Is the age of experimenting with different ways of living enjoying a resurgence, or is it now over? In the 1960s, 1970s, and even into the 1980s, such experimentation in utopian living seemed popular as communes, squats and back-to-the-land movements sought not simply to modify existing systems, but to reconfigure the organisation of everyday life. These were explicit attempts to live differently as alternatives to mainstream lifestyles.

Do today’s societies lack either the ambition or the capacity to imagine fundamentally different ways of living? A new book by historian Gregory Claeys suggests that utopian ideas of better lives have either become discredited or have come to feel detached from the practical organisation of everyday life. The question we are therefore asking is a simple but important one: are experiments in different ways of living over, or is it that have they simply become harder to recognise?

It is easy to describe our life as ‘pretty standard.’ Maybe we have a full-time job, a partner, a couple of children, and a house in the suburbs of a major city. Nothing in this description would typically attract the attention of those interested in alternative lifestyles, but if we look more closely, then perhaps a different story unfolds

Childcare may be distributed across multiple households, including an ex-partner and a neighbour, paid in favours. Employment combines formal work with freelance income and informal flexibility. Health decisions move between GP advice, online forums, and social media. Financial arrangements relied on a shifting set of accounts, buffers, and informal agreements.

Hence, whilst from a distance everything looks very conventional, up close almost everything seems quite the opposite. So, are we in fact in a period where we have experiments in everyday living taking place, just that they are hiding in plain sight? And if so, what are the implications for policymakers and marketers who seek to engage with people and drive change?

The label of alternative lifestyles

Claeys sets out how, historically, alternative ways of living have been easiest to see when they are explicit rather than informal and when they have an ideology underpinning them. Communities such as the Shakers or the Amish are good examples of this: they organise life differently, in a very visible way, often in deliberate contrast to the societies around them.

Contemporary analysis follows a similar pattern with thinkers such as Sophie Rosa and Alva Gotby drawing attention to emerging forms of intimacy and care that depart from dominant norms, highlighting, for example, the growing importance of friendship networks, non-monogamous arrangements, and more collective approaches to dependency. Crucially, these are often framed as alternatives: ways of living that are consciously articulated and, in some cases, politically positioned against the ideal of the more familiar notion of the self-contained, independent household.

These contributions are important, not least as they show that alternatives exist. However, this focus perhaps risks introducing a bias, as it tends to focus on what is named and spoken of and, in doing so, risks overlooking forms of change that are absorbed into everyday life without being recognised as such.

Assemblages

A helpful lens to explore everyday alternative ways of living is provided by anthropologist Anna Tsing with the concept of assemblage. These are temporary combinations of various elements including jobs, relationships, bits of knowledge, forms of support, that come together in ways that work, but often only just. They are not stable or centrally organised systems, but arrangements that hold for a time before needing to be adjusted again. Seen this way, contemporary life is perhaps less something people step into and more something they piece together as they go

Work, for instance, becomes a bundle of roles, contracts, and income streams, reflecting the wider fragmentation of labour. Care is distributed across networks of family, friends, and neighbours rather than contained within a single household. Health, meanwhile, is navigated through hybrid forms of knowledge that combine institutional authority with peer advice and informal sources. Intimacy is organised across overlapping relationships that between them produce support, and are not confined to a single relational form.

These arrangements are not designed in advance but are constructed on the go, often under pressure, and are continually adapted as conditions change. They are not only assembled, but also, as anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out, repaired, compensating for absences and working around constraints in ways that allow everyday life to continue.

What drives this?

Claeys would likely argue that this kind of ‘assembled’ way of living only really makes sense once stability starts to thin out. When work is less predictable, services feel patchy, and support systems don’t quite hold, people stop relying on fixed structures and start piecing things together. On this basis, uncertainty and gaps begin to feel like the normal backdrop of everyday life. This is close to what sociologist Ulrich Beck had in mind with the idea of a ‘risk society’: a world in which the management of insecurity shifts away from institutions and onto individuals, who are left to navigate it as best they can (Beck, 1992).

Earlier accounts framed this as a kind of freedom where people were becoming more self-directed, more able to shape their own lives. But for many, it is less about reinvention and more about simply keeping things on track. Again, as Graeber put it in a different context, much of modern life involves making systems that don’t quite work appear as if they do, patching things together, adjusting as you go, filling in the gaps in ways that rarely get noticed.

So, perhaps it is hard to unpick whether these ways of living are chosen, or if they imposed out of necessity. In practice, it’s perhaps hard to separate but surely for most people, necessity comes first. Work is less secure than it once was, housing absorbs more time and income, and public services can’t always be relied on in the same way. The effect is that more of the burden of organising everyday life sits with individuals and the people around them.

But what is striking is how quickly these arrangements stop feeling temporary. Flexible work can feel like independence, even when it started as a compromise, relying on friends or family can feel like community rather than necessity, drawing on different sources of health advice can feel like being informed rather than unsupported. So what begins as ‘making do’ can, at least in part, become something people come to value. What begins as ‘making do’ can, over time, become something people come to value, even as the constraints that produced these arrangements continue to shape what is possible.

Historical perspective

A longer historical perspective helps us to better understand this moment. As Claeys demonstrates, alternative ways of living have rarely begun with fully articulated blueprints. Instead, more often, they emerge as practical responses to conditions that are no longer workable, gradually stabilising into recognisable systems.

The Shakers, for instance, did not begin with a complete design for communal life. Their practices developed incrementally, in response to the tensions of late eighteenth-century religious and social conditions. Early followers of Ann Lee were facing instability in both their religious beliefs and everyday lives, particularly around issues of property, sexuality, and social hierarchy that existing institutions were struggling to manage.

Celibacy wasn’t simply a starting principle but emerged as a way of managing concerns around desire and spiritual discipline. Collective ownership grew out of economic insecurity, while gender equality reflected both belief and the practical realities of living closely together. These practices were worked out over time, each responding to a different pressure, rather than being designed as part of a single, coherent system.

A similar dynamic can be seen in the Amish. Rather than rejecting modernity outright, Amish communities have historically engaged in a process of selective adoption, continuously negotiating which technologies and practices can be incorporated without undermining the cohesion of the community. Decisions about electricity, transport, or communication are evaluated in terms of their effects on relationships, authority, and community boundaries. What appears, from the outside, as a fixed or conservative way of life is, in practice, an ongoing process of calibration.

This pattern extends beyond religious communities. Nineteenth-century cooperative movements in Britain, for example, saw workers pooling their wages to open shared shops, set fair prices, and gain more control over what they bought and sold, practical responses to the instability and exploitation of industrial capitalism. Early kibbutzim operated in a similar spirit, organising farming, childcare, and decision-making collectively in order to manage the economic and social uncertainty of their surroundings. In each case, everyday practices were worked out in situ before being codified into more stable institutional forms.

Not all such experiments become recognised as alternative ways of living. As Saidiya Hartman shows in her account of early twentieth-century Black women in urban America, experimentation has often taken place outside formal institutions and without recognition as such. The ‘beautiful experiments’ she describes were not organised as utopian projects, but emerged as everyday responses to constraint.

These experiments took involved the organisation of daily life. Women left exploitative domestic service to live with friends or lovers, pooling income and sharing space in ways that challenged both economic dependence and social expectations. Households were reconfigured, sometimes temporarily, around friendship, desire, and mutual support rather than marriage or family obligation. Relationships themselves were treated as open to negotiation, rather than fixed by convention, allowing space for autonomy in contexts where it was otherwise limited.

These were not stable arrangements, nor were they recognised as legitimate alternatives. They were often precarious, subject to surveillance, and vulnerable to breakdown. Yet they represented deliberate attempts to live differently within the constraints imposed upon them, ways of carving out freedom, however partial, in environments that offered little of it.

Across these examples, we can start to see that later appears as a coherent way of living is, in fact, often the endpoint of earlier experiments. Those practices that proved workable were repeated and gradually formalised.

What distinguishes the present, then, may not be the absence of such experimentation, but that many of these arrangements remain in this earlier phase, emergent and not yet stabilised into recognised forms.

Today’s alternative lifestyles

The alternative ways of living, or assemblages, that characterise contemporary life often seem to remain fragmented and temporary. They do not seem to consistently coalesce into shared visions or collectively recognised alternatives but remain dispersed across individuals and networks, unevenly held together and only partially stabilised.

We can consider the possible reasons for this. First, drawing on the notion of Liquid Modernity, we can see that the conditions of contemporary life are more fluid and less territorially bounded than they once were. Historical communities were able to consolidate in part because they were geographically and socially contained. Today, mobility makes this containment more difficult, as individuals move between roles, relationships, and environments with greater frequency. This makes it harder for practices to stabilise into fixed forms.

At the same time, contemporary assemblages are entangled with market systems that both might, on the one hand, enable them but more likely will absorb them. Practices that emerge as responses to constraint are quickly commodified, reframed as lifestyle choices, and reintegrated into existing economic structures, limiting their capacity to develop into autonomous systems. For example, practices such as mindfulness, now packaged through apps like Headspace, began as informal ways of coping with stress but have been absorbed into the market and reframed as tools for individual optimisation.

Digital infrastructures enable coordination, but they also allow people to assemble highly individualised styles of work, care, and identity without requiring collective alignment. What might once have become shared practice instead remains distributed, even when widely experienced. For example, remote work, enabled by platforms like Zoom and Slack, is widely undertaken, but each organisation and individual assembles their own version rather than collectively agreeing on a single model.

The result, it seems, is not the absence of experimentation, but an abundance of it, just that it lacks consolidation. If earlier assemblages stabilised into ways of life, contemporary ones seem more likely to remain in motion and are rarely allowed to settle.

Seen in this light, contemporary life is not lacking in alternatives so much as saturated with them, only in dispersed and often unrecognised forms. What we are witnessing are not fully formed utopias, but micro-utopias: situated attempts to make life workable under conditions where inherited models no longer hold.

What might policymakers and marketers be missing?

If experiments in new ways of living have not disappeared but instead become dispersed and embedded within everyday life, then the challenge is not simply to identify them, but to recognise them for what they are. This has important implications for those seeking to engage with people and shape behaviour.

Policy makers, in particular, tend to work with relatively stable models of how life is organised. Households are treated as coherent units and individuals as decision-makers. Yet the reality is that things are far less contained. Care is distributed, decision-making is shared or negotiated, and responsibility is often spread across informal networks. Interventions designed for neatly defined individuals or households can therefore miss how life is actually lived, failing to connect with the structures people are already relying on.

A similar issue applies to marketing. Much contemporary marketing still assumes relatively stable identities and lifestyles, targeting individuals based on fixed segments, life stages, or clearly defined needs. But if people are assembling their lives across multiple roles and relationships, these categories begin to blur. The same person may be a parent, a carer, a freelancer, and a patient, moving between these positions over the course of a week. Messaging that assumes coherence can therefore feel out of step with lived experience.

But perhaps even more fundamentally, both policy and marketing are in danger of misreading adaptation as deficiency. When people rely on informal care, draw on multiple sources of health advice, or piece together income streams, these behaviours can be framed as problems to be corrected. Yet they are often pragmatic responses to conditions that are not easily changed – which means that interventions that seek to ‘fix’ behaviour without recognising the context that has generated it risk undermining the very systems that allow people to cope.

There is a case that instead we require a shift in perspective. Rather than asking how to move people from one stable behaviour to another, the question becomes how to support the arrangements people are already ‘assembling’. This may involve designing for networks rather than individuals, recognising the role of informal systems, and engaging with the realities of constraint rather than assuming idealised conditions.

It also requires a different way of seeing. If contemporary alternatives take the form of micro-utopias, albeit they may be partial and provisional, then they will not always be visible as movements or clearly defined segments. Instead, they will be found in the work people do to make life function in the arrangements they build, the compromises they make, and the ways they hold things together.

The challenge is that these are not immediately identifiable. Recognising them requires more effort, looking beyond stated identities and formal structures to the practices through which people actually organise their lives. Without this shift in attention, experimentation is easily mistaken for conformity.

Conclusions

It seems that we can make the case that experimentation in ways of living is far from over. Instead, what has changed is its form: where earlier periods produced visible, collective alternatives, our current period is characterised by dispersed and often unrecognised experimentation embedded within everyday life.

Unlike historical utopian projects, these do not seek to stand apart from society or establish clear boundaries between inside and outside. Instead, they are embedded within existing systems, adapting around them rather than replacing them. They are rarely explicitly named as alternatives and seldom stabilise into shared doctrines or institutions. Instead, they remain partial and provisional, lived before they are articulated, and often without ever being recognised as something distinct.

Contemporary society is often described as lacking shared visions of the future. Yet this may reflect a limitation in how change is perceived. People are not simply moving from one system of living to another but are assembling lives from multiple, overlapping elements, adjusting them over time in response to shifting conditions. The most significant experiments in how to live are not always the ones that boldly state their presence, but those that take shape within ordinary life, quietly reshaping it while preserving the appearance of continuity.

There has been a sharp increase in political deepfakes: AI-made images and videos that often mix politics with eye-catching visuals and money-making content. These include AI-generated ‘ordinary’ people placed into political scenes, as well as manipulated depictions of public figures.

At one level, this development appears to confirm a familiar concern. If synthetic media becomes sufficiently realistic, we may struggle to distinguish fact from fake – and if this is the case, then we perhaps will be persuaded by arguments based on malicious and misleading information.

However, with a behavioural lens, we can also make the case for a more complex dynamic. As media academic Daniel Schiff set out, this sort of material can have an impact even when it is recognised to be fake, as is often the case; it simply ‘feels true’. Which raises a different set of questions. Rather than asking whether individuals can detect fakes, perhaps we should consider why synthetic content becomes meaningful to people and how it might influence behaviour, even in the absence of people literally believing it.

From epistemic judgement to affective alignment

Conventional explanations of misinformation typically assume that we evaluate content primarily in terms of accuracy. On this basis, the problem is one of misclassification: false information is mistakenly treated as true.

But deepfakes complicate this notion as engagement with synthetic content does not depend solely, or perhaps even primarily, on their perceived accuracy or authenticity. Instead, deepfakes arguably function through affective and identity-based alignment: they resonate with existing beliefs, our personal ethics, or group identity, and, in this way, acquire a legitimacy that is not about factual correctness. This is consistent with research on motivated reasoning and identity-protective cognition, where we selectively accept information that is congruent with what we already believe.

In some way, then, deepfakes are reflecting our underlying beliefs, attitudes, sympathies, and emotions, making them visible. The codes, signals and symbols that normally operate in the background are brought to the surface in a very salient way. Surely this means we can see more clearly the mechanism for the way authority is generated, how identity is signalled, and how meaning is assembled.

Synthetic media as expressive infrastructure

If we view deepfakes this way, perhaps we can see that they are not isolated pieces of deceptive content but part of a wider expressive ecosystem. They share similarities with memes, satire and other symbolic forms that circulate within digital culture. For all of these, their role is not primarily about evidence (fake or otherwise) but communicative: they often translate complex beliefs and narratives into condensed, legible formats that can be rapidly interpreted and circulated. This reinforces how they operate less as claims to be verified and more as signals to be recognised.

A useful parallel is the political cartoon. During the early 19th century, British caricaturist James Gillray repeatedly depicted Napoleon Bonaparte as a tiny, petulant figure, most famously in “Maniac Ravings, or Little Boney in a Strong Fit” (1803), where he is shown thrashing wildly in a padded cell. The image was not intended to be an accurate representation, but to condense a broader political narrative: that Napoleon was unstable, dangerous, and illegitimate.

