces that creates our resistance to a resistance or the first stage of defiance that, oh, the nurses, I feel something's wrong here, but I feel like I can't speak up. And it's that tension between wanting to speak up in a situation and feeling that you can't because it's not what's expected of you. Something else is expected of you, or somebody makes a Sexist remark. And you want to say something, but you don't want to insinuate that the other person is sexist. Right? That's the tension that I'm talking about, which could stem from expert intuition, but it doesn't necessarily have to stem from expert intuition. So the engineers in the Challenger disaster, they felt that resistance to resistance, they wanted to speak up, and some of them did. They said, you cannot launch, it's too unsafe. We haven't tested the O rings at this temperature. What they didn't have, and even though they were hired by NASA, and what the NASA scientists didn't have was right then and there, evidence from the data that showed that there was a clear correlation between weather, cold weather, and corruption of the O rings. And they didn't have that at hand, although later on, when they did look at that, it was. It became pretty obvious. And so when they communicated that they were uncomfortable with this, there was a lot of pushback from NASA to say, we want to launch, right? When are we going to wait? Are we going to wait till spring? What is it that we're going to be doing? And it was very difficult for them to basically defy. There was so much pressure for a number of reasons. It was going to be the first teacher in space. There was going to be a lot of publicity about this. Obviously, people wanted the launch to go ahead and they thought it would be safe enough. And then it turned out to be a huge disaster. But those engineers, they never regretted speaking up. In fact, they wished that they could have done more to avoid that disaster from happening. Right.
- [70:17]
Paula Pant
And I think that's a perfect example to highlight the environmental challenge of speaking up, saying something, getting pushback, and then becoming quiet when you receive that pushback.
- [70:28]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Right. There's some statements that were said like, you know, take off your engineer's hat and put on your management hat. It's like, what does that mean? So when there was the big investigation into this disaster, they said it was really the decision making process that was flawed and the culture at NASA that had to change.
- [70:49]
Paula Pant
Right. About a year ago, we had a NASA astronaut named Mike Massimino as a guest on this podcast. And he talked about the day that the Challenger exploded, which he referred to as the worst day of his life. And he also talked at length about how the investigation that came afterwards and the discovery that the O rings were the problem with the O rings in cold weather, which was the reason that the Challenger blew up. And then beyond that, the culture at NASA of speaking up and making decisions, he Kind of talked about how NASA, his experience at NASA changed in the aftermath of the Challenger explosion.
- [71:26]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yeah. And it's really fascinating that workplaces can differ a lot in terms of how expressive you can be. I mean, I've certainly worked in places where it's more natural to speak up and even show some emotion. And in other places, that type of expression is not accepted. So workplaces do have these different cultures where they encourage people to speak up and make sure it is what we call psychologically safe to speak up without there being severe consequences for doing so. And other places where you just keep your head down and do what you need to do.
- [72:06]
Paula Pant
But this is a question that I've been grappling with. I have had times in managing, afford anything, right, where we'll work with an outside contractor, we'll work with a developer. And there's this one particular instance where I was speaking to a developer about a change that I wanted to make on the website. This was something that I had really thought about for weeks. Going into the meeting, I was absolutely certain I wanted to make this particular change to the website. And in that moment of the meeting, you know, I went to him and said, hey, I want to make this change. And he was like, ah, I don't think you should do that. He made a case as to why I shouldn't. And at that very moment, I just folded. And I was like, oh, okay, sorry, yeah, you're right. And I folded. And then the Zoom call ended and I went on with my day. And in the. The days and weeks that followed, I was like, man, why didn't I stick to my guns? And what that created in me was actually a little bit of resentment towards this developer. Fairly or unfairly, it wasn't really his fault. But, like, I essentially had signaled that we are the type of workplace that invites dissent and invites discussion. And then when he dissented, I folded, and then I was kind of like, mad about it afterwards. As a manager, how do you, on one hand, encourage that type of dissent and discussion, but then also stick to your guns when you're like, look, there's a time for debate and there's a time for a decision, and this is a particular issue on which we've made the decision. Let's just implement the decision and move on?
