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- [00:00]
Phil Agnew
As humans, we find it very hard to say no. In 1963, researcher Stanley Milgram proved this. He asked everyday citizens to administer deadly electric shocks to strangers.
- [00:12]
Sunita Sa
What Milgram found in his first study was that every single participant pulled the lever for 150 volts and for 300 volts when the participants started pounding on the door. And then there was deadly silence after that. And 65% still carried on up to the deadly 450 volts at the end.
- [00:34]
Phil Agnew
That's my guest on today's episode of Nudge.
- [00:36]
Sunita Sa
I'm Sunita Sa. I'm a physician turned organisational psychologist and a professor of management and organisations at Cornell University.
- [00:45]
Phil Agnew
And today on Nudge, Sunita and I will explain why we all find it so very difficult to say no. HubSpot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers. And here's the perfect example. Morehouse College, a liberal art college in Atlanta, needed to reach new students with fresh, engaging content. But with a massive 900 page website, even the smallest updates took 30 minutes for them to publish. But then they found Breeze, HubSpot's collection of AI tools. And Breeze helped them write and optimize their content in a fraction of the time. The results 30% more page views and visitors now spend 27% more time on their site. If you're ready for growth like this, visit HubSpot. My guest on today's episode of Nudge has spent decades studying why people find it so hard to say no.
- [01:38]
Sunita Sa
I'm the author of the Power of no in a World that Demands yes. And the book is really about reclaiming your agency. What my experiments show is that people comply at shockingly high rates.
- [01:51]
Phil Agnew
And Sunita has firsthand experience of this inability to defy.
- [01:56]
Sunita Sa
When I was in Pittsburgh, which was my first stop when I moved from the UK to the us, I felt some chest pain, like central chest pain. It was quite deep, it wasn't like anything I'd felt before. So I was quite worried about it and I ended up going to the emergency room and they did a bunch of tests on me, including an electrocardiogram, and everything came back normal. So I was relieved and the pain was subsiding and I thought I was just going to be discharged, but what happened was that the doctor said, oh, before you go, I just want you to have a CT scan. And I asked why? And she said, I want to make sure you don't have a pulmonary embolism. Now, a pulmonary embolism is a blood clot in the lung and I used to work as a respiratory doctor in the uk. And I know that has a specific type of pain. It catches your breath when you breathe in and breathe out. It's like a sharp pain. And I was not experiencing that type of pain at all. And I didn't have any of the risk factors, factors for having a blood clot in my lungs. And so I didn't want it because for a CT scan you get the ionizing radiation is about 70 times more than an X ray. It's still a small amount, but why take the risk? I was also a scholar of over diagnosis and over treatment in medicine. In fact, I was doing research on it at the time and a scholar of medical ethics. And I really believed in, you know, patient autonomy, patient choice, do no harm. And I really wanted to say, no, I don't need the CT scan, I can go. And yet, even with the knowledge and understanding that I had, I found it very difficult to do. And I ended up just complying with what the doctor told me. Why did I find it so difficult to say no?
- [03:39]
Phil Agnew
Sunita's research proves that this affects all of us.
- [03:42]
Sunita Sa
Despite our ideals, our best intentions, we often choose just compliance over defiance. And this I've seen is true regardless of the stakes, whether the situation sometimes could be life threatening or it could be more mundane.
- [03:57]
Phil Agnew
And no study encapsulates this more than Stanley Milgram's infamous 1963 studies on obedience.
- [04:04]
Sunita Sa
The studies were conducted by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s at Yale. He was really interested into investigating this claim of I was just following orders from Nazis in World War II. And he wanted to see whether this was actually a psychological reality or not. So he brought in participants, community members, to take part in what he called a learning experience experiment to see whether any kind of harm would actually improve people's memory. So he had the participants be what he called teachers and another person be the learner. The participants thought the learner was just someone like them that had come to do the experiment, but it was actually an actor that always played the part of the learner. And the learner was strapped into what looked like an electric chair. They were to recall word pairs that the teacher gave them from another room. And if they got the word pairs wrong, the teacher would have to give the learner an electric shock.