A similar approach appears in wartime propaganda, where the British “Careless Talk Costs Lives” posters of World War II did not depict real events but depicted exaggerated scenarios, such as eavesdropping enemies lurking behind everyday conversations. These were designed to make abstract risks visible and memorable.

Going even further back, medieval religious imagery functioned in much the same way. Relics such as fragments of the “True Cross” or illustrated icons of saints were not always verified as ‘real’ in any modern sense, but they were treated as meaningful because they made belief tangible and present.

Deepfakes follow the same logic, but with an important difference: they use the visual grammar of reality itself. The example of AI-generated personas makes this clear. For example, images of fictional women in a military context circulate widely online, despite the way that details often do not hold up to scrutiny – uniforms are incorrect, and the scenarios are implausible.

But clearly, what matters is not plausibility but composition, as the images form a tight cluster of cues centred on sexuality, authority, and nationalism, all within a single, highly understandable frame.

Non-binary belief and the persistence of influence

It feels, at times, that a key policy concern about deepfakes is that belief in their message is binary: we either accept or reject a claim made by a deepfake, which means that exposing content as false should reduce its impact.

However, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that belief is less a binary true-false and more often provisional: we might both be dubious about the claim in a deepfake, yet still find it meaningful or worth sharing.

This aligns with what philosopher Daniel Dennett describes as “belief in belief”, as well as sociological accounts of how individuals maintain multiple, sometimes contradictory, commitments. These positions suggest that belief is often less about arriving at a settled judgement of truth and more about maintaining a workable orientation to the world. People may hold onto ideas not because they are fully convinced, but because those ideas feel right, are socially reinforced, or simply support a broader worldview they are invested in.

In practice, this means we have a looser relationship to the notion of truth that might be assumed. We rarely stop to determine whether something is definitively real or fake, but instead, we move through the world holding things lightly.

Correlation is not causation

Recent work has begun to make more assertive claims about the role of synthetic media in shaping real-world events. Beatriz Lopes Buarque and Nick Lewis, for example, argue that algorithmically amplified visual content, including AI-generated imagery, likely fuelled episodes of unrest by increasing the visibility and emotional salience of conspiracy-driven narratives. Their analysis points to a compelling mechanism: highly affective visual content travels further, is prioritised by engagement-driven recommendation systems, and can intensify collective responses.

There is substantial evidence supporting these underlying dynamics. Emotionally arousing content is more likely to be shared and diffused through social networks, while platform algorithms tend to privilege engagement over accuracy. Visual material, in particular, has been shown to produce stronger and more immediate emotional reactions than text, increasing its persuasive and mobilising potential. Taken together, this body of work makes it entirely plausible that synthetic visual content could contribute to the escalation of collective behaviour.

However, identifying a plausible mechanism is not the same as establishing causation. As Zoë Adams, Magda Osman and Björn Meder caution, much of the evidence in this space remains observational, relying on patterns of co-occurrence between content exposure and behavioural outcomes. While these patterns are suggestive, they do not demonstrate that the behaviour in question would not have occurred in the absence of the content. This is a longstanding challenge in the study of media effects, where exposure is rarely random and is instead shaped by prior beliefs, social networks and platform dynamics.

Indeed, individuals are more likely to encounter and engage with content that aligns with their existing views, a process of selective exposure. At the same time, homophily within social networks means that like-minded individuals cluster together, making it difficult to disentangle whether behaviours are driven by the content itself or by the characteristics of the groups in which it circulates. What appears as influence may, in part, be reflection.

From this perspective, the relationship between deepfakes and real-world behaviour may be better understood as one of amplification within an already active system, rather than direct causation. Synthetic media may well heighten visibility, sharpen narratives and accelerate diffusion, but it typically does so in environments where the underlying sentiments and conditions are already present.

Recent policy responses reflect a strong emphasis on detection and removal. For example, the UK Electoral Commission has launched a pilot system to identify and track deepfake content during elections, focusing on misleading material such as fabricated candidate statements or false claims about electoral processes. This approach is understandable, particularly where content poses a risk of direct deception. However, this arguably reflects a relatively narrow model of influence that assumes the primary problem is the circulation of false information.

At the same time, the Commission itself notes that deepfakes have not yet “meaningfully affected” a UK election, despite widespread exposure to misleading content. This highlights an important distinction: visibility and concern do not necessarily translate into measurable behavioural impact. On this basis, perhaps this reinforces the need for caution in attributing causal power to deepfakes alone and suggests that their influence may be better understood as part of a broader set of informational and social dynamics.

Implications for interventions

Of course, these dynamics challenge much of the received wisdom in behavioural science, given that it focuses mainly on detection, labelling or debunking. Because if content spreads through alignment, identity and meaning, then correcting factual inaccuracies will have only a limited behavioural impact.

This echoes broader debates within behavioural science about the limits of information-based interventions. Simply providing better facts or clearer signals of accuracy assumes that people are primarily motivated by truth-seeking. The evidence here suggests something more complex.

A more realistic approach would be to instead engage with the conditions under which content becomes meaningful and shareable. In practice, this begins to look quite different:

Working with narratives, not just facts: Rather than only correcting false claims, interventions could focus more on offering alternative narratives that are equally compelling. We see this in areas like vaccine uptake, where campaigns that centre on personal stories and lived experience often outperform purely statistical messaging. The same logic could apply to synthetic media: instead of simply flagging a deepfake as false, an intervention might counter it with a more compelling narrative that reframes the issue in human terms. The competition is not just over accuracy, but over which story travels.

Targeting social contexts and networks: If content spreads through social affiliation, then interventions need to work through those same channels. Research shows that targeting influential individuals within networks can shift norms and behaviours at scale. In practice, this might mean working with creators, moderators or highly connected users within specific communities who can model alternative ways of engaging with content.

Designing for friction and reflection: Prompts that encourage users to pause and consider the accuracy of content before sharing have been shown to reduce the spread of misinformation. During election cycles, some platforms have introduced warnings or prompts before resharing political content. With deepfakes, similar approaches could involve surfacing information about how an image was generated or prompting users to reflect on its source. The goal is not perfect judgment but interrupting automatic amplification.

Building alternative repertoires of participation: Finally, if deepfakes serve as a means of participation, interventions could offer alternative ways for people to participate. Rather than simply discouraging engagement, this might involve helping people to create formats that allow users to express identity, humour or political stance without relying on misleading or synthetic content. This could include counter-memes, participatory campaigns, or community-led content that reshapes norms from within. And, as behavioural economist Cass Sunstein suggests, participation in online political behaviour is often driven as much by opportunities for expression and affiliation as by information.

Taken together, these interventions can shift the emphasis from correcting information to shaping the environments and sensemaking frameworks within which information is encountered. The task is not simply to help people distinguish true from false, but to understand how content becomes meaningful, how it travels, and how those dynamics can be redirected.

Conclusions

Our engagement with information is never purely evidence-based. Research has consistently shown that the way people interpret and act on information is shaped by identity, social norms, heuristics and context, not just accuracy alone. But perhaps what synthetic media does is expose this more clearly – we can see more clearly how people use information, not just to understand the world, but to navigate it, to position themselves within it, and to connect with others.

In doing so, deepfakes challenge models that treat truth as a straightforward input to behaviour, in which better information leads to better decisions. Instead, they point to a more ‘situated’ view of behaviour, in which meaning is constructed collectively, and perception, interpretation, and action are bundled together.

For behavioural science, this means the task is not limited to understanding how individuals process information or how biases distort judgment. Instead, it is about understanding how our shared realities are assembled through social interaction, how they are stabilised within networks, and how they become actionable through shared narratives and symbols, such as deepfakes. In a sense, then, deepfakes are not simply a problem to be corrected or contained; they are a signal of a wider changing knowledge environment.

A couple of weeks ago, on our family WhatsApp chat, my mother said she was filling up the car with petrol, ‘just in case’. War in the Middle East appeared imminent, and there was a chance it would hit petrol supplies before long. This is familiar behaviour for her, from years of living in the countryside, where if you did not have something, it was a twenty-mile round-trip to buy it. And memories of being snowed in for weeks plus the oil crisis of the 70’s meant that ‘being prepared’ was a family mantra. I ignored this myself, but then the following week did exactly the same.

There was nothing to suggest any concern at the petrol station - deliveries were arriving, there was no official shortage, and it was no busier than usual. The price of petrol had gone but not by all that much.

But we know that fuel crises rarely begin with the empty pumps. Instead, they start with behaviours like those of my mother and myself - small changes in behaviour, each individually sensible, but when done by many people, it’s destabilising. Systems are not only disrupted by external shocks but are instead gradually reconfigured by people’s behaviour in response to these shocks. Behavioural science captures this through the concept of adaptive purchasing behaviour (APB), defined as changes in consumption in response to perceived or anticipated scarcity. This framing matters because it moves away from the misleading language of ‘panic’ and instead recognises these actions as reasonable attempts to manage uncertainty.

The critical issue, therefore, is not only whether there is enough fuel due to events in the Middle East, but how behaviour evolves once the possibility of shortage becomes socially real.

Anticipation, timing, and the reorganisation of demand

It is clear that we respond not only to objective conditions but also to expectations about future availability: I am not buying petrol now because there is a shortage, but I anticipate there will be one in the future. And these expectations are formed through a complex environment of signals rather than through formal information alone. We are exposed to price movements (have prices gone up, by how much?), media tone is there a sense of alarm, impending doom?), expert commentary (what is the analysis of shipping volumes), peer behaviour (the fact my mother filled up her car got me thinking), and everyday observation (does the petrol station seem busier?) combine to create the sense of a trajectory, if where the situation is probably heading. This means that behaviour often shifts not when people know there is a shortage, but when the possibility it becomes plausible enough to warrant precaution.

This anticipatory dynamic has been observed before, of course. During the early stages of the COVID, pandemic, purchasing behaviour peaked in advance of formal restrictions, indicating that we respond to perceived futures rather than confirmed realities. In fuel markets, this temporal shift is particularly consequential, as consumption is flexible in timing: drivers can bring forward demand by refuelling earlier than necessary to reduce perceived future risk. What emerges is not an increase in total demand in the immediate sense, but a redistribution of demand over time. This places pressure on systems designed for steady throughput, creating bottlenecks that can resemble or precipitate genuine shortage.

The significance of this reorganisation can often be underestimated. Policy and industry tend to focus on aggregate supply and demand, but behavioural shifts operate at the level of timing, not just volume. When millions of individuals act to secure access earlier than they otherwise would, the system experiences a surge that it is not configured to absorb. The result is that the perception of risk begins to materialise as operational strain.

Despite this being well understood by analysts and policymakers, a persistent public narrative is that shortages are driven by extreme behaviour, by a minority of people hoarding resources. The evidence contradicts this perspective - data from the pandemic show that demand spikes were mainly the result of modest adjustments distributed across large populations rather than dramatic over-purchasing by a few. We did not typically buy excessive quantities of single items; instead, we added a few extra items to baskets, shopped slightly more frequently, or brought forward purchases we would have made later.

This phenomenon, often described as ‘accidental stockpiling’, is critical to understanding fuel dynamics. In this context, drivers do not need to store large quantities of fuel to destabilise the system.

Social amplification and the construction of crisis

To understand how these behavioural shifts escalate, it is necessary to move beyond individual decision-making and consider the broader environment in which those decisions are made. The social amplification of risk framework suggests that risks are not merely communicated but are interpreted, intensified, and transmitted through social systems, including media, institutions, and interpersonal.

In the case of fuel shortages, amplification occurs through the interaction of multiple signals. Media coverage frames the situation, perhaps emphasising urgency or instability. Price increases provide a tangible sign that conditions are getting worse. Visible cues, such as queues and petrol stations that have run out, translate abstract risk into lived experience. These signals reinforce one another, producing a cumulative effect in which the perceived severity and immediacy of the situation increase.

In fact, research demonstrates that exposure to scarcity cues increases purchasing behaviour, but also real-world data reinforces this dynamic. The UK fuel shortages of 2021, characterised by high visibility and widespread queues, produced a substantial increase in demand, whereas less visible disruptions in 2022 did not generate comparable behavioural responses. The underlying conditions may be similar, but the behavioural outcomes differ according to how those conditions are perceived and verified.

Crucially, amplification is not simply about the volume of information but about its interpretation. As signals accumulate, they shift how individuals understand the situation. We start to see risks as more personal, more immediate, and more critical, which means the threshold for behavioural change lowers, meaning that the situation can rapidly escalate.

Lived adaptation

While much of the literature on shortages focuses on demand spikes, emerging evidence suggests a broader pattern of behavioural adjustment. Many individuals are not increasing consumption but actively restructuring their everyday practices in response to rising prices and constrained supply.

Reports from multiple countries show people reducing discretionary travel, grouping journeys, switching transport modes, and cutting domestic energy use. Others are heating fewer rooms, substituting fuel sources, or abandoning heating altogether where costs become prohibitive. These behaviours reflect constraint rather than excess, shaped by affordability, infrastructure, and necessity.

This reveals a dual dynamic. Some individuals bring consumption forward, contributing to demand spikes, while others ration and reduce use, often at significant personal cost. Adaptive behaviour is therefore heterogeneous, shaped by resources and context. Those with greater flexibility can adjust more easily, while others face trade-offs between essential needs.

From price shock to supply constraint

A critical question is whether the current energy disruption represents a continuation of recent crises or a qualitatively different form of risk. Much of the behavioural evidence on shortages comes from contexts where overall supply remained largely intact, but distribution bottlenecks and demand synchronisation created the appearance of scarcity.

However, energy operates differently. It is not simply a consumer good but an input into production systems. Disruptions to oil and gas supply can propagate through the economy via increased transport costs, reduced fertiliser production, and constraints on energy-intensive agriculture.

There is evidence that fertiliser production is particularly sensitive to energy prices and that agricultural systems are highly dependent on fuel inputs. During the COVID pandemic, global oil demand fell by approximately 18–20 million barrels per day, reflecting an unprecedented contraction in activity. By contrast, current disruptions are framed in terms of constrained supply rather than reduced demand, suggesting a different form of system stress.

The distinction is important because systems respond very differently to falling demand than they do to falling supply. When demand collapses, as in 2020, goods still exist in sufficient quantity. So, the system has slack; the problem is that consumption has dropped away.

Of course, when supply falls, slack disappears. But demand does not fall at the same rate as availability does, meaning the system is forced to adjust through higher prices, reduced access, and strained distribution.

So while initially shortages are driven by behaviour, by people bringing forward purchases or reacting to signals, it becomes one where the system itself imposes limits. Behaviour no longer just reveals scarcity; it begins to operate within it.

This has a range of implications: large urban centres depend on continuous inflows of goods sustained by complex logistics networks. Fuel disruption places pressure on these systems at multiple points, affecting transport, packaging, and distribution. As costs rise and uncertainty increases, suppliers may adjust their behaviour, prioritising local markets over more distant urban centres.

This introduces the possibility of geographical fragmentation, where goods remain available within the system but are no longer evenly distributed. Such dynamics have historical precedent, where shortages have emerged not from an absolute absence of supply but from failures of distribution.

From a behavioural perspective, these structural pressures interact with demand dynamics. Early signals of scarcity trigger adaptive purchasing, which further strains distribution systems already under pressure. The result is a non-linear escalation in which behavioural and structural dynamics reinforce one another.