- [73:41]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yeah, so there's so many things in that. There's so many things in that example. So, I mean, one is a cultural thing. So interesting to me that you say, oh, I was mad about it afterwards, because you were not. You didn't Feel heard in terms of what you really wanted. And so even though I'm trained as a physician, there was a time when a doctor recommended that I have a CT scan that I knew was completely unnecessary to have a CT scan because what they were looking for was a pulmonary embolism, like a blood clot in the lungs. And I knew, having worked as a respiratory doctor in the uk, that causes what we call pleuritic chest pain. So it's a sharp pain that catches your breath when you breathe in and breathe out. And I knew I didn't have that. And I knew that the CT scan was completely unnecessary. And yet. So this was my sort of first experience of like the emergency room in the us having moved from the uk and the doctor was telling me that I needed just have the CT scan before we discharge you. And I went along with it and I complied, even though I had the knowledge myself. Right. And I complied with it. Why? Because she told me to. That was the only reason. And then I didn't feel good about it. And I really started thinking about that situation a lot. And there were a number of things for me. First of all, I'd come from the uk, where medicine is practiced differently, that it's not for profit driven as much as it is in the us, Right. And so they would not have sent me for a CT scan unless it was absolutely necessary. But I didn't know how to handle that situation. What I realized is that I asked some questions. So I got to stage three of defiance. I knew like CT scans are out 70 times more radiation then an X ray, which could still be a small amount, but any amount can cause cancer in the future, so why take the risk if I knew I didn't need it? I was asking these questions at stage three and I didn't continue to say I was not comfortable with it. And so I ended up going back and complying with it so I couldn't get to stage five. And what I've realized is that what I needed to do was advocate for myself a lot more. That might have worked in the uk. It's a different type of culture. If you just ask a question, maybe some people will pick up on it. But then I needed to change because I'm now in the US and become actually a lot more vocal if I did not want to have something. But I can totally imagine myself in your situation with the website developer and just sort of saying yes in that situation too. And what I've learned now that is really helpful for me is when I start to feel uncomfortable because you still might have had that queasy feeling in your stomach, even though you're saying, okay, fine, and you were folding, and you describe it as folding, as in not that you are now enthusiastically consenting. You're just like, okay, fine. Is that instead of saying, okay, fine in that situation is just to take some time out and just say, you know what, I'll think about your points. I'll consider your points. Can I get back to you on that? And then you can email them afterwards where you're much more likely. You find what's most natural for you to defy. If it's really hard for you in the moment, tell them that you'll think about it, you'll get back to them. I do that so often when I feel pressurized in a zoom meeting or on a call or something. I'll say, you know what, let me think about that and I'll get back to you. And then I do actually think about it, I do consider it and wonder, why are they recommending this and what is it that I really want and why? And why might it not be a great idea to do what I want? But if I still think, oh, yes, that's what I would have preferred, which I think is what you wanted, then you can write to them and you can say, I really appreciate what you proposed to me, but this is why I think this is the right way for my website, you know? And so taking that time to defy rather than folding in the moment is really powerful. So it goes back to that. Just give yourself an opportunity to change your mind. If you feel like you're being pushed into one particular decision or choice, know that you can go back and change it.
- [77:39]
Paula Pant
Right. But it's a delicate balance in terms of wanting to encourage an environment in which employees, contractors, do speak up and do say, hey, are we really sure we want to make these changes? Does it really make sense? You know, like, I want to encourage that environment, but sometimes. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I go along with every dissenting opinion.
- [77:59]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Right? Right. And that's true, Right. We can't go, like, everybody's going to have a different opinion and stuff. Sometimes things are subjective as well. And so how important is this decision is one thing. Right? If it's an important one, then we do some market research. And that's what I would do as a scientist. Let's do some market research and see, like, if we looking at the COVID of a book, for example, why don't we do some market research and tell it, like, have the readers tell us, because everybody has a different opinion on what would be, like, the best cover for a book, almost appealing. So let's do some market research, and maybe we'll get a very, very clear answer about what readers would prefer. And that's one way to go about it. And then once the decision is made, we've done the research, we've got to go along with what that says. Or we can say this isn't that important a decision, then we go with a majority. You know, we don't need to do market research on it. What do people think? And if it's not that important, then maybe go along with what the majority say. So I've worked in places where it is like, majority rule, and I've also worked in places where we want a unanimous decision. And there's pros and cons for both, because having the unanimous decision takes a lot longer. So it takes a lot longer. And there might be costs of that and for implementing that. So you might want to think about, are there some reasons why we really need this to be unanimous, or is this, like, just a choice that we just need to go with it because there's more cost for delaying it.