- [05:06]
Phil Agnew
So the teacher read out 25 word pairs without pausing. Pairs like blue girl, fat neck, nice day. Immediately after, the teacher would say the first word in the pair and ask the learner what the second word was. The teacher would make it multiple Choice, they would say blue and then give three. Is it blue girl, blue grass and blue ink. Do you remember if. Hopefully you do. Hopefully you remember that the answer is blue girl. And that's what the teachers hoped would happen, that the learners would successfully answer the questions correctly. But it is not what happened.
- [05:42]
Sunita Sa
So the teacher was brought to this other room and sat in front of a big device that had some volts labeled on it, starting from 15 volts, going up in 15 volt increments all the way to 450 volts. They had to start at 15 volts. If there was a mistake, they have to pull the lever for that and then increase each time the learner got something wrong. When the volts started to increase, if the teacher felt some concern about it, the experimenter who was in the room with the teacher would have four prompts. So they would say, please go on. The experiment requires you to continue. It's absolutely essential that you continue. And the fourth prompt is, you have no choice. You must go on. So if the teachers objected more than four times, the experiment would then stop. But if not, there were the four prompts that the experimenter would say. Now, before the actual experiment, the prediction from psychiatrists was that most people would not continue after 150 volts. And yet what Milgram found in his first study was that every single participant pulled the lever for 150 volts and for 300 volts when the participants started pounding on the door. And then there was deadly silence after that, and 65% still carried on up to the deadly 450 volts.
- [07:05]
Phil Agnew
At the end, 65% of participants carried on and administered a deadly voltage of 450v to strangers for incorrectly answering quiz questions. Now, when reading about this and talking about this, I struggle to picture it. I find it quite hard to imagine. I imagine it's the same for you, too. So I've gone and sourced some of the original audio from the 1960s study. Here are a few clips from the experiment. First, here's the participant discovering that he is to be a teacher.
- [07:35]
Milgram Study Participant (Actor)
Would you open those and tell me which of you is which?
- [07:38]
Phil Agnew
Please?
- [07:40]
Sunita Sa
Teacher learn.
- [07:41]
Milgram Study Participant (Actor)
Teacher learn.
- [07:42]
Phil Agnew
So that's the start of the study. The actual teacher wasn't sure if they would become a teacher or a learner. I think that would make them even feel more empathy for the learner. You know, could have been them receiving the vaults if they had picked differently. Anyway, next up, here's the teacher asking the learner the questions.
- [07:58]
Milgram Study Participant (Actor)
Cloud, horse, rock, house. Answer wrong, 150 volts, answer horse.
- [08:11]
Phil Agnew
In that clip, you can hear the learner grunt in pain. The learner then goes on to ask the experimenter to stop the experiment. Listen to the reaction from the real participant, the teacher.
- [08:22]
Milgram Study Participant (Actor)
Answer horse. Experimental.
- [08:26]
Phil Agnew
That's all.
- [08:26]
Milgram Study Participant (Actor)
Kept me out of here. Get me out of here. Please continue, please.
- [08:30]
Phil Agnew
Go right on.
- [08:32]
Milgram Study Participant (Actor)
Let me out. He refuses to go in. The experiment requires you continue, teacher. Please continue.
- [08:36]
Phil Agnew
The teacher does show a bit of resistance. He says, well, look, the learner refuses to go on. But as soon as the experimenter said, the experiment requires you to continue, please continue. The teacher just obeys and goes on.
- [08:49]
Milgram Study Participant (Actor)
You're gonna get a shot. 180 volts. I'm not gonna kill that man there. I mean, who's gonna take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman? I'm responsible for anything that happens here. Continue, please. All right, next one. Slow walk, dance truck, music. 375 volts. I think something's happened to that fella in there. I don't get no answer. He was hollering with less voltage. Can't you check in and see if he's all right, please.
- [09:23]
Phil Agnew
It's a fairly horrifying study. 65% of decent Americans administered deadly shocks to what they thought were fellow participants. They did not want to. Those audio clips make that pretty clear, but they didn't feel able to defy the order.