Policy failure and the limits of communication

Policy responses to shortages have traditionally relied heavily on communication. Governments issue reassurances, provide updates, and encourage calm behaviour. While necessary, this approach rests on an assumption that behaviour can be stabilised through information alone.

Evidence suggests this assumption is limited. Under conditions of social amplification, communication becomes one signal among many. Where communication is perceived as weak or unclear, visible signals quickly dominate, fuelling behavioural escalation. Moreover, communication strategies can inadvertently amplify risk, particularly where they signal loss of control or fail to align with lived experience.

If shortages are co-produced by behaviour, then managing them requires more than communication. Government responses will need to combine communication with structural interventions that shape how demand and supply interact.

Evidence from Thailand illustrates how these dynamics play out in practice. Policymakers debated the role of price signals, recognising that suppressing prices may reduce incentives to conserve fuel, while gradual increases can distribute adjustment across the system. At the same time, businesses optimised logistics, governments diversified supply sources, and policies promoted alternative fuels.

More broadly, resilience approaches emphasise demand management, transparency, and preparedness measures that reduce the likelihood of sudden behavioural shifts. These interventions operate upstream, shaping the system within which behaviour occurs rather than attempting to correct behaviour after the fact.

This reflects a broader shift in behavioural public policy towards integrating behavioural insights with system design and structural intervention.

Collective responses and the politics of price

Much of the analysis of fuel crises assumes that public response will take relatively predictable forms: reduced consumption, substitution, or precautionary purchasing. Yet history suggests that behaviour under conditions of sustained pressure does not always remain within these boundaries. Under certain conditions, responses can become collective, organised, and explicitly political.

The Gilets Jaunes movement in France provides a contemporary example. Initially triggered in 2018 by planned increases in fuel taxes, the protests rapidly expanded into a broader expression of discontent over living costs, inequality, and perceived disconnection between policymakers and everyday life. What began as a response to fuel prices evolved into a sustained national mobilisation, with road blockades, demonstrations, and widespread disruption. Fuel, in this case, acted as a focal point for deeper tensions around fairness and economic burden.

Similarly, the UK fuel protests of 2000 demonstrated how quickly disruption can escalate when supply, price, and legitimacy intersect. Protests against rising fuel duties led to blockades of oil refineries and distribution depots, resulting in widespread shortages across the country within days. Crucially, the speed and scale of disruption were not solely the result of reduced supply, but of how quickly distribution networks and consumption patterns adjusted under pressure.

These examples echo earlier forms of collective action, such as the autoriduzione movement in 1970s Italy, where groups of workers and households resisted price increases by collectively refusing to pay higher rates for essential goods and services. Across these cases, a common pattern emerges: when essential goods become more expensive under conditions of perceived unfairness or constraint, behaviour can shift from adaptation to contestation.

From a behavioural perspective, such responses can be understood as an extension of the same dynamics discussed earlier. Social amplification not only increases perceptions of scarcity; it can also amplify perceptions of injustice. Rising prices, visible inequality in impact, and uncertainty about how costs are distributed across society can create conditions in which collective action becomes more likely.

Importantly, these responses are difficult to predict using conventional models. They do not follow directly from price signals or supply constraints, but emerge from the interaction of economic pressure, social coordination, and moral judgment. As such, they represent a form of non-linear behavioural escalation, in which the nature of response shifts qualitatively rather than simply intensifying.

The implication is that public behaviour in fuel crises cannot be assumed to remain within the bounds of individual adaptation. Under sustained strain, responses may become collective, coordinated, and contested. The system is not only subject to pressure from consumption patterns, but from challenges to its perceived legitimacy.

Conclusion

What this reveals is a limitation in how behavioural science has typically approached problems of this kind. Much of the field has been built around understanding individual decision-making, such as the way we all respond to information, incentives, and choice environments. But the dynamics that are rapidly moving in our direction do not sit neatly at that level. Instead, they emerge when behaviour interacts with systems that are themselves under strain.

In these contexts, behaviour is not simply something to be influenced after the fact. It is part of the system’s operating logic. Small shifts in timing, perception, and expectation can reorganise demand, alter distribution, and, under certain conditions, begin to reshape the material reality they are responding to. The boundary between perception and outcome becomes less clear. Behaviour does not just follow events; it brings them about.

But just as importantly, behaviour does not remain confined to adapting to shortages. Under sustained pressure, it can become collective, coordinated, and political. As pressures intensify, questions of access, fairness, and burden-sharing become more visible. Behaviour shifts from managing personal exposure to contesting the terms of the system itself. This has significant implications for behavioural science. Interventions that focus narrowly on correcting individual behaviour are unlikely to be sufficient where outcomes are driven by collective dynamics and contested legitimacy.

Perhaps a more useful approach is to treat behaviour as something that unfolds across networks: this means paying attention to timing, visibility and to coordination. It also means engaging more directly with the political dimensions of behaviour: how people interpret fairness, how they respond to perceived imbalance, and how collective responses emerge under shared conditions of strain.

For behavioural science, the task is therefore not only to better predict individual decisions, but to understand how behaviour scales, aligns, and becomes organised. This involves moving beyond models that assume stability and compliance, towards approaches that can account for feedback, non-linearity, and contestation.

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The response to the recent meningitis B (Men B) outbreak in Kent, in the UK, bore a striking resemblance to the early behaviours we saw during Covid. Students stopped going to lectures before guidance required it, mask-wearing reappeared, parents questioned whether their children should attend secondary school, and doctors and pharmacies experienced a surge in people seeking guidance for what seemed like relatively minor symptoms.

These are not responses that medically align with meningitis, a disease that, while serious, spreads through close and prolonged contact and is usually managed through targeted intervention, such as contact tracing, antibiotics, and vaccination, rather than widespread behavioural change. The pattern of response, therefore, seems, in many ways, out of step with the nature of the disease.

It is tempting to interpret these behaviours as disproportionate or as evidence of sensitivity and anxiety in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. However, what we saw in Kent is not simply a reaction to meningitis, but an interpretation of meningitis as something that resembles, however partially, the early stages of a situation that previously escalated in ways that were both unexpected and disruptive.

To understand this, it is necessary to move beyond what is arguably a narrow focus on risk perception and instead consider the role of ‘collective memory’ in shaping behaviour. The key issue is not whether people understand the nature of meningitis as a disease, but how they make sense of an unfolding situation under uncertainty. In these conditions we will draw on available information to make sense of the situation, and we would argue, among the most powerful of these is our collective experience.

Collective memory as a framework for anticipation

Conventional approaches to memory often treat it as a system of storage and retrieval, whereby individuals access previously encoded information in response to relevant cues. While this perspective remains influential, it is insufficient for explaining behaviour in situations such as the Kent outbreak. A longer tradition in psychology and sociology suggests that memory is not a passive repository but an active, reconstructive process. Frederic Bartlett demonstrated that recollection is shaped by existing schemas, with individuals transforming past events in order to render them coherent within familiar frameworks. Maurice Halbwachs extended this insight to the collective level, arguing that memory is socially organised and embedded within shared narratives.

Building on this tradition, social psychologist Cristian Tileagă sets out the way that collective memory is not only about remembering the past, but about anticipating the future. It acts as a resource through which individuals, but also groups, anticipate possible futures. Using what has been called ‘mnemonic imagination’, elements of past experience are reactivated and recombined in order to interpret the present and project forward.

This perspective seems very relevant in ambiguous situations, where information is incomplete, and people do not simply wait for clarity but instead draw on existing narratives to make sense of what is happening and to anticipate what might follow. Behaviour, on this basis, is determined not only by what is known, but by what is considered possible based on prior experience.

COVID as a dominant narrative template

Arguably COVID has provided a powerful template for this process as it unfolded as a recognisable sequence: initial uncertainty, followed by the accumulation of evidence, delayed recognition of scale, and eventual widespread disruption. This temporal-based structure has likely become embedded in public consciousness, not necessarily as an explicit spoken model, but as a tacit framework through which we assess new events.

In the case of the Kent outbreak, early reports of meningitis cases were not interpreted solely in terms of their immediate clinical significance related to meningitis B. Instead, they were situated within a broader (COVID) narrative of potential escalation. The initial ambiguity surrounding the outbreak – the inevitable fragmented information, uncertainty about transmission, and the presence of severe outcomes- all seemed congruent with the early stages of the pandemic. As a result, people may have begun to interpret the situation not only in terms of what it was, but in terms of what it might become.

This shift from present-oriented to future-oriented interpretation is important as behaviour was not simply a response to the current state of knowledge, but to the anticipated trajectory of the situation. The question implicitly guiding action was not limited to ‘what is meningitis?’, but extended to ‘where could this lead?’. In this way, behaviour is better seen as anticipatory rather than reactive.

Importantly, this does mean that people are confused. Rather, it reflects the application of a familiar narrative template to a new situation. The present is being understood through recognition of a pattern, even if that pattern is only partially applicable.

From anticipation to collective behaviour

The anticipatory interpretation of the outbreak is closely linked to the social nature of behaviour. Research on behaviour in emergencies, particularly by Stephen Reicher and colleagues, suggests that the public’s responses to crisis are typically structured by shared identity rather than individual panic. By this, he means we act in relation to others, we align our behaviour with perceived norms and expectations.

This was likely evident in Kent. Behaviour such as withdrawing from lectures or seeking reassurance is unlikely to have been formed in isolation, but instead emerged within a shared social environment in which information and concern were circulating. In this sense, responses may reflect not only individual judgement but the influence of others’ perceptions and actions, consistent with research on the social organisation of behaviour in uncertain contexts

And COVID reinforced this collective orientation. It showed us that behaviour in response to uncertainty is not merely a matter of our own independent judgement, but of shared interpretation. For instance, mask-wearing emerged and spread before formal mandates were introduced, as we took cues from the behaviour of others and from shifting social norms, rather than acting purely on official guidance. Once a particular narrative begins to take hold, such as the possibility of escalation, then behaviour can change rapidly as people align themselves with that emerging understanding.

This has very practical consequences. The increased demand for primary care services reflects not only individual concern but also how responses build collectively. Behaviour, in this way, becomes a system-level rather than an individual phenomenon.

Blurring distinctions and shifting expectations

The application of a COVID narrative template also contributes to a blurring of different types of health threat. From a biomedical perspective, the differences between meningitis and COVID are clear. But for most people, these differences may be less significant than shared features such as uncertainty, severity, and the potential for rapid deterioration.

In this context, the categorical boundaries between conditions become less stable. Distinctions between a localised outbreak and a systemic crisis may not be so clear, not because individuals lack knowledge, but because they are operating through narrative forms that prioritise what something looks and feels like, over technical differentiation. As Tileagă suggests, past experience is drawn upon to interpret present uncertainty, resulting in these different phenomena of meningitis B and COVID being understood through a similar lens.

This coming together is reinforced by the still unresolved status of COVID: its consequences remain visible in ongoing policy debates, public inquiries, and continued uncertainty around issues such as long COVID and healthcare pressure. Its meaning continues to be negotiated across institutions, media, and in everyday conversation. As a result, it has a high degree of salience as a reference point, which also shapes expectations of the response it merits.

One of the most direct examples of this is how, during the pandemic, the scale and visibility of measures were unprecedented. Governments implemented wide-ranging measures, and public health became a central feature of everyday life. So it is not a leap to suggest that this experience has altered the baseline against which subsequent responses are evaluated.

In the context of the meningitis B outbreak, where interventions are more targeted and proportionate, this can give rise to a perceived mismatch, as there is an expectation that disease threats warrant large-scale responses. When this is absent, it can be interpreted as insufficient action, even though it reflects an appropriate assessment of the situation.

At the same time, not all behavioural responses shaped by COVID-era memory are misaligned with the underlying risk. In some cases, the same anticipatory logic appears to generate actions that are more directly relevant to disease control. For example, reports from across the UK suggest a sharp increase in demand for the MenB vaccine following the outbreak, with some pharmacies struggling to meet requests. While this surge in demand may exceed current public health recommendations, it nonetheless perhaps reflects a form of precautionary behaviour that aligns more closely with the mechanisms through which meningitis risk is mitigated.

In this sense, the influence of collective memory is not uniformly distorting; it can also channel behaviour in ways that are directionally appropriate, even if not always proportionate.

Implications for communication in a post-pandemic context

These dynamics are a significant challenge for public health communication. Traditional approaches assume that providing accurate, context-specific information will lead to proportionate behavioural responses. However, this assumption rests on the idea that individuals interpret information in relation to the present situation alone.

In reality, interpretation is mediated by collective memory, where information is filtered through a narrative shaped by COVID. As a result, communication is not simply about conveying facts, but about engaging with the ‘interpretative context’ in which those facts are received.

This requires a more explicit approach to differentiating between Meningitis B and COVID. It is not enough to set out that meningitis is less transmissible than COVID; instead, communication must actively reposition the present situation in relation to the past, making clear how the underlying dynamics differ. At the same time, it is necessary to acknowledge the legitimacy of concern, given the severity of outcomes associated with meningitis.

In addition, communication needs to address expectations of response. The pandemic has altered perceptions of what constitutes appropriate intervention. Public health messaging must therefore articulate not only what actions are being taken, but why those actions are proportionate to the nature of the threat. Without this, there is a risk that targeted responses are perceived as inadequate.

Finally, we suggest that communication must engage with the social nature of behaviour. Responses to risk are shaped through interaction and shared interpretation, meaning that effective communication must extend beyond individual messaging to consider the networks through which understanding is formed and reinforced.

Collective memory is a useful means by which we can articulate how we navigate our relationship among past, present, and future. The implications of this for a post-pandemic context are writ large with the meningitis B outbreak, setting out the implications for public health. This must address not only the biological characteristics of the disease, but also the collective memory landscape that determines how the disease is understood.

Generation Z, (or ‘Gen-Z’), commonly defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, are often referred to as the ‘snowflake generation’, characterised as unusually fragile, lacking resilience when faced with difficulties. Alongside this, rising rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among young people appear to have reinforced this perception. Explanations are often around topics such as overprotective parenting, too much exposure to social media or simply a broader decline in social discipline.

However, as we shall set out, this view typically relies on a notion that fragility is mainly an individual attribute and that we should all be able to maintain mental resilience in the face of a wide range of conditions. But this is a generation that came of age during an ‘age of danger,’ a period of climate emergency, technological disruption, economic precarity, and political volatility. And this raises a fundamental question: what if the emotional patterns we attribute to generational ‘weakness’ are in fact a rational response to the instability we see in the world?

To explore this possibility, we need to challenge the often unspoken assumption that runs through much of behavioural science: that humans function as atomised, sealed entities. We instead make the case that we are, in fact, much more porous to the world around us. What might look like fragility is not simply emotional vulnerability, but the signs of heightened sensitivity to unstable or demanding environments. We make the case that it is not a fixed trait but a condition that emerges from the interaction between individuals and the increasingly unstable systems they inhabit.

We will also set out the case that fragility has an overlooked value: it can serve as an early warning signal of the ways in which the environments and institutions we have relied upon are under strain. It is also the basis on which new ways of living are developed. And it is the younger generations, most exposed to these strains, from whom we have most to learn.