- [79:22]
Paula Pant
Right? Yeah. And if it has to have a unanimous decision behind it, that gives outsized power to the one person who holds out.
- [79:30]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Right, Right. And sometimes we see that in workplaces that one voice matters more than others. Right. And that's also something to be aware of.
- [79:38]
Paula Pant
I share the story of the website designer, but in example after example, one of the stories that you've told is of a home contractor for people who are doing their. I think it was a kitchen renovation, some very basic type of home remodel, where the contractor comes in and suggests something.
- [79:58]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yes.
- [79:59]
Paula Pant
And the people who are renovating their home have a different idea, but they have a similar situation to me where in that moment, when they hear what their contractor is recommending, they fold and they go along with the contractor's idea. And now that impacts their renovation budget and it impacts their renovation scope. And so there are all of these ways in which that moment needs some practice.
- [80:23]
Dr. Sunita Sa
That's right. And in your situation, I guess you can go back and fix your website for them. It was really difficult. So they really wanted the sink in a particular position, and their contractor just said, no, no, better for you over there. And they didn't agree. And so they'd actually planned to both be there the next time the contractor came and tell them where they really wanted the sink to be. And as soon as the contractor started saying, no, no, I think you should have it there, they both folded. Right. And now they should have every time they see the sink. And it would be far too costly to change it. And so there are situations where we want to think about that and plan in advance, like just asking for some time to think about it and maybe emailing, as I said afterwards, so we're not caught in the moment having to live with that decision for so long.
- [81:13]
Paula Pant
Right. So what are the things that people should think about as they decide to hone the skill of defiance so that they can practice it both. Both episodically in those.
- [81:26]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yes.
- [81:26]
Paula Pant
In those moments of their. Their work and their lives, when they're meeting with a financial advisor, when they're meeting with a contractor for their kitchen renovation, as well as chronically.
- [81:37]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Yeah. So if there's one thing that I would love your listeners to take away is that we've misunderstood what it means to defy in numerous ways. And one of those is thinking about defiance as being bad, or that you need to be loud and bold and brave and just have a big personality and be assertive, or that you need to be heroic. And that is just out of reach. It's not you. I want people to know that's not true. You can be defiant in your own unique way. You can be defiant with far less angst than you think it might involve. We can learn ways to do it in a way that feels more natural to us, that is actually part of us, because it is a practice. It's not a personality. And it's available and necessary for all of us to do. One way that we can start practicing for that is start anticipating those situations. So, you know, the next time you're going to get your website done, you know, oh, if they say something now, I've experienced this before. I've probably thought about what I wish I would have said, which is what I call our aspirational selves. I wish I would have said this at that particular time. And so you're more likely to do that next time. You're less likely to be going along with it now that you've experienced it. And then I went along with a CT scan because the doctor ordered it and they told me so, even though I knew better. So the next time I did get asked to go, and I knew it was an unnecessary test, I was able to defy in that situation and just say, you know what? I'm going to not have that right now if I find I need it. In a few weeks time I'll come back and have that. But right now I'd rather take a different route. So anticipating those moments is really important. You probably experienced it. You probably know that a certain colleague is going to make a certain remark in a meeting. You probably know that maybe somebody's going to take credit for your work. What are you going to do about it? So anticipating those situations, because surprise disables defiance, whereas anticipation prepares us for defiance. And we don't want to be caught off guard so much because that's the difficult thing for us. So anticipate it. Once you anticipated it, you can visualize it. If it's a very difficult situation, let's just visualize it. This is what athletes do a lot of the time. And performers, they visualize the situation that they're in because they want that situation to be so perfect. And then they pre script and they practice, practice, practice. Because what that practice does is change the neural pathways in our brain. So if we have been wired to comply, now we can start practicing for defiance because we get like words out there, we get used to hearing it, we get used to our mouth saying it. And it becomes easier in the moment. This is what we wish we would have said and this is the training for defiance. And we can start with small moments. We can start with small, like, you know, telling people that you don't like the haircut that they've made. You know, we can start with something small and build up to the really important moments. Because there's a really powerful saying that's often attributed to Bruce Lee, but actually comes from a Greek poet, which is under duress. We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training. And that's why it's so important to practice for defiance. Because our everyday acts of consent and dissent actually create the society that we live in. It affects our lives, it affects our workplaces, you know, the culture. One person can make a difference. It affects our communities and it affects the whole of society. And that's why I'm really passionate about it.