- [09:38]
Sunita Sa
For me, what was really fascinating about the Milgram studies is both the people that complied, but also the people that defied and the reactions that they had because Milgram wrote a letter and he basically called the people that complied, like almost two thirds of people going up to 450 volts. He described them as moral imbeciles. And yet, if you actually have a look at what else he noted was that a large proportion of them showed signs of nervous behavior. So that could be laughing, you know, smiling, sweating, asking questions, swearing, all of these things.
- [10:13]
Phil Agnew
In Sunita's research, she's identified three reasons why individuals like those in the Milgram study struggle to say no.
- [10:20]
Sunita Sa
So the first one is this enormous social pressure to go along with other people. And I've discovered some psychological factors that explain some of this a little bit more. The second reason is we don't really understand what compliance is and defiance and consent are. We don't understand the differences and what it means really to defy. The third one is once we know that we want to defy, we want to say no. We actually don't know how. We've never developed that skill or ability we haven't been trained for it the way that we've been trained for compliance most of our lives.
- [10:54]
Phil Agnew
And the participants in Milgram's study struggled most with that social pressure.
- [10:59]
Sunita Sa
If we go back to the three reasons why people resist defiance, this first one, this enormous pressure to go along with other people, this is what we're seeing here. And there is a psychological force that I've discovered in my own research that I call insinuation anxiety. And this is a distinct type of anxiety that arises when people worry that their non compliance with another person's wishes could be interpreted as a signal of distrust. So insinuating that the person isn't whom they appear to be or should be. So when someone like a doctor or someone in authority tells you to do something, if you reject that, it insinuates that the other person cannot be trusted, that they're untrustworthy in some way, or that they're incompetent. Even though we might not feel good about it, we feel this pressure to go along with it. That is what I believe, this adverse emotional state that's occurring in these participants, this insinuation anxiety where they become so concerned with offending the experimenter that you get these concerns even in one off situations. I found in my experiment with strangers.
- [12:08]
Phil Agnew
Sunita's actually conducted a very well known study with Lowenstein and Kane which showcased this insinuation anxiety.
- [12:15]
Sunita Sa
We gave participants some scenarios based on really what I felt with the CT scan that I had in Pittsburgh. So there were different scenarios that participants could read about. They would imagine being a patient and they would read about a scenario where they've gone to see their doctor, for example, and the doctor maybe recommends something like you could enter a clinical trial or you could take a standard drug that you've taken in the past. What I find in these experiments is even if the two options are given and then the doctor discloses, I should let you know that I will receive a referral fee if you enter the clinical trial. What I find now if the doctor recommends the clinical trial, and the only difference is that either the disclosure statement is there or it is not there, or once the disclosure statement is there, people report less trust, which really is quite rational, like a conflict of interest, there's some uncertainty as to the quality of advice. So perhaps that's the purpose of the disclosure statement and why the American medical of ethics way back in 2005 said that if you get a referral fee for recommending a patient enter a clinical trial, you must disclose it to the patient. And patients say that they want to know if that's happening. But what I find is even though you have this decreased trust, you also have more insinuation anxiety. It's more uncomfortable now to decline the suggestion, the recommendation to take the clinical trial.
- [13:42]
Phil Agnew
Sunita writes about this study on page 78 of her book. She writes, our results showed that people had less trust in the doctor when he disclosed a conflict of interest. Yet at the same time, they also felt much more pressure to do what the doctor recommended. The conflict of interest disclosure left patients feeling torn between feeling less trust in their doctor and but a greater pressure to comply with their advice.
- [14:07]
Sunita Sa
And why is that? Well, if there was no disclosure, there could have been a range of reasons you could give for not wanting to enter the clinical trial. You could say that you'd rather stick with something you had in the past. It's too risky, you don't like the side effects. There could be a range of different reasons. But now in the disclosure condition, if that is present, there's another very salient reason for rejecting it. And that's because the doctor has this referral fee. And that implies that you think the doctor will be influenced by that referral fee. And that becomes very difficult for us to signal. So it's really fascinating. In these situations where disclosure is there intended to protect the patient, it's actually making them feel more insinuation anxiety are more likely to comply with advice that we trust less.