How early adaption looks fragile

To start our examination of fragility, we can look at the way societies adapt when confidence in the structures and institutions that were the scaffolding for their functioning starts to weaken. Anthropologist Anna Tsing writes about the way this leads communities to develop new ways of organising within what she calls ‘capitalist ruins’. In these environments, she sets out how people frequently ‘assemble’ smaller, more flexible networks of cooperation that allow them to operate within the conditions of uncertainty that inevitably arise. So rather than relying on stable institutional structures, people piece together temporary forms of organisation through short-lived alliances and informal, distributed networks of support

In his book, aptly named ‘The Ruin Dwellers’, Historian Jake Smit sets out how the historical precedents for these sorts of adaptations can be found in the countercultural movements that emerged in post-war West Germany. In the decades following the Second World War, the Federal Republic experienced rapid economic expansion and political consolidation. Whilst the so-called Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, at the time created a narrative of stability and progress, Smit sets out how critics in the 1960s and 1970s believed the prosperity rested on shaky foundations. Politically, many younger citizens questioned how much democratic transformation had really taken place, given the continued presence of individuals and practices associated with the previous authoritarian regime. At the same time, the environmental consequences of the rapid industrial expansion, such as polluted rivers and deteriorating air quality, began to challenge the notion that growth could continue indefinitely and was an unquestionable ‘good thing’. Many also criticised the social effects of consumer capitalism, arguing that rising prosperity often produced alienation rather than community or social participation.

Taken together, these concerns led many in the counterculture to question whether the apparent stability of industrial society was as secure as it appeared. But rather than simply criticising existing institutions, Smit sets out how many activists began experimenting with alternative ways of organising everyday life. This included cooperative housing projects, communal living arrangements, ecological agriculture, and experimental cultural spaces developed in abandoned buildings and spaces in neglected urban districts, outside the core infrastructures of the post-war economic system.

These environments were referred to as Zwischenräume, or ‘in-between spaces’, that is, between established institutional structures, which are neither fully inside nor entirely outside dominant systems. Of course, these initiatives appeared fragile and unrealistic as they were small, improvised, and lacked the permanence associated with established institutions. But perhaps it is this apparent fragility that also allowed them to function in the uncertainty. Because these communities were not organised around institutional frameworks that had been developed over time (and therefore hard to deviate from), instead, they could adapt more easily to changing circumstances. Their fragility was, in fact, their feature and strength, not a bug.

Smit describes these ‘ruin dwellers’ as people who believed that their experiments were not simply acts of protest but thoughtful efforts to develop ways of living within landscapes they saw as increasingly uncertain.

This illustrates an important point: adaptation often begins at the margins of established systems, where those who perceive instability first experiment with alternative arrangements. Because these responses emerge before institutional change becomes unavoidable, they typically appear fragile or eccentric to those still invested in the stability of the existing order.

We could make the case that a similar pattern is visible today. Younger generations are increasingly experimenting with decentralised forms of economic and social organisation. So cooperative digital platforms, community-owned housing initiatives, and distributed creative collectives have grown in prominence as alternatives to traditional institutional structures. For example, research on the emerging platform cooperativism movement documents efforts to build digital services owned and governed by the people who use them, rather than by external investors or corporate executives. The aim is to retain the efficiencies of digital platforms while distributing ownership and decision-making more collectively among participants.

At the same time, many contemporary movements that operate through digital platforms, especially those involving younger participants, tend to organise through loose, distributed networks rather than centralised leadership structures. This makes it possible to mobilise quickly, coordinate campaigns across locations, and maintain flexibility as circumstances change.

But an understanding of why the apparent fragility of people might be key to these sorts of changes requires reconsidering a deeper assumption that often goes unquestioned: the idea that human beings function as separate, autonomous ‘units’. If the social experiments described above emerge from sensitivity to environmental instability, then we must ask how and why such sensitivity arises in the first place.

To answer that question, we need to delve into what we know about the nature of human subjectivity itself.

A history of the fragile self

Historians have also shown that the era we live in today, in which we assume the self is sealed and autonomous, is, in fact, historically unusual. Historian Peter Brown’s work shows that people in the late Roman and early Christian worlds did not imagine the individual as a contained psychological unit. Instead, the self was understood as open to flows of influence; emotions could move through communities and disturbances in collective life were thought capable of entering the body and shaping inner experience. On this basis, rituals and communal activities were not simply moral exercises, but techniques designed to regulate the currents passing through communities.

On this basis, psychological disturbance was rarely seen as an internal failing, as it is today, because the cause would be located in the wider social or spiritual atmosphere rather than within the individual alone. Emotional life was understood more relationally than individually, with a troubled mind flagging disturbances in the wider environment, such as a conflict within the community or the pressures of political upheaval.

But from the Enlightenment of the late 17th century onwards, political theory increasingly encouraged a notion of the individual as autonomous and self-governing. Figures such as Descartes emphasised rational selfhood and personal autonomy. Over time, this vision of the self influenced cultural expectations about psychological maturity - in other words, to be an adult meant demonstrating emotional control, independence, and the ability to remain steady despite the wider turbulence of the world we might be inhabiting.

If earlier societies were correct in recognising the way we are all entangled with our environments, then this more modern demand for impermeability places us in a difficult position. Information, social cues, and collective moods still move through communities and shape individual experience, and yet our culture today often insists that we should remain unaffected by these forces.

But while there may be philosophical arguments and related cultural expectations about the porousness of humans, we need to understand the behavioural evidence, to which we now turn.

The behavioural backbone to fragility

There is, in fact, a vast literature in sociology and social psychology documenting the extent to which our well-being, beliefs, and behaviours depend on relationships with others. These perspectives collectively suggest that emotional and cognitive responses are not simply internal states but emergent properties of shared social systems. Under conditions of instability, these systems can amplify perceptions of risk and uncertainty, shaping how individuals experience the world. Yet despite this extensive work, much of traditional behavioural science continues to portray decision-making as primarily an individual cognitive process.

Influential models of judgement and decision-making, popularised through the work of Daniel Kahneman, for example, often frame behaviour as the product of internal information processing occurring within the mind of a single decision-maker. While these models acknowledge that individuals may be influenced by social context, the underlying assumption remains that cognition itself is located within the boundaries of the individual.

Philosophers and cognitive scientists have more recently argued that many forms of knowledge and reasoning are in fact distributed across groups rather than contained within individual minds. Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach describe this phenomenon as the ‘division of cognitive labour.’ In complex societies, individuals rely extensively on the expertise and understanding of others, with no single person possessing the knowledge required to navigate modern life independently. Instead, communities collectively generate and maintain bodies of knowledge that individuals can draw upon as needed.

As Sloman and Fernbach observe,

‘Humans are the most complex and powerful species ever, not just because of what happens in individual brains, but because of how communities of brains work together’

From scientific research to everyday practical knowledge, much of what individuals believe depends upon shared cognitive infrastructures maintained by social groups.

Going a little further back, social psychologist Serge Moscovici’s theory of social representation argues that societies develop shared frameworks that enable individuals to make sense of unfamiliar or complex phenomena. These representations circulate through conversation, media, and institutions, gradually shaping how groups collectively understand the world. Rather than forming beliefs independently and then sharing them with others, we often participate in the creation and reinforcement of shared cognitive maps.

More recent research in social psychology has extended this perspective by examining how beliefs and behaviours spread through social networks. Betsy Paluck and colleagues have shown that attitudes and norms often diffuse through communities via influential social actors rather than through purely individual persuasion. We frequently look to trusted peers or respected figures to interpret ambiguous situations, particularly when navigating complex or uncertain environments. As a result, shifts in belief can occur not simply because we independently revise our views but because social networks collectively reinterpret events.

Paluck’s work highlights the importance of ‘social referents’, people whose behaviour signals what others in a community consider acceptable or legitimate. When these adopt new attitudes or practices, the shift can ripple outward through networks, reshaping collective norms. This process highlights the extent to which beliefs and emotional responses are embedded within shared social systems rather than confined to individual cognition.

Seen in this light, we can see how our beliefs and emotional responses are permeable to the cognitive and interpretative structures of the groups to which we belong. Ideas move between individuals, becoming stabilised through social interaction rather than through solitary reflection.

This has important implications for understanding fragility. If emotional and cognitive life is deeply embedded within collective systems, then shifts in shared representations, such as those about the future and risk, can quickly reshape how individuals experience the world. Under these conditions, what appears as individual fragility may instead reflect the dynamics of shared mental ecosystems. Fragility, in this sense, becomes less a property of individual psychology than a signal emerging from the collective mind.

The ‘Coddling’ thesis and its blind spots

Despite these explanations that examine the structural basis for fragility, a widely influential account instead attributes this primarily to changes in childhood socialisation. Jonathan Haidt’s notion of ‘safetyism’ argues that modern parenting practices and educational settings shield children from risk and emotional discomfort. According to this notion, declining opportunities for unsupervised play and increasing adult intervention discourage young people from developing the resilience that was once cultivated through childhood experimentation. As Haidt put it:

”Human childhood is a kind of mammalian childhood. All mammals need to play to wire up our brains. And we need to play in certain ways -- a lot of physical activity, running around. Pretending to be predators, pretending to be prey. All of that. So kids need to do a lot of that in order for their brains to develop normally through adolescence.”

So this argument draws partly on developmental psychology. Children often acquire coping skills through repeated exposure to moderate challenges such as negotiating conflicts or managing minor injuries. When these experiences diminish, the argument is made that people may struggle to calibrate responses to stress later in life.

While this certainly has some appeal, some critics have suggested that the coddling thesis risks overstating the role of parental behaviour and underestimating broader structural transformations. Parenting practices themselves are shaped by social environments, not simply by cultural preference. And rising inequality, educational competition, not to mention the increasing legal liability of institutions, have all led to shifts in childhood supervision.

In addition, the environments facing younger people differ significantly from those experienced by previous generations. Opportunities for low-stakes risk may have declined (e.g. decline in youth clubs in the UK for semi-supervised space), but exposure to high-stakes uncertainty has surely increased substantially. For example, adolescents and particularly girls now have to navigate digital reputation where social feedback occurs continuously and publicly.

The ‘coddling’ thesis, therefore, appears to sit within a longer tradition of explaining social strain in psychological terms. Yet a wide range of contemporary research suggests that rising sensitivity among younger generations is better understood as a response to changing structural conditions.

Evidence from public health and economics links rising distress to long-term shifts in inequality and economic security. In parallel, research on digital environments shows that the effects of social media are small, variable, and strongly mediated by prior vulnerability, rather than uniformly harmful. Meanwhile, sociological work demonstrates how modern governance increasingly frames distress as an individual psychological issue, even when its drivers are systemic.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest that what is often described as fragility may instead be a reasonable response to environments that have become more complex, uncertain, and demanding. On this basis, Gen Z’s experiences highlight the widening gap between inherited expectations of stability and the realities of living within rapidly transforming environments.

Conclusion: Fragility as a diagnostic signal

The idea that Gen Z are uniquely fragile misses something important about how social change works. Rising emotional sensitivity reflects not just how people are raised but also the conditions they live in. Humans have always been shaped by their environments, so rather than asking people to toughen up, it may be more useful to look at the kinds of worlds we are asking them to navigate.

In many ways, people are already responding. As institutions struggle to provide stability, individuals and communities are finding new ways to support each other: these are often smaller, more flexible, and built around uncertainty rather than long-term security.

Seen this way, what looks like fragility may actually be part of a wider process of adaptation and, in fact, is what adaptation feels like from the inside. This shifts how we think about generational change. Fragility is not simply a sign of decline but can point to the way that people are beginning to live differently in response to changing conditions.

In this sense, there is much to learn from this generation as they are the part of our society navigating these conditions most directly. Understanding how they are developing ways of living that are better suited to uncertain, disrupted environments is surely important for society as a whole.

Some of my most frustrating moments have been when I feel I know my facts of a topic pretty well, but somehow, when discussing with someone who has a different perspective, I fail to make my case, even though they don’t seem to have as good a grasp of the detail.

Surely it is most of us who have been in this position where, despite feeling strongly about an issue, we are challenged by someone who seems to have a very persuasive argument as to why we are wrong! In the heat of the moment, despite knowing the facts, we struggle to find an effective response and are left with an uncomfortable feeling that we have somehow been outmanoeuvred.

This is perhaps writ large in the way that a particular style of political figure has become increasingly familiar on university campuses, presenting themself as defender of open debate. They invite passers-by to challenge them, insisting that they are simply creating space for free exchange. Naturally, this looks like democracy working well, the ‘public square’ where the best case wins. But if we look at the format more carefully, we can see that the exchanges are often not about a mutual exchange of views to arrive at the best possible answer, but are instead designed simply to win the argument at all costs.

Of course, persuasive communication is nothing new – but in an environment which is concerned with misinformation, perhaps we need to be alert not just to ‘what’ people say but ‘how’ they say it.

If it is hard to spot the techniques people are using to win arguments (regardless of how strong their case), then surely spotting a ‘fake argument’ is just as important as spotting ‘fake news’. And it has been argued that the skills to do this are often embedded in institutions rather than simply an individual characteristic.

So what does this mean for how we understand and tackle misinformation? And more widely, what lessons does this have for public debate generally?

Back to ancient Athens

To help us unpack what is going on, we first need to head to fifth-century BCE Athens, where ‘Sophist’ teachers travelled between city-states to offer instruction in the art of persuasion. These were highly educated figures, trained in the art of arguing either side of a case with fluency and precision. They, in turn, trained the young elites in how to win public debates, succeed in courts, and navigate civic life.

Philosopher Plato’s objection was not that these Sophists were necessarily wrong, but that persuasion had become detached from truth. The goal was not to discover the underlying truth to a question, but to simply secure victory. This meant that argument became a tool for dominance over one’s opponent, rather than to arrive at a mutual understanding. In some ways, then, Sophistry was not simply about cleverness but power with the tools of the trade to maintain it being the capability of arguing to win.

We might consider that things have not changed all that much, judging by the book Excellent Sheep, in which William Deresiewicz suggests that today’s elite educational institutions often place greater value on students learning to present positions persuasively than on intellectual exploration. Success, he suggests, depends on winning the argument rather than working out the best outcome, and the skills to achieve this are more likely to be found in powerful institutions.

Not just what you say but how you say it

We can see the ‘art of the argument’ as simply a form of persuasive communication; the behavioural sciences have long documented the mechanisms through which people are influenced. For example, psychologist Robert Cialdini wrote the 1984 book on persuasion and marketing, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, based on three ‘undercover’ years spent applying for and training at used-car dealerships, fundraising organisations, and telemarketing firms to observe real-life situations of persuasion. Using this research, he suggested that influence is based on six key principles: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. Cialdini’s principles suggest we are influenced not only by arguments but by who delivers them, how many appear to endorse them, and how costly it would be to dissent.

And a similar set of principles has been termed ‘truthiness’, referring to the feeling that something is true because it feels right. Comedian Stephen Colbert popularised the term satirically, but the underlying psychology is well-documented. Claims that are familiar, easy to process, coherent, or visually supported are more likely to be judged accurate.

But perhaps we can make the case that these are different to a ‘Sophist’ approach: Cialdini’s persuasion research identifies general mechanisms of influence, ‘truthiness’ identifies metacognitive cues that shape perceived accuracy, ‘sophistry’, by contrast, is less a psychological tendency and more a practice. We can characterise it as the intentional deployment of techniques to win an exchange, often regardless of how well the underlying claim is supported.

The distinction is important because persuasion and truthiness describe what we see as vulnerabilities or ‘deficits’ in audiences; Sophistry, on the other hand, describes strategies adopted by speakers. So this is not simply about how our minds err, but it is about how communicative environments are shaped.So what do these strategies actually involve?

