As someone who devours self-help and psychology books, I found "Defy" to be a refreshing and insightful exploration of why we so often choose compliance over standing up for our values. Dr. Sunita Sah transforms our understanding of defiance from a negative trait into a crucial tool for personal and societal change.

The book's strength lies in its practical framework, particularly the five stages of defiance and the clear distinction between compliance and consent. Using Stanley Milgram's famous 1960 Yale experiments as a foundation, Sah breaks down the forces that push us toward compliance and provides actionable strategies for resistance when our values are at stake.

What sets this book apart is its nuanced treatment of defiance and the introduction of concepts like "conscious compliance" – the idea that sometimes we might choose to comply while fully acknowledging our disagreement, without shame. The five elements of consent (capacity, knowledge, understanding, freedom, and authorization) provide a practical toolkit for decision-making in challenging situations.

"Defy" stands as a valuable addition to my self-help books, offering essential guidance for anyone who has ever felt the pressure to go along with something that didn't feel quite right.

A big thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

If you've ever hesitated to voice a dissenting opinion, or gone along with something out of peer pressure, or wondered after the fact why you didn't speak up or say "no" in an uncomfortable situation, or just want to understand why so many people often stay silent or compliant despite having moral or logical objections, you need to read this book.

In Defy, Dr. Sah blends research and personal insights into a powerful nonfiction work. She explains the psychology and sociology behind why and when people defy or comply, and how those decisions affect them and others, both mentally and externally. Throughout the book, she asks readers to examine their own past moments of defiance or compliance in order be better prepared in the future to practice defiance on their own terms. Dr. Sah stresses the need to regularly consider the questions "Who am I?" and "What does a person like me do in a situation like this?" in order to strengthen our ability to dissent or be defiant in circumstances that do not align with our morals, ethics or knowledge.

With this book, Dr. Sah shows us the importance of large and small-scale acts of defiance to improving our feelings of self-worth, as well as improving the world we live in. She asks readers to step away from the idea that some people are naturally compliant or defiant, and to think of defiance as a skill that can be learned, built upon, and encouraged in others. The action steps to practicing this skill are detailed in each chapter, and compiled in a very helpful appendix and reader's guide at the end of the book. I highly recommend this timely and crucial book to everyone who strives to be better at standing up for their beliefs and advocating for themselves and others.

Defy is not about defiance. To the extent that the book redefines defiance in the table of contents.

The disobedience side of defiance is de-emphasized in trade off with the motivation side. The author defines it as "acting in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise." The book consists of stories of people acting or failing to act in defiance, including some of the author's own. There is some of the psychological research on the topic. Similarly, this includes some of the author's own research.

Defiance is redefined because the author wants to delineate different sorts of defiance, specifically a "true" defiance versus as "false" defiance, until devising a tri-polar system with "conditional compliance" as well. Conditional compliance is in effect compliance without consent. Or at least consent in a dictionary definition. Here, consent is refined to give it a values-focused organization and five-quality bright-line test.

This is a No True Scotsman. But there is some truthiness to it. A list of synonyms for the concept of defiance display a lot of judgy connotations in the word chose. Sort of, as the author points out, how 'obedience' has mostly positive ones.

However, the informal fallacy is the least interesting problem with the redefinition. In getting hung up somewhere in the book's introduction, I feel a bit like the college student stalling for time in class discussion by talking about the cover. But it I cannot escape the pull of the weirdness that this is.

The definition of True Compliance seems closer to a general definition of virtue. Mostly Aristotle, I think. Because, when acting on true values, when would you not be in defiance, seeing as how some sort of resistance is required as a matter of expression of whatever those values would be? As Colman McCarthy said "everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals." You do not abstractly have a True Value, you only have a True Value that is expressed at time it is tested. Effectively, this definition of defiance is about moral character under a specific interpersonal situation, specifically a public one. If honor is defined as what you do when no one is watching, True Defiance is what you do when everyone is.

That is a weird place to draw a line, but whatever happened to authority? Milgram's experiments on the subject centered authority. The mise-en-scène of authority is the principal variable in the experiment, or one at any rate. Milgram played around with the appearance of the situation to create different senses of authority. Here, the concept is diffused, made into pressure, coming from above, below, and laterally. It permits a broader scope of morality tale and anecdote. But I have a much more cynical answer for this, which I will return to later (after Conditional Compliance).

The idea of a True Value is unusual. This is what defiance is supposed to express. This is also the keystone of False Defiance. False defiance is defiance motivated by external values: living someone else's dream. It takes internal reflection and self-awareness to realize the True Values, reflecting "core values and highest principles." Do values do not arise originally out of external values? Did I do it wrong when I didn't build a system of True Values through a series of syllogistic observations about the world? Or what about communal values and communal value systems? Or just the context of values within and without from a group? Even if our values do not derive from others, as resistance is required for the expression of a value, the context matters (eg. murder vs. war). Or do True Values arrive a priori?

Well, they can't be a priori, not without ceasing to be True Values. True Values cannot be Moral Convictions. Moral Convictions can point to true values, and encompass all political and religious allegiance. Moral Convictions are understood by people as facts, whereas values...don't get explained in the context except that they are not a fact-like Moral Conviction. The closest to a swing the book takes is a means/ends test. But if that is the test, then True Values are just intent or motivation, not something related to the character of the action.

For context, this is coming up in a chapter about Clayton Ray Mullins and his post-arrest claims that he didn't really do it. I do not see why not to permit evil values, and assume that his defiance was True Defiance, just evil in intent. If True Values and Moral Convictions are distinct, why do we excuse people for having Moral Convictions not in line with their True Values?