- [14:52]
Phil Agnew
So if my doctor offers me two treatments but shares that she's being paid to recommend one of those treatments, I'll feel pressure to pick the treatment she recommends, even if I don't want it. I think that's fascinating. And I wondered if this worked in more transactional settings, would a car salesman get more sales if they were upfront about the commission they made when selling the car?
- [15:14]
Sunita Sa
And with that example of the car salesperson, what I find is a different psychological force, actually that I call the sales pitch effect. Because insinuation anxiety tends to arise in situations where we believe the other person should have our best interest at heart. So a physician, a teacher, a family member maybe that you think should have your best interests at heart. A car salesperson, you kind of know that they're working on commission and they know that you know. But there is a similar psychological force in the same direction is that we don't want to signal that we're being unhelpful or uncooperative. It's almost like asking for a favor. And I've run a bunch of studies Where I offer people two different lotteries, either A or B, and lottery A is clearly superior. It's more than two times the expected value. And if people are given both choices, more than 95% of people will choose.
- [16:10]
Phil Agnew
Option A. Sunita writes about this 2019 study in her book. It was conducted on a Long island ferry crossing with just over 250 participants. Sunita and her colleagues Lowenstein and Kane had a middle aged white man dressed in a suit and tie a ask participants to fill out a short survey in exchange for $5. However, he offered two choices. Option one was to just take a crisp $5 bill straight away, or option two was to enter a mystery cash lottery where they could have the chance of winning more than $5. Now, this lottery paid out anywhere between zero to $10. But they were warned, the participants were warned that on average, it paid out less than $5. So unsurprisingly, when given those two choices, the V people preferred the cash. Only 8% of the survey takers actually picked that mystery lottery.
- [17:02]
Sunita Sa
But then you have someone come along, a complete stranger, who recommends B, and there's no consequences for disagreeing at all. What I find now is if they disclose a conflict of interest, I also get a bonus. If you take lottery B, up to 85% of people will take it. And it's not because they want to. If they made the decision in private, the amount of compliance goes down greatly. But what they're saying is that they feel too uncomfortable now to turn it down because it would deprive the other person of their commission.
- [17:36]
Phil Agnew
When that middle aged white man dressed in the suit simply advised people to choose the lottery, it did have an effect. The number of people who did so more than doubled to 20%. But when that man revealed that he would get a bonus if they chose the lottery, the number of people who did so doubled again to 42%. Sunita writes that when asked, those participants confessed that while they trusted the man less once they knew about his ulterior motive, they felt more pressure to follow his recommendation. They didn't want him, a complete stranger, to think that they thought his advice was bad or biased.
- [18:12]
Sunita Sa
So instead of disclosure being something like giving you information, I will receive more if you do X rather than Y. What people hear is, please do X because it helps me. And then they feel pressured to do it. So these two psychological forces, insinuation, anxiety and the sales pitch effect, work in the same direction. Even if you have decreased trust in the advice, you don't want to take it. You feel this social pressure to go along with it.
- [18:38]
Phil Agnew
Social pressure forced Long island commuters to buy a lottery ticket they didn't want. It made patients more likely to agree to a doctor's recommendation. It made Milgram's participants willing to administer high voltage shocks and and it even made Sunita take an unnecessary CT scan. But will it affect you? Well, let's find out because after the break, Sunita has an experiment she can run on all of you to see if you are influenced by social pressure. Content is Profit, hosted by Louise and Fonzie Camejo is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Content is Profit is the podcast I'd love to recommend today because it shares the secrets and strategies behind what the hosts call a frictionless sale. Louise and Fonsi talk about frameworks, strategies, tactics, and bring in special guests to bring you all the information you need to turn your content into profit. Back in December, they recorded with a YouTuber who reached 76,000 subscribers in just a year to learn how go and listen to Content Is Profit wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. So far, Sunita SA has documented how social pressure makes it hard for patients, commuters and participants to say no. But what about you? How would you act in one of these scenarios? Well, let's find out with the following thought experiment.