The subtle mechanics of modern sophistry

Whether in ancient Athens or in the modern day, Sophistry rarely relies on outright falsehood. More often, it operates through moves that are technically defensible yet can reshape our perception of an issue.

One common mechanism is category stretching: expanding a concept in ways that increase its impact. Take the word ‘violence’: in everyday language, it usually refers to physical force. Yet in some contexts (mostly academic and activist), it is extended to include speech, exclusion, or structural harm. Within those frameworks, the move makes sense - language and institutions can cause real damage.

But broadening the term also brings the associations of physical harm into new areas, which has the effect of making disagreement feel less like debate and more like an actual injury. So while nothing has been fabricated, what counts as ‘violence’ has been changed, taking its emotional and political charge with it.

A second mechanism is anchoring through magnitude. Large numbers exert disproportionate influence, which means that when headlines announce that a policy will ‘cost £10 billion’ or ‘save 100,000 lives,’ the number quickly becomes a reference point in our minds. Even if the figure is provisional or model-based (and therefore subject to assumptions), it shapes how everything is then judged. Smaller adjustments can feel very minor next to a large anchor.

We saw this during the early stages of COVID, when high-end mortality projections circulated widely: these scenarios were built on assumptions and designed for planning. But once these large numbers entered public debate, they quickly became psychological landmarks and were difficult to replace with more realistic figures.

Closely related is catastrophic framing. Losses feel larger than gains, and negative information attracts more attention. A headline warning that a reform will ‘collapse the system’ or that a cultural trend is ‘destroying society’ travels further than one describing incremental change.

Finally, there is strategic ambiguity, phrasing that might carry broad force but has a much narrower technical meaning. For example, a government might describe a policy as ‘evidence-based,’ meaning evidence informed the decision, but this does not mean that it determined it. So whilst the phrase is defensible, it carries much more weight in the public’s mind than it merits.

Of course, any of us can deploy these moves in everyday conversation. But returning to an earlier point, their wider impact depends on status. It is those in positions of power, such as within elite universities, policy bodies or corporations, who have the reach and influence to redraw categories at scale, introduce anchors that stick, and set the tone of public debate.

When these techniques are then amplified through media and embedded in policy, they do more than win an argument. They reshape the basis on which arguments are conducted.

The sophistry to misinformation pathway

Drawing these strands together, first, we can see, therefore, how Sophistry begins to look uncomfortably close to what we call misinformation. A ‘fake argument’ which is rooted in form is not so different from ‘fake news’ rooted in content. Both can mislead. The difference lies less in whether something is technically false, and more in how it shapes understanding.

In addition, the dominant image of misinformation as fringe social media content with incorrect ‘facts’ may be misleading. Research suggests that exposure to outright false content is often limited - on that basis, it would appears that large-scale public misunderstanding cannot be explained solely by ‘fake news’ circulating at the margins. Which then raises a more unsettling possibility. If distortion frequently operates through ‘fake arguments’, then it may have a broader impact than ‘fake news’.

Consider the kind of abuse many women in public life face online. A journalist publishes an article and is met not with direct factual rebuttal, but with insinuation: perhaps screenshots are circulated out of context, her tone is dissected, old posts are resurfaced as evidence of a supposed ‘pattern.’ No single claim needs to be fabricated, instead, ordinary behaviour is reframed as proof of instability or hidden motive.

This is not fake news in the narrow sense of a demonstrably false statement, instead the narrative encourages audiences to infer guilt while preserving plausible deniability. And because the distortion lies in implication rather than inaccuracy, it can escape traditional fact-checking frameworks: this is, in our terms, a ‘fake argument.’

Second, researchers and commentators have begun to recognise that misinformation can operate within mainstream institutions themselves. This has been described as ‘elite misinformation’: technically defensible claims emerging from respected bodies that nonetheless cumulatively mislead. This is not a case of these institutions necessarily intentionally setting out to mislead (although there are famous examples of this, of course), but institutions are often structurally rewarded for winning arguments.

An example comes from economic policy, where governments frequently describe spending packages as ‘fully funded’ or ‘cost-neutral’ - much more attractive than suggesting something will cost money. However, the calculations to get to this may rely on long-run growth projections or behavioural assumptions that, whilst technically modelled, are highly reliant on a set of fairly bold assumptions. So, although the claim is not fabricated, it rests on modelling choices which may or may not come to pass – and yet the confidence of the presentation of the data can exceed the robustness of these assumptions.

Another example is from the private sector, where a company might label a product as natural’ because it contains plant-derived ingredients, and yet the manufacturing process might be highly industrial. So again, the term is legally defensible, but its everyday interpretation is much wider.

If these two points are right, that ‘fake arguments’ are a form of misinformation and that this is not confined to fringe actors but the institutions at the heart of society, then we need to carefully consider the ways in which we move the discussion forward.

What do we do about this?

Misinformation is traditionally understood primarily as a cognitive problem (people not being able to distinguish what is ‘fake’), which means the remedies typically centre on correcting citizens. We improve media literacy, teach critical thinking, debunk false claims, and inoculate against manipulation. But if distortion is at least partly institutional, then we cannot confine ourselves to correcting individual cognition.

This has at least three implications.

• First, interventions should move beyond teaching people to spot false content and instead help them recognise misleading forms of argument. This requires a more sophisticated approach than the simple ‘fact-checking’ style of truth-versus-falsehood dichotomies.

• Second, behaviour change efforts should account for the way in which the information is communicated - do the assertions reflect the information fairly and effectively?

• Third, and perhaps most importantly, behavioural science must involve itself with institutional design. If organisations are rewarded for ‘winning arguments’ regardless of the pursuit of the best outcome, these problems remain.

That’s not to say the current remedies do not tackle this at all, but what is given prominence in the debate and is a focus of where the intervervention efforts fall may well need to better reflect these points.

Conclusions

Perhaps the most significant but most difficult task in tackling this issue is cultivating wider societal norms that value fair arguments. This means slow discussion, allowing revisiting of definitions, and embedding claims in a lived context. This may do more to counter distortion than reactive correction alone.

And this is where grass roots activity of talking to people, connecting with their concerns, countering arguments that are overstated and so on is much needed. We could perhaps see this in action in the recent UK by-election win by the Greens – a victory that some have attributed simply to talking to people. As political commentator Grace Blakely put it:

“Their campaign did not treat voters as passive recipients of a polished messaging strategy, but as participants in a shared political project. Campaigners showed up on doorsteps across the constituency to listen, as much as to talk.”

A lesson for political parties, for sure, but a wider lesson for all institutions, is that it is not sufficient to win the argument. Instead, it is the hearts and minds of people that need to be won to drive effective change.

A while ago, I met a fairly well-known person at a wedding and tried to make small talk. He looked at me, scanned the room, spotted someone much more important and interesting to talk to, and quickly made his excuses. I was slightly wounded but soon forgot about it! A year or so later, I unexpectedly bumped into him again at a party. This time, he made a beeline for me. I sensed there was no one else available to talk to. He then spoke about himself and his achievements for the best part of an hour before I made my excuses and left. During the conversation, the only questions he asked were the kind designed to establish his authority and importance over me.

It is obviously the height of bad manners to comment on someone else’s manners but I knew the hosts well enough to subsequently ask what they thought about him. “Yes,” they said, “he is really arrogant, but he was so nice to me when my father died.”

And that seemed to matter disproportionately. That single act of kindness appeared to outweigh the pattern, softening what might otherwise have been seen as simple self-importance, reframing the rest. In dating, this is known as ‘breadcrumbing’, offering just enough warmth or attention to keep someone engaged without changing the broader pattern of inattention and lack of care. We will borrow that term (and call it ‘behavioural breadcrumbing’) to describe this phenomenon outside of the dating context.

This is a curious phenomenon and surely carries much wider implications than it might first appear. What might look like a small bias in how we judge people can also be a much wider pattern in how we evaluate power, allowing moments of kindness or warmth to reassure us over the wider (and arguably more important) patterns that likely demand accountability.

Leaders who govern in an autocratic manner but appear kind or empathetic at key moments can retain legitimacy or be forgiven after a carefully timed act of compassion. The issue is not that such gestures are necessarily fake but that they are deemed enough. And this means that policy fades into the background and that performance comes to the front.

The behavioural science of breadcrumbing

So what explains this pattern? Arguably, the dynamic is based on contrast effects in the social nature of perception, which suggests we do not look at personality traits in isolation but instead compare behaviour against expectations and the surrounding context. When someone who seems self-absorbed performs a kind act, it stands out precisely because it is unexpected. And once it feels meaningful, it can have a halo effect on how we see the person, as we treat the good act as evidence of their ‘true’ character. If a self-centred colleague publicly supports a junior at a key moment, we don’t just register the gesture, but we start to create a wider narrative about that person. In other words, we think, ‘If they can do that, they must be fundamentally decent.’

Acts that appear costly, whether generosity, artistic creation, or some form of sacrifice, are read as especially revealing of character. Research on signalling suggests that when people appear to incur visible effort, we tend to treat it as evidence of sincerity and trustworthiness. Public generosity in particular can enhance status and reputation, as we tend to interpret it as proof of underlying virtue.

How this plays out culturally

Arguably, we can see how this works at a cultural level in the film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. William Shakespeare is portrayed as largely absent from the domestic sphere, while his wife Agnes carries the daily weight of childcare. Agnes is not unreasonably angry about his absence from domestic labour, reflecting the way that domestic and emotional labour are essential but undervalued.

When their son dies, Agnes is struck down with grief, but Shakespeare continues to be absent. We subsequently discover he has been writing Hamlet, presented as a highly emotionally charged processing of the grief of his son’s death. Shown in a public forum, this play appears emotionally costly and culturally transformative. Grief is transformed into art, something that appears demanding and visibly ‘expensive’, thereby acquiring moral significance.

That imbalance travels well beyond the story and Hamnet: work that produces visible artefacts, measurable outcomes or cultural prestige is easier to narrate as sacrifice. It appears intentional, effortful and transformative. By contrast, the steady work of supporting others is often treated as ordinary, despite it being foundational.

The gendered nature of breadcrumbing

There is a highly gendered dimension to this pattern, of course. Visible achievement to which moral credit is attached has historically been more accessible to men. By contrast, the labour of care has more often fallen to women. The domestic and emotional labour sustains households, organisations and institutions, but rarely attracts recognition in the way that public achievement does.

This means that occasional but public and symbolically resonant acts will overlook the background ‘hidden’ work that makes it possible in the first place. The question is not whether kindness or creative achievement matter but whether we are willing to examine the standards by which we assign value and whose work those standards quietly privilege.

Implications for behavioural science

For behavioural change work, the implications are surely that if visible gestures carry disproportionate weight, then symbolic acts may well be mistaken for substantive change. Public commitments, empathetic speeches or one-off initiatives can generate reputational credit that outpaces underlying behaviour.

This creates a risk in many settings, but particularly organisational ones. Leaders may receive recognition for isolated displays of virtue, but the everyday reality for those affected by their decisions remains unchanged. And this distortion is not neutral, as public statements and visible leadership have historically been more accessible to men. By contrast, the labour of actually maintaining culture and sustaining continuity has more often fallen to women and is less likely to generate moral credit.

The behavioural challenge, then, is not to produce more moments, but to reshape patterns. Effective behaviour change depends on structural support. And this means designing environments in which sustained conduct, including the often invisible work of care and maintenance, accrues recognition and status, if we wish to avoid behavioural breadcrumbing.

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For much of the last decade, marketing has been organised around a simple behavioural assumption that if friction were removed, then behaviour would follow. The mantra was: make it easier, faster, and seamless. If people do not act, the diagnosis is usually that there is still too much effort (or ‘friction’) somewhere in the system.

But is there a case to be made that this logic is now outdated? Perhaps it made sense at a time when digital systems were new, unevenly accessible, and often difficult to navigate. Because while this context meant that reducing friction removed real barriers to action, today we can question whether it still fits the conditions we now face. It seems our problem now is not access, but saturation. Content is everywhere, prompts are constant, and attention is pulled in too many directions at once.

This means that while we see more than ever, perhaps we process less. If we are in a state of automaticity brought about by ‘frictionless’ environments, then perhaps, for example, we recognise brands without forming attachments, we comply with prompts but do not commit to decisions. In other words, while exposure is high, meaning is thin.

One cultural response to this seems to be the rise of the ‘analogue bag’. These are everyday bags deliberately packed with physical activities such as crosswords, novels, sketchbooks, knitting, or magazines. The idea is that when the impulse to scroll appears, something else is immediately to hand. People are not relying on willpower, apps, or digital self-control tools but changing the environment around them through physical alternatives that interrupt automatic behaviour at the moment it occurs.

Seen this way, the analogue bag is less a lifestyle quirk and more a practical response to environments that move too fast and demand constant reaction. It reflects a broader desire to reintroduce friction, not as an obstacle, but as a support for attention, judgment, and agency.

Against this backdrop, we are seeing what might be described as a sensory shift. There are many examples of renewed interest in physical, tactile, and embodied forms of communication, including print, packaging, in-store environments, and out-of-home media. And while this can often be framed as nostalgia or resistance to digital progress, that interpretation perhaps misses the point.

We make the case that the shift is less about rejecting technology than about how human cognition behaves under conditions of overload and what happens when systems become too efficient for their own good.

Living on autopilot

The overriding feature of today’s digital environments is less persuasion and more the ambition of encouraging routinised behaviours. Digital systems are encouraging fast, intuitive responses, leveraging cognitive processes that prioritise speed and efficiency over deliberation. Whilst this encourages scanning, clicking, dismissing, and moving on, behaviours that are adaptive in high-volume environments, this is less well suited to reflection and deliberation. So while this type of processing allows people to function in complex environments without cognitive exhaustion, it is also conservative. It tends to reinforce what is already familiar and habitual rather than opening space for reconsideration or change.

This distinction matters because more substantive behaviour change requires people to pause, reconsider, and update their understanding of what they do and why – the antithesis of conservative. Behaviour change relies on slower, more deliberate thinking, which is harder to sustain in environments designed for constant throughput rather than reflection, an idea Herbert Simon captured when he argued that attention is shaped by environments, not just individual capacity.

In low-friction environments, it is simple recognition that replaces evaluation: messages are rarely interrogated because the surrounding system rewards immediate response rather than considered judgment. Information is seen, but not meaningfully integrated into longer-term understanding or decision-making, as acceleration compresses the time available for reflection. This means that digital systems will often optimise for throughput rather than transformation, making (less substantive) behaviour change through repetition and habit rather than reassessment or learning.

And while much of the traditional canon of behavioural science has emphasised the power of reducing friction to encourage uptake and completion, perhaps this has failed to consider that ease is not the same as importance.

This also matters as there is signalling value in effort: if something takes time, attention, or engagement, then it is more likely to be considered as serious or consequential. When everything is instant and endlessly refreshed, the absence of effort may often signal that nothing appears to have cost anything, and as such particularly worth holding onto.

This creates a paradox as, on the one hand, systems designed to remove friction can struggle to signal significance. On the other hand, physical experiences, whether through print, packaging, or spatial design, reintroduce friction, changing the conditions under which attention operates.

Physicality as a processing intervention

Holding an object, opening a letter, moving through a space, or repeatedly encountering a poster requires effort and slows people down. This disrupts intuitive processing and moves attention into a more deliberate mode. As such, it seems that physical is less about persuasion and more about changing the mental state in which information is received.