And as it comes to context, the acts of defiance here are mixed. The author gives several examples from her own life. Some are quite moving, particularly those regarding the actions of her parents. Others? Well, the author takes a bold stand against mutual funds. But the author's examples that bookend the book are two instances where she is seeing a doctor when she is having a medical crisis and where the doctor requests a useless test.

"Useless," in this context, means that the author, also a trained physician, does not think that the tests are medically relevant and so should not be done. The first time she acquiesces and allows the useless test to be performed at the doctor's insistence. The second time she refuses, the doctor makes a silly comment, and she gets a JAMA article out of it.

Now, the need for patient advocacy is real, and speaking up in any situation, particularly one where you - by definition - are in some order of physical distress, is difficult. But this defiance is not about values, True Values or otherwise. It is about knowledge. I can make it about values, contort narratives as to why it an expression of True Values, like 'I value my health so the possible downsides of the testing are less important than the minimal chance of a problem that the testing might reveal.' But that is still a knowledge judgement. The author can make a cost-benefit analysis. I cannot.

82.5% of the people in a similar situation would not have the knowledge to know if the doctor was making the right choice. 50.5% of people in a similar situation would think that they have the knowledge, and would be wrong. I do not have the knowledge. I reiterate this because I actually have no basis for judging the author's choice in either situation as correct. The author's statements seem totally reasonable. I have no reason to doubt her, other than a sort of too clever feeling of a published book serving as the 'pressure to do otherwise' from a True Value calculation.

If the author was wrong...well, if the author was wrong is then that is the anecdote that immediately follows the author's first story, that of the engineers at Morton Thiokol before the Challenger explosion. You know, where the engineers could not point to the hard data but loudly expressed their expert intuition on what should be done and were ignored to terrible outcome. Sort of like with the doctors and their test, but not without the bad results.

These are not opposite points, but they do act in contrast. There are other examples of this sort of equivocation in the book presenting two sides on something. Cynically, that's what happens in self-help books. But one of those points, in opposition to the True Values as intent over results, is in the Conditional Compliance chapters, which describes it otherwise.

Conditional Compliance is the best part of this book. Conditional Compliance is compliance in situations where an expression of True Values through True Defiance is too dangerous, or otherwise fraught. It is often a product of structural inequities and traditional sources of racism and other bigotry. The book's starting example is a Black man putting up with a nonsense traffic stop by the police.

Of course, event Conditional compliance is only of limited value there. Even the 'good cop' story of True Defiance by a police officer is a weak inclusion, or an odd one to prove any point. It is an instance where someone is morally correct without being technically correct. Maybe you are supportive of vibes-based policing, but I'd rather the technically correct. It is important for that to be in place when vesting people with authority, like we do with doctors or police officers. Which takes us back to the disappearing authority in the book.

Taking authority out of the question leads to weird results. In that Uvalde chapter. I kept waiting for the book to shift to how the defiance was on the part of the police, in how they didn't act, even in the face of pressure to act by an increasing number of people. With the doctors, I kept trying to apply the book's own logic to their own decisions, which reasonably are created by some sort of social pressure as opposed to a zeal for testing.

The Conditional Compliance chapters are great. This is the part of the topic that - well, I would say deserves more study, but the overall lack of research in the book makes it so that I do not know if that is the case. But what is there is interesting. Milgram's work was not naive to it, but we have a much deeper appreciation for marginalization and hierarchy or the role of intersectionality. Even the questions about and when to resist seem as trenchant as ever.

And in particular as a sort of how-to guide for defiance, the chapters would seem to provide those people in situations who need to use Conditional Compliance (due to whatever immutable characteristic that requires its use) with tools to do so. But are not these people who already understand, who have to understand, this sort of thing to deal with a bigoted society?

I suspect that the answer key there is in the jargon. Along with the terms and terms of art, the book loves formula and chart, you know, like the cone of compliance or the five steps to disobedience, each with their particular iconography. It all gets a bit Understanding Poetry, which is...well, fine, actually. If a taxonomy gets you to tell off a transphobe, the mission is a success regardless of the route taken.

But my suspicion is that it will function to the contrary. This writing is in the grand tradition of the Airport Book, specifically of the MBA at $29.95 a course, with scientific research repurposed as managerial self-help. And when I look at this, and how the different aspects of defiance is dissected, I do not see it being for someone who is going to make a principled stand. I see it as something out to de-fang and diffuse that sort of objection. Did you follow all the necessary steps in escalating your defiance? Have you spent the necessary time in meditation to know that this is a True Value you are expressing?

I see it being used to label someone, giving a way to register an act of compliance without reacting to it. I see how someone would read this to affect showy wokeness, for others, but mostly for themselves, while at the same time avoiding challenges to the system that perpetuates the evils.

So of course authority is erased. The book is for authority. Or people who think that they are in authority. Or want to be. Yet the author here seems capable of so much more than that. The writing itself is charming and spry. I like her stories and each invocation of the crocodile smile positively glows, but the light keeps dying each time under a burden of square-hole-ness. A brief review of her other work, both popular and academic, is just better than this. So I love the topic and want to see more from the writer, but not in this direction.

My thanks to the author, Sunita Sah, for writing the book, and to the publisher, One World, for making the ARC available to me.

It is an excellent look at what it means to push back and say no instead of yes all the time and how it can be viewed as defying others, but in reality, it is not. I found the information helpful. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.