La Vie en Révolte

Dr. Sunita Sah has a point. Many of us, time and again, find ourselves in a situation in which we feel pressured to perform (or abstain from) a particular action while feeling acute nervous tension because the mandated (in)action runs counter to what we ourselves wish to (not) do (Fischer et al., 2011). In Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes, Dr. Sah suggests that in such situations we often betray our true values and that, with foresight and practice, we can do better, perhaps all the way to becoming “moral mavericks,” and drivers of a “cultural shift.” Professional endorsers agree, praising Defy as “powerful” and “transformative” on the dust jacket. Dr. Sah's message resonates because we have all experienced the discomforts of dissonance and have surrendered to social demands, but I am not sanguine about the book's evidential grounding and its broad implications. In the following paragraphs, I intend to explain why.Defy is situated in a context. The macro-context is a century of theory and research in social psychology, motivated by the need to understand the social forces that shape behavior and often do so in opposition to the mandates of rational choice or the individual's or the group's best interests (Krueger & Massey, 2009). Dr. Sah ignores this rich history, aside from retelling—rather uncritically—the gist of the famous Milgram adventure. The micro-context is a cottage industry of self-help books designed to teach rebellion or at least encourage independence. There are classic treatments of how to become less shy (Zimbardo, 1990) and more assertive (Bower & Bower, 2004), which go unnoticed. Likewise, there are recent books preaching rebellion and insubordination (reviewed respectively in Krueger, 2019, and Krueger, 2023). They too go unnoticed.Dr. Sah's point of departure is the tension often experienced when social forces, such as peer pressure or obedience claims, run counter to the person's “true values.” When the person surrenders to these forces, the self is split into a private and a public part, and the two are out of alignment. Self-recrimination may follow, along with a promise to the self to never let this happen again and perhaps to purchase a book said to help with the journey. Then it does happen again, as it must, simply because the next time the micro-context is just a little different, and savvy influence agents know how to get the element of surprise to work to their advantage.Dr. Sah's advice to the perplexed is pretty much what these victims of social forces have been promising themselves to do all along: (1) clarify their own true values, (2) anticipate the challenges coming from the social world, (3) recognize these challenges in the moment of truth and step on the psychobehavioral brake, (4) consider the response they can endorse in good conscience, and (5) then act rather than react. After that, it is practice, practice, practice until this psychobehavioral protocol becomes second nature and the social animal has become whole. This line of advice is as good as it is trite.Dr. Sah anchors her argument on a simple—and false—dichotomy of equations. Society equates compliance with good behavior and defiance with bad behavior, she says. It is easy to gather examples consistent with this reductive scheme, and Dr. Sah dutifully does. Of course, most cultures teach parents to bring some pressure, brute or gentle, to bear on their developing brood. Indeed, many of the next generation's “true values” are shaped this way. Yet dramatic examples of parental overreach also come to mind with ease. Here's one: When I was less than 2 years old, my mother sought to toilet-train me, forcibly if need be. She held me with both hands above the potty, insisting I should pee. I defied her with screams until my face turned purple. I prevailed. My mother gave up (for the moment), noting in her journal that I was “a little tyrant.” I did not need to be taught to defy. Quite the opposite. Defiance came naturally. Schopenhauer (1819/2021) would have understood. Defiance is the expression of the will.Traumatic as the potty party was, it must be admitted that my parents also taught me useful habits of compliance. Flush the toilet after use, feed your pets, don't litter. Many people, all too often, fail to comply when they should, an inconvenient truth Dr. Sah ignores. Put together, the twin errors of overcompliance and undercompliance show that what is at stake is the degree of calibration of a person's behavior. A perfectly calibrated person complies when social demands are congruent with personal values, no more and no less (Swets et al., 2000). Ironically, in such a state of affairs, the need for social demands would be eliminated. The person's true values would do the work necessary and sufficient to predict and cause behavior.Although perfect calibration must remain the stuff of speculation, we can explore the structure of the data when errors do occur. The matrix in Figure 1 shows the person's behavioral options, to comply or to defy, in the rows, crossed with the person's true desire, to comply or to defy, in the columns. In all cases, we assume the presence of social pressure to comply. Let us further assume that both the desire and the ultimate behavior are biased toward compliance, with both base rates being p = .8. Beginning with the null hypothesis of no association between desire and action, we see that for most behaviors (.68), action is aligned with desire (.64 + .04). The question is how a person can depart from this null model and what consequences will unfold.Consider two interventions. In the first, the person simply defies more (moving the base rate of defiance from .2 to .4) without improving calibration. Now the probability of alignment drops to .56 (.48 + .08). Simply reducing the general bias of compliance is clearly not useful. In the second intervention, the person ceases to comply when desire calls for defiance (moving from .16 to 0) while still occasionally defying despite a desire to comply (e.g., leaving the A/C on and the window open) and leaving the base rates unchanged. Now the probability of alignment rises to .84 (.64 + .2), and the association (i.e., calibration) between desire and behavior rises from φ = 0 to .8. In short, a reduction of overcompliance, as envisioned by Dr. Sah, can move a person toward greater calibration, but the gains are limited unless errors of undercompliance are also addressed. As this numerical example shows, the base rates of compliant behavior and desire are critical as well. The more the public and the private tendencies are tilted toward compliance, the smaller is the maximum marginal effect any defiance training can hope to have (see Ajzen & Fishbein, 2005, for the rich history of research on attitude–behavior associations).Defy's neglect of the problem of undercompliance is unfortunate. Another problem is the strong assumptions about ordinary people's ability and willingness to know their “true values” and to act on them. The process model sketched by Dr. Sah is hyperrational and unrealistic. Moreover, few values are cast in stone, waiting to be called up and acted on. Much research attests to the malleability of values (Jordan et al., 2015). Dr. Sah offers a pragmatic shortcut, suggesting that the physiological tension experienced at illegitimate influence attempts reveals one's true preferences. Again, this often works only in hindsight.An individual's “true values” might be thought of as being personal. However, as values are shaped by cultural forces (and their agents, as noted above), they break down into majority and minority views (see Poses et al., 1993, for examples of practice variation in the medical profession, an issue of the author's concern). Dr. Sah seems to be concerned mainly with personal true values that run counter to received majority values, hence the physiological tension and the moral(istic) cry for defiance. In Dr. Sah's exposition, the values of a moral minority seek self-assertion in the face of oppressive majority forces. The examples she adduces for her general point come from a special set of circumstances. This matters because it conflates her theoretical argument with a political point of view and therefore amounts to an exercise in mission creep. For a political liberal, it is facile to encourage readers to be the next Rosa Parks or Greta Thunberg, but what if a person's true personal values are out of step with a liberal normative environment? Is a liberal professor not called on to encourage students’ forthright self-expression even if a student is a libertarian or—gasp—a conservative? In other words, how would Dr. Sah counsel defiance among those who disagree with her?As a person's assessment of their own true values can be tricky, it is yet more difficult to anticipate the downstream consequences of defiance. Just how costly will it be to say no? The much-repeated story of the Taoist farmer, who steadfastly refuses to be delighted by praise or consoled by compassion in the wake of life's ups and downs, is a cautionary tale. What seems to be an up now can turn out to be a down later, and vice versa and ad infinitum. Experimentalists avoid this problem by asserting final values. Choose, they say, between receiving $5 now and receiving $10 with a probability of .6. With choices like this, the question of rationality is tractable. For the Rosa Parkses of this world, the outlook is more uncertain. To even ask whether she would stay in her seat had she known all the personal sacrifices that were to come seems indecent when we focus on the social good that came of her sacrifice. But the question is, “Would Ms. Parks have acted the same way had she had full knowledge of all consequences?” It is not whether she later in life did or did not have any regrets. Alas, the decisive question cannot be answered, much as the big clock of the universe cannot be rewound. Yet Dr. Sah's argument demands that people, when considering defiance, see the future and produce realistic estimates of costs and benefits.Defy is unabashedly autobiographical and debased by self-congratulation. Dr. Sah learned to resist some wasteful and risky default options of medical practice, earning her a short note in JAMA, but her chief accomplishment appears to have been unintended. A student pointed out that she had published in different academic disciplines, which in hindsight presents itself as sustained defiant attitude in light of disciplinary academic conventions. So far, so good, but this emergent sort of defiance clashes with the hyperrational, instrumental, and prospective kind of defiance Dr. Sah tries to model. Lastly, given the project's high ambition, it is sobering to see how underreferenced it is. There are 217 notes but, by my informal count, only 34 peer-reviewed references, and of these only 15 seem to be articles with original empirical findings (i.e., not reviews or meta-analyses).We can do better. A more comprehensive review of the social psychology of independence with a cleaner separation of general claims and the author's personal preferences would go a long way. The topic is important and deserves the best scholarship. A thoughtful treatment might also give a nod to the deep and original analyses achieved by nonexperimentalists. For example, Camus (1951/1992) wrote a book-length essay trying to find a rational basis for revolt. By contrast, Dostoevsky, throughout his work, promoted an irrational—though compelling—defense of revolt (Krueger & Grüning, 2024). He insisted that defiance can be a value in itself because it asserts the person's freedom, especially so when the sacrifices are great. Dostoevsky memorably wrote that he would wander the Kalmyk steppes in tents rather than bow to the bourgeois ethic of work and prudence. Let us look forward to a time when book authors defy conventional trends to please a jaded public.