This speaks to the findings of embodied cognition, which sets out the way that touch, weight, resistance, and presence are not peripheral to our cognition but are an integral part of how meaning is constructed. Physical engagement activates sensory and emotional systems that digital interactions rarely engage to the same degree.

Emotion matters, telling the brain whether something matters enough to store, revisit, and act upon later. Experiences that remain emotionally neutral are easily forgotten, regardless of repetition.

Physical experiences tend to be emotionally richer because they are felt with the body registering effort and presence before the mind evaluates arguments. That embodied signal of importance shapes what follows.

What physical media signals before it speaks

Beyond cognition, physical formats carry meaning semiotically, not simply transmitting messages but also creating cues on how those messages should be interpreted by shaping expectations about value, seriousness, and relevance. Physical artefacts tend to signal scarcity rather than abundance, effort rather than automation, finiteness rather than endless flow and ownership rather than simply access.

This feels important as the signals operate in advance of any content being read, which means they function as ‘interpretive frames’. Scarcity cues value, effort cues sincerity, boundedness supports sense-making, and ownership increases psychological attachment.

Digital formats, by contrast, risk signalling immediacy, replaceability, and low marginal cost. While these cues support speed and scale, they tend to privilege rapid consumption over reflection and depth of processing. This helps explain why identical content is often perceived as more serious or trustworthy when delivered physically.

Effort, intent, and trust: Trust is often discussed as a function of claims or proof points. Behaviourally, however, trust is frequently inferred from signals of commitment: we implicitly ask what something took to produce, not only in monetary terms, but in time, coordination, and attention. Signals that are costly to generate tend to be read as more sincere because they imply that the sender had something to lose.

Physical artefacts make these costs visible. Effort is legible in a way that digital communication often is not. The material presence of an object, document, or format signals intent before any content is read, shaping credibility at an early, pre-evaluative stage.

In low-cost digital environments, making claims is cheap and easily reproduced. This has contributed to growing scepticism toward stated values, purpose claims, and institutional messaging, as audiences discount signals that require little commitment. This helps explain why physical formats often feel more credible: trust is often felt before it is reasoned.

Ownership and attachment: One of the most robust findings in behavioural science is the endowment effect: people value things more simply because they own them. Once something feels like mine, giving it up feels like a loss rather than a neutral exchange.

Carey Morewedge and colleagues suggest that ownership arises through control, personal investment, and intimate knowledge. Of course, physical artefacts support all three: they can be handled, positioned, retained, or discarded with even brief interaction generating feelings of ‘mine-ness’, independent of legal ownership.

Ownership changes the relationship between person and object with stability and persistence, strengthening attachment. Physical objects endure but digital content is episodic. Over time, endurance produces psychological weight.

Extending time: Physical media changes how people experience time. If we consider digital environments as compressing time where everything feels immediate and urgent, physical artefacts stretch time as they endure, are revisited, and offer postponement rather than instant reaction.

This has significant consequences as longer time horizons support different kinds of thinking: reflection rather than impulse, commitment rather than novelty. This makes physical formats particularly powerful for behaviours that require consideration rather than reflex. In this sense, physical media does not just slow attention but lengthens the decision window.

Agency: Another dimension of the sensory shift is control. When people perceive that their freedom is being constrained, whether through controlling language or repeated persuasive prompts, they experience psychological reactance, a motivational state aimed at restoring autonomy

Algorithms determine what appears, when it appears, and how often it reappears. That repetition and opacity can function as a subtle freedom threat, activating counterarguing and anger even before conscious deliberation.

By contrast, physical formats preserve behavioural choice. We decide when to open something, how long to engage, and when to stop. There is no adaptive optimisation and no invisible escalation of persuasive pressure.

This matters because reactance is energising and defensive. When perceived threat is reduced, the motivational need to resist is reduced

When people feel less constrained, they are less likely to counterargue and more likely to engage voluntarily. Physical media can therefore feel calmer and more trustworthy, not because it persuades more forcefully, but because it preserves the experience of freedom.

Publicness, norms, and legitimacy. Digital communication is largely privately experienced, but physical media, by contrast, operate in shared, visible spaces such as homes, streets, stores, and workplaces. This visibility matters because social norms are shaped less by private attitudes and more by what people observe others doing in public.

Research by people such as Betsy Paluck suggests that behaviour spreads through visible environments and social networks, not simply through individual persuasion. When behaviours or signals are publicly observable, they help define what is acceptable, expected, or legitimate. Physical artefacts very tangibly anchor these signals in space. A poster in a workplace, a brochure left in a communal area, and signage in a store all make expectations visible. They transform norms from abstract beliefs into environmental cues.

Ritual, transition, and moments of openness: Physical artefacts often function as markers of transition: opening a letter, unwrapping a product, entering a space. These moments act as behavioural thresholds, interrupting ongoing context–response associations that normally guide behaviour automatically.

When environmental continuity is disrupted, habitual control weakens and behaviour becomes more open to evaluation. The disruption itself does not guarantee change, but importantly, it creates the conditions under which deliberation becomes more likely.

At that point, something else also happens. People do not passively absorb change; they subjectively diagnose whether a moment represents a tipping point. As Ed O’Brien notes, individuals determine for themselves when comparison shifts, when background noise becomes a meaningful signal. The interpretation is constructed, not imposed.

We can make a good case that physical media is effective because it does both things at once. It disrupts routine and invites diagnosis. The material act of opening, unfolding and entering signals that a new episode is beginning. In that window, people are less governed by automaticity and more likely to interpret what is happening as consequential. That makes physical formats particularly powerful at moments of onboarding, renewal, or reconsideration, all points at which people are already deciding whether this is “just more information” or something that warrants a response.

Conclusions

If you are a market leader seeking to defend your share and only incrementally grow, then marketing is often more about reinforcing and slightly ‘nudging’ buyer behaviour. But in a world where even low growth is hard to find, challenger brands are eating into your share, and innovations coming to market require consumers to act quite differently (e.g., dry shampoo), then reinforcement will not work. Instead, change is needed, and this requires deliberate attention, emotional engagement, memory that persists, trust in intent, a sense of agency, and a social context that supports legitimacy.

Physical media does not, of course, guarantee change. But it creates the conditions of change readiness, as it shifts people out of autopilot, signals importance, invites ownership, stretches time, restores agency, and raises the stakes.

Discussions about physical media often focus on effectiveness, attention, or engagement. Those are valid concerns, but they do not fully explain why interest in physical formats is resurfacing now. Judgement takes time. Considering alternatives, weighing implications, and deciding whether something aligns with one’s values or intentions all require space. Environments that move too quickly can make those processes harder, not by preventing them outright, but by constantly pulling attention forward.

Physical media introduces a different rhythm to digital. It arrives at a slower pace, remains present, and requires a more deliberate form of engagement. It does not adjust itself moment by moment in response to behaviour. Decisions about content, tone, and intent are made in advance, which makes those decisions more visible to the audience.

Seen in this light, the renewed interest in physical formats is not because it resists technological change, but because it supports a way of thinking that remains essential: the ability to stop, consider, and choose.

A new trend has been circulating on Instagram: sungazing. Influencers film themselves staring straight at the sun, promising healing and ‘realignment’. Sungazing, along with other practices, is framed as a secret that has been kept well hidden - because experts, institutions and governments don’t want you to know. The videos often feature men squinting into daylight, eyes watering, skin flaking, talking about curative properties.

While this feels contemporary, sungazing is not new. Versions of it appeared in Western health culture in the early twentieth century, most notably through the work of William Bates, during a period when spiritualism and alternative healing flourished alongside scepticism toward institutional medicine.

That historical echo matters. Moments of institutional strain have often produced practices that promise direct, personal access to truth, bypassing expertise in favour of embodied revelation.

And whilst this feels at the fringe end of wellness, it tells us something about the way that wellness is not simply a set of behaviours to keep in good shape but is now growing into a belief system: one that is increasingly political, questioning the trust traditionally placed in institutions and governments to navigate what’s best for the individual. Common threads in the wellness space on social media include “just do the opposite of what the government recommends”. As sociologist and wellness culture author Stephanie Baker points out in an interview with us, there was already a steady decline in institutional trust before the pandemic, but “this social distrust and distrust in experts and institutional experts in particular has intensified.”

Traditionally, the term wellness has been understood to mean practices and routines that sit outside the pharmaceutical and formal healthcare industries. More recently, this remit has expanded well beyond health, operating increasingly as a moral and social framework, offering guidance on how to live, eat, and sleep, what to value and trust, and how to understand success and failure. It centres on the individual performing constant work and remaining constantly vigilant.

For brands and policy makers, there are increasing challenges – the difficulty is less that people have become anti-expert, and more that the terms on which expertise is judged have changed. In a wellness landscape shaped by social media pressure, we find that credibility is achieved through relatability, transparency, and perceived alignment with everyday life. Food and health choices now carry a moral weight, meaning that messages from traditional sources of advice and information, designed to inform or empower, can easily be read as judgment or control.

For policymakers, this growing mistrust is a real problem: when expertise feels distant or opaque, doing the same thing or shouting louder isn’t going to work. And for brands, the challenge is how to navigate a noisy and confusing wellness landscape, where people are often looking for help to make sense of choices rather than more instruction.

Over the past six months, we have been exploring this industry, now globally valued at US $6.3 trillion. We have used ethnographic research, expert interviews and survey findings to examine how wellness manifests in people’s everyday lives. What emerges repeatedly is how wellness has shaped our mental models of the self and its increasingly central role in our lives.

Our research shows that the growth of the wellness industry is, in large part, driven by a widespread desire for greater control and agency over health and wellbeing. For many people, wellness offers a sense of autonomy in a context where public systems feel slow, fragmented, or unresponsive. At the same time, it has become an increasingly demanding and difficult space to navigate. Advice, products, and claims circulate at speed - often through largely unregulated markets - leaving individuals to constantly judge what is safe, effective, or trustworthy.

This paper examines how these conditions have helped to transform wellness from a set of practices into a cultural operating system. We explore what this means for the individual, as well as some of the central tenets of wellness, such as purity and naturalness, which increasingly shape what is purchased, consumed and deemed a moral achievement. We also examine how trust is being reconfigured away from traditional institutions and towards horizontal, peer-led sources of learning.

Finally, we consider what these dynamics mean for brands, policymakers, and institutions, arguing that while wellness amplifies confusion and pressure, it also creates an opportunity for more transparent, supportive, and trust-building forms of guidance in a fragmented cultural landscape.

The drive for agency

For many, wellness culture has definite upsides - providing connection, information and healthier practices. Part of the appeal stems from the fact that, globally, struggling public health systems lead to long waiting times and limited continuity of care. According to a recent Ipsos Health Services report, 68% globally agree that waiting times to get an appointment to see a doctor in their country are too long. We also know that a large proportion of people with chronic conditions report receiving limited or no information after diagnosis.

Added to this, our previous research into women’s health and the health experiences of minority communities shows how people in marginalised groups have long been ignored and disadvantaged, and excluded from clinical trials, for example.

Within this context, looking outside formal systems, engagement with supplements, alternative therapies, and online peer networks can be understood not merely as lifestyle experimentation but as attempts to reassert autonomy and care when institutions appear slow, biased, or simply impenetrable. A recent Ipsos Global Trends report found that 8 in 10 respondents worldwide want greater control over their health decisions. Wellness, in this sense, functions as both a coping mechanism and a critique.

But, as Stephanie Baker told us in an interview, the growth of wellness poses real challenges in itself:

“Increasingly, during the pandemic, we saw not only individual influencers but also networks of influencers who were disseminating false and misleading advice. And increasingly this is motivated by a variety of incentives, political gain, social gain, clout and fame as well as commercial gain.”

One of the problems, Professor Colleen Derkatch, author of Why Wellness Sells, notes, is that the wellness movement relocates responsibility onto individuals to resolve issues that may well be beyond their control. Problems may be structural rather than personal, and yet the individual is left to decipher these alone. As Derkatch points out, wellness can offer the feeling of agency without its substance, holding out the promise of self-improvement through discipline and mindset while leaving the conditions that constrain wellbeing firmly in place.

This points to a critical tension at the heart of wellness culture: where responsibility for health is located. It is this tension that the next section explores more directly, by examining how responsibility has shifted between individuals and collective systems of care.

From structural causes to individualised responsibility

Even wellness experts find this landscape difficult to navigate. Colleen Derkatch describes visiting the doctor to have her child vaccinated and, in that moment, questioning her own judgment as a mother, despite trusting the evidence of the vaccination's value. The current climate, she says -

“assumes that everyone has the resources of time and money and knowledge to make their own health decisions. It becomes much harder to see that a lot of the problems people actually experience come from big social, collective problems of living.”

This dilemma is captured by anthropologist Didier Fassin, who writes about health as ‘moral economy’ in which collective society-level failures are subtly placed at the feet of individuals. Wellness culture arguably operates on the same basis, encouraging people to interpret tiredness, anxiety, or illness as evidence of personal failings rather than structural strain, whether, for example, from precarity of employment, racism and sexism or poor housing.

This redistribution of responsibility has concrete consequences in people’s everyday lives. For many, the result is not empowerment but confusion, particularly when moral pressure to optimise collides with a lack of trusted guidance. As Derkatch said:

“for some people that can be especially challenging because they can end up perusing wellness products and services that don’t have established safety or efficacy, and they can get into trouble with products can make them quite sick.”

One of our ethnography participants told us that when someone in her mom WhatsApp group shared how they were feeling better on a higher dose of vitamin D, another of the moms ended up in hospital after taking the same dose. Another of our ethnography participants told us he is opento trying most health tips he finds online. But recently, he had a bout of debilitating headaches that led him to worry seriously that he had a brain tumour. After a trip to the neurologist and a brain scan that came back clear, he realised it was the Himalayan salt drink he’d been taking, discovered from a gym buddy, that left him severely dehydrated. He stopped taking it as soon as he realised. “You’d like to think there’s good regulation out there” he told us.

The messy landscape saturated with advice can also mean people don’t engage with appropriate medical care, as Richard Simcock, Chief Medical Officer of Macmillan Cancer Support, told us in an interview. It may even mean that people “don’t seek appropriate medical care, or decline evidence-based high-quality medical care.” As a GP we interviewed told us, she is seeing more people coming in with their own ideas that sit outside the medical model – which in previous years she might have dismissed, but now has to work with so they stay in her care.

Constant work and personal choice

One of the other problems with the wellness space is the constant pressure to be our best selves – as one social media influencer posts, there is no such thing as ill health – it’s just bad diet and not taking the right supplements. The expectation is that the individual should stay vigilant: read ingredient lists, avoid ‘toxins,’ and demonstrate self-discipline. The message is - if you do this, you will be well. But if you don’t, then ill health is your fault. This is a moralised model of well-being in which goodness is measured by how disciplined we are. As the GP we interviewed told us, this has led people to constantly feel disappointed that they aren’t feeling optimal all the time. Derkatch sets out two primary wellness orientations that she has seen in her research:

· Restoration: efforts to regain what age, stress or illness has worn down

· Enhancement: aspirations to go beyond ordinary functioning

The challenge here is that this keeps people in a continual cycle of self-improvement, leading to disappointment because there is no clear point at which one can be judged to be ‘well enough.’ The state of ‘being well’ remains perpetually out of reach, with each achievement simply revealing new areas to work on, new deficits to correct. As one of our US participants in her early 20s told us:

“Tik Tok has begun new concerns in me that I never had before, like having low cortisol levels or I have to take this supplement everyday otherwise I’m not healthy”.