- [20:02]
Sunita Sa
I do this thought thought experiment, or a very similar one with a lot of my MBA students, my executive students. I ask people to really just imagine that they're an engineer. They're part of a team. They've spent years designing, building and testing this vehicle, which we'll call Firefly, which is a rocket propelled vehicle. It's like a giant metallic pencil. They think this vehicle is the fastest vehicle ever. But there's another team of engineers that are also put together a vehicle that they call the Falcon, and they claim it's the fastest. So both teams are claiming it's fastest. They decide to have a race to figure out who actually can beat the land speed record, which I think is about 763 miles per hour. And so they do this speed trials in Utah. Then it's a first of its kind. It's going to be televised. There's a $10 million award. You're going to get funding and fame. It's going to make your career if your team wins. So you're all set. But there's just one problem that you're experiencing on the Firefly team, which is that the rubber fuel lines have been leaking during some test runs. You think as the engineer, it might be due to the humidity because it's not being tested over 75% and tomorrow it's going to be 85%. So you mention this concern and the manager gets a little bit annoyed with you and say, well, do you have any proof? So you go away and try and collect some data on it as to when it's leaked and when it's not and when the humidity is being seen, that. And what you find is that the data is inconclusive, you don't know. So you go back with that and they say, actually it has leaked when the humidity is low as well as when it's been high. And so then it goes to a vote, a team vote. All the team are there, the technicians, the managers, the driver, everybody else votes. We need to race, otherwise we're just going to lose. Right. So you have sweat on your brow, you don't know what to do. Should you put your hand up to say no or not? And I ask people what they're going to do in that situation.
- [22:14]
Phil Agnew
So what would you do? You're the only one who hasn't voted. All of your team has voted to race. What would you choose? Well, almost all of Sunita's MBA students choose to race, even if they weren't sure deep down that it was the right decision.
- [22:30]
Sunita Sa
Even if as an individual you think no. Once you get into a group and you have one spokesperson in that group, you see people concede and go ahead with it. And the case that I actually use in class uses very similar data to the data that was used for the O ring. The rubber seals in the Challenger disaster that happened in 1985 with the engineers at Morton Thiocol were very worried about launching the Challenger because it was very cold on that day and they thought that the. With the cold weather, the rubber seals would leak. It becomes very difficult, especially in this type of situation where you have the social pressure to say no. And I was thinking about what I would have done in that situation. I think I would have felt the tension. I think I would have wanted to say no, but I would have found it very difficult.
- [23:23]
Phil Agnew
Now I've got a sneaky suspicion that many of you listening are thinking, well, I would say no. I'm able to counter authority. I don't agree with what Phil said. I've got no problem going against the herd. I imagine many of you do believe that, and Sunita does as well because she shared studies with me that prove how pretty much all of us predict, we think, when we predict, that we are far better at countering authority than we actually are.
- [23:48]
Sunita Sa
This really was a fascinating set of studies that Widzicka and Lafrance conducted where they looked at the difference between real and imagined sexual harassment. And so they had a group of women imagine that they were applying for a job, and what would they do if they were asked certain questions in that job interview, such as, do you have a boyfriend? Do people find you desirable? Do you think it's important for women to wear bras at work? And what the women said in this situation when they were imagining it was that they would be really angry and they would walk out of the interview. And then for another group of women of the same demographic, from the same population, the women were actually applying for a research assistant job with a professor, which is actually set up as an experiment, and the same questions were asked.
- [24:42]
Phil Agnew
Wodzika and lafrance in this 2001 study actually asked a group of women these exact questions in an interview. In a real world interview, participants who thought they were taking part in a real interview were asked, do you have a boyfriend? Do people find you desirable? Do you think it's important for a woman to wear a bra at work? And here's how the women responded.
- [25:01]
Sunita Sa
And what they found here was not a single woman walked out. And they didn't report that they were angry. They said that they felt fearful.
- [25:09]
Phil Agnew
Sunita writes how these women predicted they would feel angry and reject the question, confront the interviewer, or walk out. But the study found that when the women were actual targets of these harassing questions in a job interview, not a single one rejected the question or walked out. It's disheartening, but Sunita's keen to point out that defiance isn't impossible. We can train ourselves to get better at saying no.
