How to stand up for yourself and others | Sunita Sah | TEDxNewEngland

Sunita Sah, an organizational psychologist at Cornell University, explores why people comply with things against their values and how to build the capacity to defy. She opens with a formative childhood memory from West Yorkshire, England, when her quiet, compliant mother—who had taught Sah that goodness meant being agreeable and non-confrontational—suddenly stood up to a group of teenage boys who blocked their path. Rather than staying silent as expected, her mother made direct eye contact and demanded clarification, ultimately causing the boys to disperse. This moment shattered Sah's belief that defiance belonged only to certain personality types.

Sah's decades of research across medicine, finance, and criminal justice revealed a disturbing pattern: people comply at shockingly high rates even when it contradicts their preferences. In one lottery experiment, 85% of people followed bad advice from a stranger despite no consequences for disagreeing. She identifies the root cause: saying no feels uncomfortable and confrontational because we've never been taught how to do it. The costs of compliance are substantial—regret, stress, burnout, anxiety, depression, and chronic inflammation—yet people fear speaking up more than they consider the cost of silence.

Sah argues that the traditional definition of defiance as 'challenging power openly and boldly' is too narrow and doesn't honor human agency. Instead, she redefines defiance as 'acting in accordance with your true values, especially when there's pressure to do otherwise.' This redefinition moves defiance from something negative, rare, and risky to something positive, accessible, and prosocial. She developed the 'defiance compass,' a three-question framework: (1) Who am I? (grounding in values), (2) What type of situation is this? (assessing safety and effectiveness), and (3) What does a person like me do in a situation like this? (connecting identity to action). Critically, the third question loops back to the first, creating a practice where repeated defiant choices shape identity.

Sah concludes by connecting individual defiance to broader social change through what she calls the 'defiance domino effect.' She references Rosa Parks, who witnessed her own mother defy a bus driver's demand to move, planting a seed that later enabled Parks's famous refusal. Sah hopes that if defiance is practiced and modeled, it creates cultural shifts—one day, a teenage boy in that same alleyway might speak up to protect others, distributing the burden of resistance across society.