It’s worth knowing how and when to be defiant.

Sunita Sah grew up in the UK and always tried to please people in authority. In short, she was compliant. She trained as a doctor, working in Britain’s National Health Service and consulting for the pharmaceutical industry. She then switched to studying psychology and moved to the US. And a few experiences changed her.

Sunita Sah

            When she went to a hospital with a sudden chest pain, the doctor ordered a CT scan. Sah knew, from her training, that it was unnecessary and had risks from radiation exposure. She had reservations, but in the end she acquiesced. But the experience made her reflect on why she had given in.

            A year later, she was in a similar situation. When she went to see a specialist, on arrival she was told she needed an x-ray before seeing the doctor. It was the way this practice operated. She insisted on seeing a doctor first. This time, despite being pressured, she didn’t comply. And she did more. She wrote an article for a medical journal condemning the practice of requiring x-rays before seeing a doctor — it was a way to bring in more money via unnecessary tests — leading to changes across the country.

            Another thing that changed Sah was studying the famous Milgram obedience experiments. US psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to see whether US residents would obey instructions to hurt someone else. The idea was to see whether they were any different from the Germans who had carried out the Nazi genocide during World War II. What Milgram discovered shocked everyone. Ordinary people were brought into a lab and told they had to administer shocks to a test subject to get them to learn.

Most of these ordinary people were willing to increase the voltage to the top level, even as the test subject (an actor) was pleading and moaning along the way, and eventually seemed unconscious. Why did these test subjects comply with the scientist overseeing the experiment (also an actor)? Milgram concluded that most people were obedient to authorities, losing their moral agency.

            However, in reading Milgram’s work, Sah noticed something else. Most test subjects showed signs of distress even when they complied. They didn’t just automatically obey. They were tense. Some objected even as they complied. Sah interpreted this to mean that there was an internal struggle going on between what their inner voice was telling them was wrong and what the external authority was telling them to do.

Compliance and consent

Compliance is not the same as consent. Sah uses the medical idea of informed consent, which requires five elements.

• The capacity or competence to make a decision
• Knowledge of the situation
• Understanding of the available information
• Freedom to decide, without pressure
• Authorisation, meaning actively saying yes or no.

When I install new software, I have to tick an “agreement,” which is a long document with lots of technical and legal clauses. Hardly ever do I read it. I comply, but this isn’t informed consent because I don’t fully understand the information provided. And there’s pressure to tick “yes” because otherwise I can’t get access to the software.

            Another example is vaccination. Young children don’t have the competence to decide; their parents choose on their behalf. Some parents study information about vaccines, but many just go along with what their doctor recommends. Often, doctors pressure parents to have their children vaccinated, and some governments mandate childhood vaccination to attend school. It might be for the best, but when parents agree, this is compliance rather than consent. During the Covid pandemic, the issue of consent became personal, and for many workers there was extreme pressure: vaccinate or lose your job. The goal of authorities, for better or worse, was compliance.

            Sah’s focus is on defiance. She defines it this way: “Defiance means acting in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise.” It means saying no when there’s pressure to say yes. When Sah refused an x-ray before seeing a doctor, she was being defiant. When Jeffrey Wigand exposed corrupt behaviour by his employer, tobacco company Brown & Williamson, he was being defiant.

            Wigand is a famous whistleblower. His saga became the basis for a Hollywood film, The Insider, where he was played by Russell Crowe.

Whistleblowers like Wigand are, in Sah’s terms, defiant. But not all whistleblowers are defiant, at least not initially.

            As I read Sah’s book, I thought of “inadvertent whistleblowers,” the ones who stumbled on a problem at work — a discrepancy in the accounts or missing supplies — and innocently reported it to the boss, thinking it would be checked out and fixed. Little did they know that they would become the subject of unrelenting reprisals. Strangely, they were compliant, in the sense of following the rules and expecting problems to be fixed, but still paid the price. Some inadvertent whistleblowers try to acquiesce, but others resist. They become defiant because of the way they were treated.

The stages of defiance

Sah breaks down the process of defiance into five stages. The first stage is a tension or tingling that something might be wrong. This can be when an employee senses that something is not quite right.

The second stage is conscious recognition that there’s a problem. It’s going from a vague feeling to full awareness.

            Sah calls the third stage “escalation,” which can involve talking about the problem with someone else. In Milgram’s experiments, this stage occurs when the “participant” talks back when the experimenter says to increase the shocks to the supposed learner. For employees, it might be talking to others on the job about their concerns — or talking to the boss. The fourth stage is threatening to stop complying, and the fifth stage is an act of defiance.

            For whistleblowing, distinguishing stages 3, 4 and 5 is not always easy. Talking about concerns can sometimes be enough to trigger reprisals. Just asking questions — “Where did these deliveries go?” — might be stage 3, but a boss can treat it as equivalent to defiance. Despite this ambiguity, understanding Sah’s stages can be useful, offering a sort of self-diagnosis about how you are responding to a challenging situation. As Sah puts it, “Many of these stages don’t necessarily look like our iconic images of defiance: that’s the point.”

            In referring to “iconic images,” Sah is thinking of figures like Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move from her seat on a bus in 1955 triggered large-scale resistance to segregation in the US South. Rosa Parks became famous, but most acts of defiance are quiet and little known, such as when a “temporary” employee, after five years of service, is not granted maternity leave and speaks quietly to her boss. Sah’s point is that the stages of defiance are relevant to everyone, including the vast majority of everyday instances.

Compliance, defiance or both?

Defy is an engaging and thought-provoking book. It is a useful reminder that in many cases, compliance and defiance are not the result of careful consideration but rather responses to circumstances, of acting without knowledge and reflection. We often think of compliance being unthinking, but defiance can be too. Think of the teenage boy who rejects his father’s requests simply because they’re coming from his father. This is not what Sah would call a “true no.”

            Sah’s examples made me think of situations involving compliance and defiance at the same time. Think of a climate protest against a fossil fuel development. Some protesters are well informed and are taking action based on their deepest beliefs. They are defiant. But some protesters may be there because they are going along with their friends. They are compliant in relation to their protester friends while being defiant against the fossil-fuel development.

            The same thing can happen on the other side of the climate clash. Some climate sceptics are well informed, having studied the arguments in depth, but others reject what they see as a climate orthodoxy — the view that global warming is serious and caused by human activities — just because they don’t like solar and wind power. They are defiant against climate orthodoxy but compliant with fellow sceptics.

Lying low

Sah argues that we should act in accordance with our values. But that’s not always easy to do, and here’s where she introduces a concept that can be useful to whistleblowers: “conscious compliance.” Sometimes we know something is wrong, and that the right thing is to openly oppose it, yet instead of defying, we comply — because the consequences of defiance are too great. This is what potential whistleblowers often need to do: they need their job, to support their family, to be safe.

            In some cases, lying low and complying can be part of a long-term plan to oppose wrongdoing. Conscious compliance can be temporary, for weeks, months or even years, while collecting evidence and waiting for the right opportunity to take action. This might be called “strategic compliance” followed by “strategic defiance.”

            Sah believes that people can transform themselves through practice to become “moral mavericks” who are willing to speak up in accordance with their values. She says, “Now more than ever, in our schools, in our homes, on our streets, and in the halls of power, we need moral mavericks. We need to encourage them, foster them, celebrate them, and become them.”

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Paula Arvela, Jungmin Choi, Suzzanne Gray and Erin Twyford for helpful comments.

This review appeared in the July 2025 issue of The Whistle.