- [25:34]
Sunita Sa
So if we were to think about what you could do next, to start finding your own power of defiance, I think one of the first things is really understand the definition of defiance. Like, we often think defiance has to be loud or angry or aggressive, or that it's heroic or superhuman and out of reach. But you actually don't need to be brave if you think defiance is only for the brave or the extraordinary, ordinary, or a superhero. We kind of excuse ourselves from doing the work and understanding that it's a skill and something we can train for, just like we train for anything else makes it easy. So defiance isn't just for the brave or the extraordinary. It's actually available and necessary. For all of us, we can do it in our own unique way. We don't have to be loud, we don't have to be confrontational. So I want really people to understand that it's not a personality trait, it's a skill set. But we need to prepare long before the moment of crisis. So we need to make def. Defiance a practice and have that action plan. So we can do that by anticipating a lot of situations that require defiance. Actually we can predict in advance. So, yes, I was caught off guard with a CT scan, but a year later, I was in a very, very similar situation. And I had time to reflect during that year as why is it I couldn't say no? Even though that situation was very, very difficult and there was a lot of pressure to have another investigation that required radiation. I managed know because I thought about it, I reflected, I'd anticipated it, I'd visualize that type of situation. I actually thought when I walked into sort of the outpatient clinic at the time, it'd be so funny if they asked me to go for a scan. They did. And so just visualizing it and practice and scripting and role playing, that's the thing that changes our neural pathways. So if we've been socialized to be compliant all our life, like, I certainly was, like, even my name, Sunita, I've been told, means good in Sanskrit. And I equated being good with being compliant and bad with being defiant. We have to break that equation and really think about what is it I want to do in this situation and change those neural pathways. With practice, all of us can learn that skill set.
- [27:48]
Phil Agnew
We stopped our recording there, but off air, I joked with Sunita about how I struggle to defy in my own very small way, I think, struggle to defy. When going to the barbers, I like going to the barbers. I like my barber. But at the end of the haircut, I'm always keen to kind of leave straight away. Often the barber asks if he can put some product in my hair, some gel, some spray. I think there's a lot of sea mist he likes to put in. I never really want it. I'm not fussed. I'm usually about to go for a run. I just don't really want gel in my hair. And yet I find it absolutely impossible to say no. I know I don't want it. I feel keen to leave. And yet when I'm asked, I just nod along. I told Sunita about this and she said to follow her advice. She said, phil, just prepare in advance. Plan what you're going to say. Practice it. I felt a bit silly walking to the barbers practicing how I was going to say no. But to give Sunita credit, it worked. I managed to say no and defy in my own very small way. And I left the barbers when I wanted to. That is all for today folks. Massive. Massive. Thank you to Sunita for joining me on that. She is truly a tremendous researcher and she's a fantastic author. Her book Defy is a must read. I think. It's one of the top selling behavioral science books of 2025 and I'm not surprised because it is a really, really great read. I highly recommend it. I've left a link to the book Defy in the show notes if you'd like to pick up a copy. So go there or just search for Defy wherever you get your books. I should also say Happy New Year. Thank you so much for listening to Nudge in what is now the eighth year of running the show. I can't believe that it's been running this long. It's really fantastic having so many of you continue to listen to the show. Excitingly. I've got some major plans this year, starting with some very exciting episodes. So next week I've got Richard Shotton coming on for his final appearance. This time he's explaining the secret behind KFC's success. That's a great episode. I have three more episodes with the Godfather of influence, Robert Cialdini scheduled for the next few months. Those are brilliant. I can't wait for you to hear those. And I've got Will Ghidara. Will Gadara created the world's best restaurant by using behavioral science. He wrote the fantastic book Unreasonable Hospitality and he'll be joining me on Nudge in a few weeks time. If those episodes sound interesting then please go and subscribe to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. To make sure you don't miss out. You can also subscribe to my newsletter. Just go to nudgepodcast.com and click Newsletter in the menu. And not only will you get my much loved Friday newsletter, you'll also get an email reminder every single time and I episode goes out. That is all from me folks. Thank you for listening. Happy New Year and I'll see you next Monday for another episode of Nudge. Cheers.