Holding your tongue probably isn’t going to work in this case. If the broken commitment is really bothering you, you’re unlikely to be a good enough actor to hide your feelings. You may try to choke your feelings down, but eventually they’ll bubble up to the surface in unhealthy ways. If you don’t talk it out, you’ll act it out.
An actor named John LaMotta taught us this concept. We had hired him to play the role of a manager in a training video we were producing. During rehearsals he kept turning the rather harmless opening line into an attack. Later we learned that he had assumed that the person he was working with was a “dipstick” because he hadn’t done his job. Consequently, no matter how we directed John (telling him to soften his delivery, drop the anger, etc.), he treated the fellow with disdain. John didn’t stray from the written script, but his negative assumptions found their way into his nonverbal behavior: first his tone, then a smirk, then a raised fist, and so forth. When the director finally told John that the fellow was a hard worker whom everyone liked, John delivered his lines spot-on. He couldn’t change his actions until he changed his mind.
Paul Ekman,[7] a scholar who has studied facial expressions and emotions for 30 years, came to the same conclusion. When people try to hide their feelings or “put on” an emotion, Ekman found they use different groups of muscles than they use to express authentic feelings. For example, authentic smiles of joy involve the muscles surrounding the eyes; false or social smiles bypass the eyes completely. And other people can tell. You can’t hide your real emotions.
There’s more. When you observe a broken commitment, feel bad about it, and then decide to say nothing, your feelings don’t manifest themselves only in your facial expressions and other nonverbal behaviors; they also escape in the form of biting sarcasm, cutting humor, or surprising non sequiturs. For instance, while seated across from his mother at the dinner table, a 29-year-old chronically unemployed son politely tells her that she has “a hunk of lasagna” on her chin. Mom responds with, “Oh, yeah? When I was your age, I had two jobs.” Guess what has been annoying her?
When you’ve gone silent, but your body language keeps sending out hostile signals or you’re dropping hints or relying on sarcasm, you probably ought to speak up.
What Are We Thinking?
Why do we ever set aside pressing problems — hoping they’ll somehow get better? It’s like finding a tub of rancid cottage cheese in the fridge, setting it on the kitchen counter for a couple of days, and then thinking, “Gee, I wonder if it’ll taste any better now.”
Is My Conscience Nagging Me?
Sometimes you don’t hold others accountable because you feel isolated. You see a problem but fear that you’re the only one who cares. No one else shows signs of anxiety. “Now what am I supposed to do?” you wonder. “Why aren’t my healthcare colleagues concerned that we’re not washing our hands long enough?” “How come my fellow accountants are looking the other way when our biggest client violates standard practices?” “How come my neighbors, spouse, and kids don’t think riding in the bed of a pickup is dangerous?” Even though you’re worried — your conscience is nagging you a little — you say nothing.
As we suggested in the Introduction, the fact that people often remain silent despite their best judgment has been studied extensively. In addition to the studies we cited, Solomon Asch[8] created conditions in which people wouldn’t just remain silent when they believed they were at odds with their peers; they actually lied rather than disagree with them. Stanley Milgram[9] replaced peers with authority figures and was able to manipulate the subjects to do more than lie. He got people to shock others to the point where they worried that they might have killed the other persons rather than disagree with the individual in the white lab jacket.
Peer pressure coupled with formal authority can compel people to act against their best judgment. Here’s how it affects accountability discussions: if social pressure can cause people to lie, it can certainly drive people to silence. Pay attention to a nagging conscience — it may be indicating a conversation that you need to step up to.
When you’ve gone to silence and your conscience is nagging you, you probably ought to speak up.
Am I Choosing the Certainty of Silence over the Risk of Speaking Up?
When it comes to deciding whether we’re going to speak up, we kid ourselves into making the same mental math errors. We choose the certainty of what is currently happening to us (no matter how awful it may be) over the uncertainty of what might happen if we said something. This of course drives us to silence, quietly embracing the devil we know, when there’s a good chance that we really should have spoken up. Here’s how this insidious dynamic works.
When we’re trying to figure out if we should speak up, we often envision a horrific failure and immediately decide to go to silence. Then we look for reasons to justify the choice to say nothing. Our reasoning takes place in the following way. We first ask ourselves, “Can I succeed in this conversation?” We don’t ask, “Should I try?” Instead, we ask, “Can I succeed?” When the answer to the internal query is a resounding no, we decide that we shouldn’t try.
Accountability experts take the opposite approach. Only after they’ve decided that the conversation should be held do they ask the question, “How can I do this? Better still, how can I do this well?” If we reverse the order, starting with can and not should, we almost always sell out. We decide to clam up and then justify our inaction.
Our two favorite silence-driving math tricks are (1) downplaying the cost of not speaking and (2) exaggerating the cost of expressing our views.
Downplaying the Cost of Not Speaking
Here’s how we minimize in our own minds the cost of continuing to tolerate the status quo. First, we look exclusively at what’s happening to us in the moment rather than at the total effect. A professor is boring, unfair, and outdated, but why rock the boat? We’ll survive, right? Never mind the fact that thousands of students will be affected over the next two decades of that professor’s career.
Second, we underestimate the severity of the existing circumstances because we become inured to the consequences we’re suffering. With time and constant exposure we come to believe that our wretched conditions are common and therefore acceptable. We continue to work for authoritarian bosses, stay married to people who physically and mentally abuse us, and work alongside people who ignore and insult us because we tell ourselves that it’s not really that bad. It’s just how things are.
Third, as was suggested earlier, we can’t see our own bad behavior when we fail to maintain silence. For example, we think we’re silently suffering under the thumb of a micromanager. In actuality, we act offended when the boss asks for details. We say we know how to do the job, cutting her off when she tries to offer a suggestion. We defiantly choose to do something our way. We miss the fact that our own behavior has degraded. In this case we don’t merely downplay the cost of silence — we miss it entirely.
7
Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003).
8
Solomon E. Asch, “Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments,” in Harold S. Guetzkow, ed., Groups, Leadership, and Men (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press, 1951), 177–190.
9
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).