Dr Sunita Sah is a Professor of Management and Organizations at Cornell University, an organisational psychologist, and a former physician. Her book Defy: How To Speak Up When It Matters is a USA Today national bestseller, Axiom Gold Award winner, Amazon Editors’ Best Book of 2025, and a Bloomberg Best Books selection. It has been translated into more than 14 languages.
Her Substack Defiant By Design includes pieces on why women are disproportionately asked to take on unrecognised work, the gender dynamics of speaking up, and the psychology of insinuation anxiety.
She has kindly answered some questions from Capsule about her book.
Hi Sunita! When people hear the word ‘defy,’ many will think of disobedience or even aggression. Do we need to become more comfortable with the word and reframe it?
Absolutely. That discomfort is exactly the point. We’ve been conditioned to associate defiance with conflict, with being difficult, with making things worse. But defiance at its core is simply refusing to comply with something that goes against your values. It doesn’t require a raised voice or a dramatic confrontation. Some of the most powerful defiance I’ve ever witnessed was quiet, private, and sometimes invisible to everyone except the person doing it.
We don’t need a new word. We need to stop flinching at the old one. That’s why the first thing I do in DEFY is redefine it: not as a negative, risky personality trait, but as something positive, meaningful, and genuinely good for the people around us.
Your research has shown, again and again, that what someone believes their values to be is quite different from how they actually behave. Have you found that people are surprised by the gap?
Stunned is more like it. People genuinely believe they would speak up when something feels wrong, and then, when they’re actually in the moment, they don’t. I’ve seen this play out in medical settings, in boardrooms, and in completely ordinary situations: the friend who says nothing when someone makes a cruel joke, the employee who nods along in a meeting she disagrees with, the patient who doesn’t ask the question she really needs answered.
The gap between who we think we are and what we actually do isn’t a character flaw. It’s the result of very real psychological pressures that most of us have never been taught to recognise, let alone resist. Closing that gap is what DEFY is really about. So that when the moment comes, you’re ready.
You write that “defiance is not merely one state. Instead, it’s a process, encompassing a gradation of understanding, questioning, and action”. I imagine a lot of people probably haven’t conceptualised it as a process and, rather, have thought of it as one specific moment. Does framing it as a process change things?
It changes everything. In DEFY I map out the Five Stages of Defiance: from first noticing that something feels off, all the way through to taking action. And the most important thing about having a map is that it shows you where you are right now, not just where you’re trying to go. Most people who think they ‘can’t’ defy are already further along than they realise. They’ve noticed something feels wrong. That noticing is stage one. That is already defiance beginning.
You write that “when your ‘gut’ speaks to you, it could be expert intuition – but it could also be your biases”. You also write that “We cannot blindly trust our gut. We can listen to it – for it may signal important information – but we also need to qualify it and know when to override it”. Yet so often we’re told to trust our gut, right?
This is one of my favourite tensions in the book because the ‘trust your gut’ advice is everywhere, and it’s not wrong, exactly, it’s just incomplete. Sometimes your gut is genuinely picking up on something real: a pattern from experience, a signal your brain caught before your conscious mind did. That’s worth listening to. But sometimes what feels like intuition is actually fear, or an old bias, or just the discomfort of being in an unfamiliar situation. The problem is that from the inside, they feel identical.
The question I find most useful: have I actually had enough experience in situations like this to have developed real pattern recognition? A doctor who has seen a thousand patients might have a gut instinct worth trusting: that’s expert intuition. Someone deciding whether to push back on a new boss for the first time might be running on anxiety, not expertise. When you’re not sure, pause before you act. Not to second-guess yourself into paralysis, but to give yourself enough space to figure out which voice you’re actually hearing.
What you call ‘the pause’ — stepping away briefly, going to the bathroom – is this a good first practice for people who feel overwhelmed by the bigger goal of learning to defy?
It’s where I’d tell almost everyone to start. Before you can act in alignment with your values, you need space to hear them. The pause creates that space. I call it the ‘power of the pause’. Even 60 seconds away from a pressure situation can interrupt the automatic compliance response that most of us have been running on autopilot our whole lives. It sounds almost too simple, but in my research, it’s one of the most consistently effective tools people have. Simple is often the point.