In this framing, health and wellness are treated less as conditions shaped by circumstance and more as outcomes of personal choice. The result is that people feel morally responsible not just for their behaviours, but for their health itself – often without trusted guidance.

Another GP we talked to reported that she’d seen an uptake of young men coming to her concerned about their testosterone levels – prompted by social media. She says, “I tell them they just don’t need to.” But for those deep into wellness – this is counterintuitive – they have heard from multiple sources online that testosterone levels are a problem. What this means,

A fitness instructor told us, is that lots of gyms are rife with locker room advice about ‘T-levels’ (testosterone), vitamins and steroids. The problem, he shared, is that often people don’t feel heard by formal medical systems - for example, concerns about their testosterone levels. So they look elsewhere for advice.

As Mike Nicholson from Progressive Masculinity tells us, many young people (and young men in particular) believe that information is being hidden from them, therefore dismissing concerns is not going to work. It is critical to understand the narratives and perspectives that patients and consumers are coming from

Horizontal information

Across the challenges outlined so far, a further and compounding problem emerges: the growing prevalence of wellness misinformation. This is not incidental to wellness culture but closely tied to the information dynamics of wellness, where the trust pathways are horizontal rather than vertical, away from conventional hierarchies of professional or institutional authority. Credibility is frequently built through peers and influencers on social media accounts that offer experiential ‘truths’ rather than the expertise of a credentialed healthcare practitioner. In fact, recent polling finds that 45% of people heard about GLP-1 drugs from social media, versus 19% hearing about them through medical professionals.

Much of this horizontal information flow can be experienced positively. Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing can reduce stigma, surface lived experience that formal systems overlook, and help people feel less alone in navigating health concerns. For those who feel dismissed or rushed within clinical settings, these spaces can offer recognition, empathy, and a sense of agency.

But as Baker explained to us, this is also an environment in which misleading health advice, with short-form video platforms a particularly fertile ground. In a study, she examined one of the leading social media platforms and analysed the top 50 videos surfaced in cancer-related searches. What she found was stark: 81% of the videos promoted false or misleading information about cancer cures. These included unproven or dangerous remedies such as essential oils, dog and horse dewormers, and supplement powders, many of which were directly monetised through links, sponsorships, or product sales.

This matters not only because the information is incorrect, but because digital platforms dramatically lower the barriers to entry for profiting from misinformation. Influencers and content creators can disseminate health advice at scale without clinical oversight, regulatory scrutiny, or accountability, while still appearing relatable and trustworthy to audiences seeking guidance.

Andrea Love, a science communicator with a mission to counter misinformation, considers that many of the wellness narratives erode trust in science and public health. Her concern is that, for example, unfounded fears about chemicals are not simply a quirk of wellness culture but a public health crisis that undermines trust in vaccines, food safety, and preventive medicine. This is not simply an issue of false information, but a deeper shift in where credibility itself is located. Wellness misinformation does not circulate in a vacuum; it travels along changing trust pathways, shaped by who people feel listens to them, understands them, and represents their interests.

COVID-19 exacerbated this pattern, political analyst Catherine Fieschi told us. She argues that perceived government and scientific overreach, combined with a rising cost of living and overloaded healthcare systems, have fuelled the sense that people must take matters into their own hands and withdraw trust from ‘top-down’ authority. When social institutions such as education, housing, and healthcare fail to provide stability, Fieschi suggests that the resulting disaffection often reconfigures as anti-elite sentiment. Within this environment, wellness becomes a means of expressing distrust while at the same time offering a sense of agency.

One GP we spoke with told us that, for the first time, she is engaging with alternative treatments rather than dismissing them. “It’s a new era”, she told us, “If you say no, then you know people are going to try things without your supervision. I want to keep in a dialogue with them.”

This reflects the way that wellness has become a form of ‘underdog politics’, challenging the hierarchies of medical expertise and scientific legitimacy: turning to ‘natural’ remedies or community-based advice is not only an act of care but an assertion of independence. It is only a small step from here for wellness to fuse with populist politics. Influencers and even politicians (such as Robert F Kennedy Jnr) position themselves as defenders of bodily autonomy against state and scientific overreach: there is a sense of health as a struggle in which regulatory safeguards are evidence of elite capture of the system, and public health institutions are enemies rather than a shared resource.

With this in mind, we can see how wellness has drifted from a set of practices into a belief framework where distrust is normalised, personal intuition trumps collective evidence, and public health is mistrusted.

The role of purity and naturalness narratives

So, what are some of the central features of wellness? There is an intensified focus on purity, particularly in relation to food. In wellness culture, eating is increasingly framed not just as nourishment, but as a moral practice.

“If you want an early grave, carry on eating seed oils… We’re all being killed, watch until the end if you want to know what to do about it.”

In one widely shared Instagram video, a popular influencer takes us around a UK supermarket, inspecting different products and preservatives, questioning provenance, pointing out the impurity of different ingredients, some of which are not derived from natural processes. He warns of the dangers these pose.

In our ethnographic research, we found confusion around ingredients and what to stay vigilant about. As one of our participants shared, she had heard that certain brands of chocolate contain lead, and that is deeply concerning. For her, the upside of wellness culture is about prevention, trying not engage in practises that can cause ill health by ‘eating right’, but she is struggling with who to listen to and trust, and how to make sure her food is “pure”.

Increasingly within wellness culture, eating is framed not just as nourishment, but as a moral practice - choosing the “right” foods signals discipline, awareness, and independence, while the wrong ones imply contamination or failure. Ideas such as “clean eating,” “toxin-free” diets, and “natural” or “ancestral” foods draw a sharp line between what is pure and what is suspect.

For example, one of our participants in his early 20s showed us his social media feed - filled with short videos promoting a return to raw milk or raw meat. When we visited him, this played out in a tense exchange with his mother. “Raw milk is bad,” she told us, also talking to him. He disagreed, “You don’t understand, you haven’t researched it like I have.” Raw meat is also part of this eating-as-your-ancestors movement, which he adheres to.

What we see is a moralised food landscape in which individuals are expected to remain constantly vigilant. Structural questions, such as about food systems, affordability, regulation, and access, fade into the background, replaced by the idea that health is something earned through discipline and exclusion.

This notion of purity also has a gendered element, a move towards what journalist Sian Norris refers to as the “mythical gender roles of the past” when women stayed at home and were close to nature, and men went out and fought. Despite this era not actually existing (hence a mythical era), she expresses concern that culturally we seem to be doubling down on this notion.

And as political analyst Katherine Fieschi points out, the wellness content for women reflects this pattern: it highlights natural births and living closer to nature,
which we are encouraged to associate with moral goodness and fertility. For men, says Mike Nicholson of ex-teacher and Director of Progressive Masculinities, the pressure is to do with optimisation and endurance, privileging strength, resilience, and sovereignty over the body as a site of performance and control.

Where does this take us?

Political power once resided primarily in formal institutions, but it seems that wellness now operates as a key form of ‘soft power’, shaping what we see as credible and aspirational. Its logic goes well beyond health, and influences buying behaviour across categories as diverse as technology, finance, fashion, and automotive design. A protein drink signals optimisation; a meditation app suggests discipline; a luxury car marketed as a ‘wellness environment’ offers restoration – all amid a sense of wider social and economic instability.

The slipperiness of the term wellness means it can be applied to almost any product or service, which means brands can reframe many products and services as ‘self-care’. But while this may offer short-term gains, the danger is it also invites accusations of opportunism when wellness claims outpace actual substance – people do also see this.

Yet despite these contradictions, wellness does surely offer genuine social and psychological needs. It provides routines, symbols, and communities that promise continuity in a world that feels increasingly unstable and difficult to navigate. Practices such as morning exercise, supplementation, or mindfulness give accessible ways to create order and a sense of agency. In this way, wellness thrives, perhaps not despite instability, but because instability creates the conditions in which it feels necessary.

The challenges outlined in this report point to a clear opportunity. For policymakers, there is a chance to address the structural gaps that wellness often steps in to fill, particularly around trust, visibility, continuity, and care within public systems. For brands and marketers, the opportunity lies in engaging the wellness space more constructively: supporting understanding and decision-making rather than amplifying anxiety or moral pressure for short-term gain.

The shared task is to ensure that wellness does not function as a substitute for collective provision, but as a complement to it and in doing so help people navigate complexity without shifting the full burden of care and judgement onto individuals alone.

IMPLICATIONS FOR BRANDS

Key risks

1. Responsibility without blame: Wellness narratives that place strong emphasis on personal responsibility can easily slide into blame, implying that poor health reflects poor choices, insufficient discipline, or lack of effort. For many people, this framing feels alienating rather than empowering.

Implication: Avoid messaging that suggests individuals can ‘fix’ themselves through consumption, discipline, or mindset alone. Where possible, acknowledge the limits of individual control and position products, services, or guidance as supportive rather than corrective or morally superior.

2. Gender regression as reputational risk: Some wellness narratives, particularly those focused on purity, fertility, restraint, and bodily control, echo restrictive gender norms. For women, this can feel like a quiet rollback of autonomy; for men, it can reinforce narrow ideals of masculinity. These frameworks also routinely exclude or invalidate trans and non-binary people, whose bodies and experiences sit outside the naturalised ideals of sex, reproduction, and bodily “correctness” that much wellness culture assumes. Audiences are increasingly sensitive to these signals, even when they are implicit.

Implication: Consider which bodies, roles, and ideals are centred in wellness communication. Avoid aesthetics or language that promote perfection, restraint, or bodily moralism, especially where expectations fall unevenly across genders.

3. Purity narratives and political spillover: ‘Clean,’ ‘pure,’ and ‘natural’ framings can carry ethical and political baggage. When taken to extremes, they can be interpreted as coded language for reactionary politics. Even brands with caring intentions can find themselves adjacent to these logics.

Implication: Exercise caution with purity language, which can generate anxiety and mistrust rather than reassurance, and once politicised, is difficult to contain.

Where the opportunity lies

Across the research, one pattern is consistent: people are not rejecting expertise outright, but they are struggling to navigate a wellness landscape that feels crowded, contradictory, and morally charged. Many experience the burden of having to ‘get it right’ without reliable reference points, trusted explanations, or clear guidance.

This creates an opportunity for brands and institutions willing to engage wellness not as aspiration, but as orientation.

1. Wellness as foundation, not optimisation: For many people, wellness does not begin with enhancement or aspiration, but with whether life feels manageable. Security, predictability, rest, and access to basic resources remain the foundations of feeling well. When these are absent, optimisation narratives can feel irrelevant or even insulting.

Implication: Recognise the gap between the aspirational wellness culture visible on social media and the material conditions that actually support wellbeing. Credibility increasingly comes from acknowledging both.

2. Wellness as guidance through transparency: A defining feature of contemporary wellness culture is uncertainty. People are exposed to claims about ingredients, deficiencies, risks, and hidden harms, yet often lack the tools to evaluate them. In the absence of trusted guidance, people are left to arbitrate complex health decisions alone, often relying on peer anecdotes, influencer narratives, or intuition.

Here, both brands and public institutions have a constructive role to play. What many people are looking for is not more instruction, nor louder authority, but help in making sense of competing claims. Transparency in the shape of showing how decisions are made, what evidence has been weighed, and where uncertainty remains, can support agency, without demanding blind trust.

Implication: Help people understand why recommendations are made, what trade-offs exist, what is known, what has been researched, the limits of this research, and what is uncertain. Guidance that reduces confusion rather than adds to it is increasingly a marker of trustworthiness.

3. Wellness as ally, not authority: Declining trust in institutions reflects frustration with unresponsive expertise rather than rejection of knowledge itself. People respond more positively to guidance that feels respectful, and grounded in everyday realities and in stories they can make sense of, that are relatable - rather than prescriptive or judgemental.

Implication: Advice that feels responsive rather than shutting down people’s real worries is more likely to be trusted than expertise imposed from above.

4. Challenging the status quo with care: Wellness also reflects a broader appetite to question inherited ideas about success, productivity, and the ‘good life.’ This challenge is less about disruption for its own sake and more about meaning and legitimacy.

Implication: Challenging norms in wellness requires engaging carefully in values conversations rather than simple oppositional positioning.

Wellness cannot be addressed solely through products, campaigns, or behavioural nudges. For policymakers, it underscores the need to address the structural conditions that wellness all too often compensates for. For brands, it highlights the responsibility and opportunity to reduce confusion rather than amplify it.

In January, there is no shortage of advice on how to change behaviour, whether getting fitter, eating more healthily, taking up a sport, or simply becoming a slightly improved version of oneself through better routines.

The advice tends to be similar: start small. Break behaviours down. ‘Stack’ new habits onto existing ones. Make the desired action easy, obvious, and repeatable. For example, advice suggests that everyday life is quietly re-engineered: coffee becomes a cue for going for a walk with coffee in hand, kitchens double as gyms so you can lift weights while you prepare food, and reminders on your screen nudge you to move between responding to emails.

Of course, this all sounds sensible, and indeed, there is plenty of evidence that we can acquire habits that have tremendous sticking power. A now-classic study by psychologist Wendy Wood illustrates this: cinema-goers were given either fresh or stale popcorn while watching a film. Those watching the film ate roughly the same amount regardless of quality. By contrast, participants given the same popcorn in a standard meeting room, where eating popcorn is not customary, ate far less of the stale batch. The explanation here is that the behaviour was not being guided by taste or conscious preference, but by context and routine.

This understanding of habits is not only widely accepted in popular culture but has also underpinned many public health campaigns that aim to steer everyday behaviours toward healthier, more sustainable lives.

So, have we found a sure-fire solution for making change happen? If we reduce challenges to bite-sized chunks, does this give us a general method for addressing everything from fitness and diet to burnout, wellbeing, and work–life balance?

Behaviour change as a matter of design?

The challenge here is that this approach carries a set of assumptions that are often not discussed: that habits are mechanical and that, if we repeat a behaviour often enough, it will run on autopilot. Indeed, there is a notion that to get a habit to stick, all we need to do is to repeat it for 21 days, a ‘behavioural urban myth’ that despite being consistently debunked continues to circulate!

And there is a wider issue at play: the current narrative about habit assumes these behaviours are things that happen to people, rather than tools people actively use to manage their lives. The challenge comes from our own experience of doing these allegedly automatic behaviours: actually getting out and going to the gym does not seem any easier on a wet and dark weekday night despite being weeks into our suopposed new habit, the lure of an unhealthy snack remains hard to resist and we might just throw things in the bin rather than rinse and put them in the appropriate recycling container.

This is the challenge that psychologists Blair Saunders and Kimberly More set out to explore with the hypothesis that the complexity of different behaviours is at the heart of why some ‘habits’ stick and others do not. They suggest that some behaviours are simple, so taking a pill is easy and can readily fit among daily tasks, such as pairing with mealtimes. This is in contrast to other behaviours that may look simple from a distance but closer up, they are far more complex. So going to the gym, preparing healthy meals, or using active travel are complex mainly because they are not single actions but sequences of activities that have to be fitted around the rest of life.

They all involve planning, time, coordination, but also social judgment (e.g. others may ask why we would pay to go to the gym when it is possible to run outside for free). They are also easily disrupted: we can feel tired, there are always competing demands, or day-to-day obstacles can easily knock us off course. This means that simple repetition does not make these behaviours effortless in the way habit theory often implies should be the case.