- [85:28]
Paula Pant
Wonderful. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they would like to learn more?
- [85:34]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Oh, thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to have this conversation. So I'm easy to find online. You go to my website, which is sunitasar.com. so that's s u n I t a s a h dot com. You can sign up for my newsletter on Substack, which is defiant by design. And I'm on LinkedIn also, so please connect with me on LinkedIn and also Instagram.
- [86:04]
Paula Pant
Thank you. Dr. Sa, what are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key Takeaway Number one Disclosure of conflicts of interest often backfire when someone discloses their conflict of interest, like for example, a financial advisor revealing that they earn a commission, we often feel more pressure to comply, not less. And this happens because we don't want to signal distrust or appear unhelpful after they've been transparent with us.
- [86:34]
Dr. Sunita Sa
Imagine you're a patient and you're going to see your doctor and they recommend that you enter a clinical trial and they disclose the receipt of a referral fee if you enter the trial before that disclosure happened. As a patient, you might come up with a number of reasons for why you don't want to enter a clinical trial, but now that the disclosure has become salient, it's more likely to be interpreted that it's because of the disclosure that you are rejecting the advice and that signals distrust.
- [87:06]
Paula Pant
Understanding this dynamic can help you stay objective when working with financial advisors, with Realtors, or with anyone else who discloses their commissions or their conflicts of interest. That's the first key takeaway. Key Takeaway Number two the Power of the Pause when faced with pressure to make a financial or career decision, creating physical and temporal distance from the person who is pressuring you can help you make better choices. Take time to think and to evaluate decisions without social pressure.
- [87:42]
Dr. Sunita Sa
I call this the power of the pause because what happened with Dan, my financial advisor, was that I was actually saved by my pager going off. So it started bleeping just as the silence between us was so uncomfortable and I felt the pressure to write on the form. And then when I did get the reports and the forms, I wasn't directly face to face with him anymore. And that decreased the social pressure so much that I could see my income is too limited at this time. I can't invest in these funds.
- [88:15]
Paula Pant
Next time you feel pressured to make a financial decision, remember that it's perfectly acceptable to say that you need time to think it over. Finally, Key Takeaway Number Practice Defiance in Small Ways first, standing your ground is a skill, and like all skills, it improves with practice. So building the skill of standing your ground starts with small, low stakes situations. Practice here before you tackle bigger career or financial decisions because this helps rewire your brain's default tendency towards compliance.
- [88:53]
Dr. Sunita Sa
We can start with small moments. We can start with telling people that you don't like the haircut, that they've made. You know, we can start with something small and build up to the really important moments. Because there's a really powerful saying that under duress, we don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training. And that's why it's so important to practice for defiance.
- [89:21]
Paula Pant
By practicing defiance in low risk situations, you'll be better prepared when you need to negotiate a raise or push back against a high pressure sales tactic. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Dr. Sunita Sa. If you enjoyed today's episode, please do three things. First, share it with your family and friends. That's the most important thing you can do to spread the message of great financial wisdom. Second, make sure that you're following this podcast in whatever app you're using to listen to this show. Just open up your favorite podcast playing app, open up the app you're using to listen to this, and hit the follow button. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Third, if you have not done so already, join our 52 week challenge to make 2025 a year that you make Tiny tweaks. Tiny tweaks in your finances. One week at a time. Like, we're talking micro improvements. Things that are totally painless. They take very little time. They take very little effort. Each tweak on its own is laughably small. But when gathered together over the span of 52 weeks, they aggregate into a more efficient life, a more financially efficient life, a more ecologically efficient life. They aggregate into more savings, more simplicity, more smoothness, more efficiency. So all of that, all of that is what we're doing this year. It's 52 weeks long. Start in January. Join us this 52 week challenge, we call it One Tweak a Week. And you can download the guide for free, absolutely free@affordanything.com financial goals. That's affordanything.com financial goals. Thank you again for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast and I'll meet you in the next episode.