You write about ‘conscious compliance’ – that sometimes the consequences of defiance are too great, and you have to pick your battles. How do you know when that’s genuinely the case rather than being an excuse you’re making?
This is the question I return to constantly, and I want to be honest: the distinction is hard. Conscious compliance – choosing to comply after genuinely weighing your options – is completely different from reflexive compliance out of habit or fear. The difference is awareness. When you consciously comply, you know what you’re doing, you’ve assessed the real risks, and you’re making a deliberate choice. That’s not defeat. What I want people to avoid is telling themselves they’re choosing when really they never even paused to consider whether they had a choice at all.
For women especially, this is layered. There’s something I write about called the ‘prove it again tax’: the reality that women are often held to higher standards when they do speak up, and face steeper social penalties when they push back. Knowing that cost is real doesn’t mean staying silent forever. It means being strategic about when and how you spend that social capital, and making sure that the silence is a deliberate choice, not a default.
You write about insinuation anxiety: the discomfort we feel about seeming to criticise someone by pushing back on them. Even something like giving honest feedback to a hairdresser can feel impossible. Is this something we should try to get over?
Insinuation anxiety is the fear that pushing back on someone’s recommendation will be read as an accusation about their character or motives. It’s not just ‘I disagree with your advice’ but ‘I think you’re untrustworthy’ or ‘incompetent’ or ‘biased’. That extra weight of insinuation is why it’s so paralysing, and why it shows up even in completely low-stakes situations like telling a hairdresser you don’t love what she’s done.
What makes it worth working through is this: when we stay silent to avoid that discomfort, we often deny people information they genuinely need. The hairdresser doesn’t know she’s leaving clients unhappy. The manager doesn’t know his feedback style is shutting people down. Our silence feels kind. It usually isn’t.
My research reveals that in some contexts, women experience insinuation anxiety more acutely than men. Perhaps partly because the costs of speaking up are genuinely higher for us. The social penalties for being seen as difficult or negative are steeper, and that’s not imagined, it’s well documented. But practicing small honest moments in low-stakes situations builds the muscle for the bigger ones. Over time, it genuinely changes how you move through the world.
You write that even now, after all your research and practice, you still don’t see yourself as someone who can loudly and publicly defy. Still? Is there hope for the rest of us?
There is so much hope because my admission is the point. If the goal were to become someone who defies loudly, fearlessly, publicly, then yes, I haven’t got there, and I’ve spent years studying this. But that was never the goal. The aspiration to become that archetypal defiant person is itself a trap, because it sets up a version of speaking up that some of us will never feel comfortable with, and then we conclude that defiance simply isn’t for us.
What I’ve learned, in research and in my own life, is that sustainable defiance has to fit who you are. It has to come from your values, expressed in your voice, at a scale that’s true to your circumstances. That looks completely different from person to person. That’s not a compromise. That’s the whole idea.
You write that it is time “to imagine a world in which unjust orders are questioned, unfair structures interrogated, and flawed assumptions overturned” and that “such a world, built on a foundation of earnestly examined individual choices, is a more ethical one, a less violent, less exploitative, and freer place for everyone”. In the widest possible sense – the survival of the planet, the survival of humans, the survival of democracy – I imagine defiance is going to help more than compliance?
Yes. And I think history is pretty clear on this. Every significant shift toward a more just world, every moment where an unfair structure was dismantled or a harmful norm overturned, started with someone refusing to go along. Not a movement, not a leader, not a policy. A person, in a moment, deciding that their compliance was no longer available.
What gives me genuine hope is something I call the Defiance Domino Effect. When one person speaks up, it changes what feels possible for everyone watching. It gives the next person permission to question, and the person after that permission to act. That ripple is real and it is documented. The research on nonviolent movements shows that as little as 3.5% of a population actively participating can shift entire systems. But before that, before any of it, there is always a single person who decided the cost of staying silent was higher than the cost of speaking up.
That’s not a small thing to ask of ourselves. But it is the thing. And it starts exactly where you are right now.
Find Dr Sunita Sah’s book DEFY, here. Subscribe to her Substack here. Want more? Check out here TEDx Talk: ‘Why do we stay silent in uncomfortable situations?’ below!
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