Hence, Saunders and More make the case that what looks like a stable habit from the outside is, in fact, often a process of ongoing adjustment to overcome the range of things that can get in the way.

To test this idea, they asked about 200 people to identify four behaviours they were currently engaging in as either healthy or environmentally friendly. Some of these were quite simple behaviours, such as packing a reusable coffee cup or wearing a face covering (the study was run during the COVID pandemic). Other behaviours, by contrast, were more complex, such as making a healthy lunch, sorting their recycling, and exercising.

They asked the participants to report how habitual their chosen behaviours were using the Self-Reported Automaticity Index, a short questionnaire that asks you if a given behaviour is, for example, something ‘I do without thinking’. Then, over the following two weeks, they asked the same people to keep track of any purposeful strategies they used to engage in these behaviours: this might be calling on a friend for support, reminding themselves of the positive outcomes, or adding something extra to make the behaviour more fun.

They found that for simple behaviours, people were less likely to report using strategies to motivate them, which makes sense: as they point out, you don’t need much self-encouragement to pack a reusable cup once that behaviour is habitual.

But for complex behaviours, those who reported the strongest habits used purposeful strategies just as often as those who reported only very weak habits for the very same behaviours. So those who said their exercise routines were strongly habitual reported were using just as wide an array of tactics and tricks to get themselves going.

It merits pausing here for a moment to unpick the implications of this: essentially, it suggests that, for many behaviours, if you want to create successful habits, then there is no let-up in the work you need to encourage and support yourself if you want to maintain the behaviour.

This puts to rest the idea that many of the behaviours we might want to make part of our lives can become completely ‘automatic’, especially if they require multiple steps, time, and/or exertion. As they point out, ‘automaticity’ may work on days we don’t have competing demands, feel tired or are distracted by work and caring responsibilities.

But of course, this is not how life works, and much of the time, the habits we aim for will need support from intentional processes. This might include setting up so that the things you need for the behaviour are readily available, adding music or podcasts to the activity to make it more fun, reminding yourself of how the behaviour is aligned with your values, or focusing your attention on the first steps of the behaviour to give yourself momentum.

The philosophy of habit

This explains why philosopher Elizabeth Grosz argues that routines are less about switching off effort than about learning to cope with the world as it is. People who keep going to the gym, cook regularly, or commute actively are not free from effort. However, they do become better at dealing with it. They learn when motivation tends to dip, what makes things harder, and which small adjustments help them carry on.

In this sense, routines work like skills: a skilled cyclist still encounters hills, traffic, and bad weather, but knows how to respond. Similarly, someone with a well-established exercise routine hasn’t eliminated resistance; they’ve just learned how to work around it.

This also explains why people with strong ‘habits’ still rely on reminders, planning, self-talk, or small rewards. As Grosz puts it, habits involve a kind of quiet, practical intelligence, something learned through doing, rather than thinking it through from scratch each time.

Seen this way, the problem with many habit-based approaches is not that they are mistaken, but that they mistake the nature of the challenge. They treat effort as something to be designed away, when, for many important behaviours, the work is learning how to persist.

Once habits are understood as ways of managing complexity, rather than escaping it, their limits and their value become much clearer.

Unpacking complex behaviours?

Another consideration is whether complex behaviours can be shifted by isolating the part of the behaviour that carries the greatest leverage, ideally using data and experimentation to guide where to intervene. This is the approach proposed by James Elfer and colleagues, who argue that cultural change (in our language, complex behaviours) becomes possible when it targets specific behaviours at critical moments.

In their work with AstraZeneca, rather than attempting to improve the overall complex behaviour of hiring experience end-to-end, they focused narrowly on one aspect of the hiring manager's behaviour in the first few minutes of interviews. Using large-scale experiments with over 1,200 candidates, they tested different ways of shaping that moment, from boosting confidence to signalling inclusivity. The most effective intervention turned out to be simple: normalising nerves as an expected part of the process, a small shift that made candidates feel more at ease and better able to perform.

The wider lesson is that change did not come from removing complexity, but from intervening at the point where uncertainty and emotional load were highest.

Conclusions

Perhaps it is worth asking why behavioural science and the technologies, policies, and designs it informs can all too often remain so invested in the promise of effortlessness.

Perhaps part of the appeal is surely practical, as systems that appear to work automatically are easier to scale, justify, and fund. Effortlessness reassures us that change can happen without asking for anything more, but as we have set out, this rarely holds for the behaviours that matter most. This logic is especially visible in cultures of wellbeing and productivity. People are encouraged to optimise sleep, exercise, diet, focus, and mental health, often simultaneously, while being told that the right routines will make it all feel natural. When that ease fails to materialise, the gap is all too often internalised as a personal failure.

The problem, then, is not that habit-based approaches are wrong but that they carry a moral story about how change should feel: smooth, frictionless, and self-sustaining, leaving little room for the reality that many worthwhile changes will always be effortful because they involve managing complexity and trade-offs.

We can perhaps then reframe habits as ‘routines of competence’ rather than ‘mechanisms of automation’, as this allows us to recognise persistence and adaptation as a feature, not a bug.

The question then becomes not how to make change feel easy, but how to support people in staying with what is hard, without treating effort as something that needs to disappear.

The start of a new year is, predictably, a moment of resolution. We are encouraged to reflect on what we will improve, optimise, or become: healthier, more productive, more fulfilled. Progress is imagined as upward movement; we might start small, but with the help of these resolutions, we can live well and become a better version of ourselves.

But perhaps what does not get so much attention is how narrow this vision of the good life can be, leaving little room for continuity or maintenance, which means that standing still can be seen as stagnation. In other words, ordinariness is something to be overcome rather than sustained. And surely this does not stop at January resolutions but extends to work, politics, culture, and life more broadly, so that exceptionalism is sought out over good-enough and peak-performance over steadiness.

We will explore the case that ‘ordinariness’ is perhaps less a failure of ambition or imagination but is instead a structural requirement of contemporary life. Most systems do not depend on continuous improvement, but on repetition, maintenance, and the capacity to simply keep going. And that despite its importance, we do not credit it with the importance that it deserves.

This raises some hard questions for behavioural science, which has largely been built around moments of decision, interventions, and change. It has arguably paid much less attention to how people sustain effort and remain involved in systems that may rarely work as designed.

So in this article, we ask the question of whether being ordinary is perhaps a human strength that is one of our most important, yet overlooked and underexplored qualities.

The work of the ordinary

Ordinariness rarely features explicitly in political, cultural or organisational analysis, partly because it is designed not to. Instead, it operates as what we might call background infrastructure: the routines, habits, tacit judgements, shared ways of living that allow us to live without having to constantly explain or justify ourselves. In this sense, ordinariness provides our lives with a set of taken-for-granted conditions that enable coordination without friction.

This means that being ordinary is rarely considered a skill in its own right. But as we have seen, human life is sustained not through constant decision making and their associated justification, but through background continuity - having an unremarkable world that is stable enough to act within.

In addition, ordinariness is the way we regulate exposure to systems that demand we exceed our capacity. Political theorist Philip Pettit emphasises that freedom is not only exercised through voice or participation, but through the ability to remain unexceptional, to avoid being constantly mobilised, categorised, or intensified. From a systems perspective, this creates capacity, which is critical as what keeps systems viable over time is not continuous optimisation, but tolerance for managing shocks which comes through presence of slack, redundancy, and low-intensity functioning. Ordinariness is the human version of that principle, absorbing fluctuation, smoothing, allowing imperfect conditions without resulting in collapse.

From a psychological perspective, it has long been established that we do not need a perfectly optimised environment, but simply one that is “good enough” for early caregiving: predictable, unremarkable, and not demanding constant monitoring or response. Subsequent work has extended this insight beyond childhood, showing that when ordinary environments erode, whether in families, workplaces, or institutions, then anxiety tends to fill the gap, and our behaviour becomes more defensive, fragile, or performative.

From an organisational perspective, sociologist Richard Sennett suggests that institutions rely heavily on routine competence and the slow accumulation of practical judgement. These ordinary forms of capability enable the workplace to operate without constant oversight, thereby making long-term collaboration possible even in complex settings.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest that we can think more clearly about being ordinary: it is not simply a passive background but rather enables systems to function without constant strain. The implication here is that if it is eroded or made into something that is permanently visible, then the possibility of friction and difficulties multiples.

The illegitimacy of the ordinary

Despite the value of the ordinary, it often has little legitimacy. We frequently frame adequacy, restraint, and continuity not as virtues but as signs of a lack. Ordinariness is associated with a lack of ambition or adaptability in cultures that attach value to visibility and continual self-advancement. And this is not merely a cultural stylistic preference but can be a very moralising judgement – it is your ‘moral duty’ not to be ordinary.

We see this in the way that our organisational and policy language references qualities that exceed the ordinary: resilience, agility, passion, purpose, and high performance are presented as neutral virtues, but in fact, theorists suggest, they distinguish those who can sustain exceptional demands from those who cannot. This distinction is as much one of moral character rather than simple capacity: when we are organised around achievement and recognition, we start to treat limits and modest aspiration as signs of failure. And these are individual, personal failures as Barbara Ehrenreich showed in her analysis of the way calls for positivity and self-transformation subtly divert structural limitations into individual responsibility.

So, we have a contradiction. On the one hand, our institutions and society more generally rely on the assets of ordinariness, such as routine competence, informal coordination, care, and maintenance. On the other hand, it is devalued in language and expectations: it may be critical to our functioning, but it is often unacknowledged.

Janteloven and cross cultural differences

However, there do seem to be geographic differences in the extent to which we place value on the ordinary. In Scandinavia, the concept of Janteloven is a social code specific to the Nordic region, emphasising collective accomplishments and well-being, and disdaining focus on individual achievements. The term comes from the work of Danish-Norwegian author Askel Sandemose in his 1933 book A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (En Flyktning Krysser Sitt Spor).

In the book, Sandemoose tells the story of a fictional small Danish town, Jante, where residents are expected to subordinate their individuality to the group, something that Sandemoose argued can historically be found throughout Scandinavia.

An example of the way Danes have played with the term Janteloven is the Carlsberg campaign: “Probably the best beer in the world.” It’s a mixture of self-effacement and pride meant to showcase the best of Denmark, including Carlsberg beer, while simultaneously undercutting the compliments. Always ending with the undercut of “probably.”

This perhaps confirms that being ordinary is not something alien to our being – but in some societies at least it can often be under-recognised. However, there is also a case that this behaviour, defined by its background characteristics, is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

When the background won’t stay in the background

One of the defining characteristics of modern society is that of culture wars: often described as disputes over values or identity, we can see that it creates a direct conflict over the ordinary. Culture wars operate by making ordinary behaviours visible: how people speak, teach, care, joke, discipline, manage, consume, or remain silent is no longer unremarkable but is instead seen as a signal of allegiance or intent. Everything is required to mean something.

This is how symbolic power operates, less about imposing beliefs but more about imposing the requirement to justify. Which means that what once ‘went without saying’ is forced into view, so, for example, our ordinary shopping choices can begin to function as a form of expressive labour, signalling values, awareness, and responsibility, rather than simply meeting needs.

There is of course a case for saying that making the ordinary visible has had real gains. Everyday sexism, casual racism, exploitative labour practices, environmental harm, and taken-for-granted exclusions are sustained precisely because they are ordinary. Social theory has long recognised that power does not operate only through rupture or force, but through normalisation: practices become durable not because they are uncontested, but because they are repeated. What is repeated comes to feel inevitable; what feels inevitable is less likely to be questioned. Ordinariness lowers cognitive and moral alertness, encouraging continuity rather than interruption.

Feminist scholars have shown how asymmetric power relations shape what is deemed ordinary. The private, the domestic, and the taken-for-granted are not neutral spaces but historically structured by gender, dependency, and silence. Much of what appears ‘natural’ or ‘just how things are’ rests on unpaid, feminised labour: care, emotional regulation, social smoothing, endurance. So, where power is uneven, ordinariness can embed domination. From this perspective, the problem is not ordinariness itself, but rather it is unexamined ordinariness under conditions of unequal power that can be problematic.

Nevertheless, when everything ordinary involves moral signalling, then we can slide into permanent justification. Ordinary actions are no longer just open to reflection; they are continuously evaluated, anticipated, and pre-emptively defended. And these pressures are not evenly distributed. As Alva Gotby argues, if we demand people to constantly explain themselves, then this privileges those with time, energy, and linguistic confidence. This is what makes culture wars so exhausting: it is often less about resolving disagreement and more about escalating the baseline of what participation in everyday life requires of us.

The question then becomes how much exposure, explanation, and emotional labour anyone can reasonably sustain. When ordinary practices are repeatedly pulled into scrutiny, behaviour recalibrates. We typically do not make a coordinated refusal or a collective exit, but there is an adjustment – we might present but reduce the surplus effort, the extra hours, the additional care, that these systems rely on.

Seen against this backdrop, behaviours that are often described as disengagement begin to look different.

Opting out without leaving

Take quiet quitting, a term that was trending a couple of years ago. Commonly framed as a collapse in work ethic, we can instead understand it as a response to the moralisation of work. If employment increasingly demands not only competence, but enthusiasm, identification, and emotional availability, then we may find that while participation persists, its scope narrows. This means that tasks are completed, but additional commitment is withdrawn. Work is given a more ordinary status: bounded, means to an end, finite.

A similar pattern is evident in politics, with declining turnout, protest fatigue, and political disengagement often interpreted as a crisis for democracy. But these shifts can also be seen as responses to a form of politics organised around spectacle, outrage, and constant mobilisation. Given that we have limited capacity to remain in a permanent state of moral outrage, our participation becomes more ad-hoc and situational, based on capacity and context rather than by a standing sense of obligation

Digital life is another example, with reduced public posting, a preference for private group chats, and minimal digital traces, often framed as withdrawal. Yet recent analysis by Kyle Chayka describes a shift toward ‘posting zero,’ in which ordinary users no longer see an incentive in broadcasting their lives publicly. Social interaction does not disappear; it migrates into lower-visibility, more private, and more ordinary forms, such as direct messages and small-group chats.

And we can also see how shifts in consumption follow the same structure: repair and reuse are often seen as sustainability practices, but arguably they can also reflect disengagement from a system in which identity is expected to be continually expressed through the choices we make. As sociologist Eva Illouz has shown, consumption functions as a form of expressive labour rather than simple use or need. On this basis, reducing participation is a way of lowering demands on us and avoiding making a statement.

A wider intellectual shift: from exception to maintenance

Despite this somewhat gloomy analysis of the state of ‘ordinariness’, there is a huge body of work that supports its value. Across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a shift has taken place across the humanities and social sciences, turning away from models that privilege rupture, heroism, optimisation, and peak moments and instead leaning towards frameworks that emphasise the importance of maintenance, repair, and the ordinary conditions of continuity.

In the field of history, a twentieth-century shift away from event-centred narratives redirected attention toward long durations and routine practices, most notably through the rise of everyday history. What mattered was no longer only what changed the world, but what kept it going.

In sociology and anthropology, attention has increasingly shifted from norms as formal rules to norms as lived practice. Everyday living, tacit knowledge, and informal work has came into focus, with our social lives understood as something we actively sustain through routine action rather than simply imposed from above.

In feminist theory, this turn has probably been the sharpest. Care, emotional labour, domestic work, and endurance, long treated as private or pre-political, have been re-theorised as central to how societies reproduce themselves.

Across these areas, it seems that there is theorising to support the notion that the key challenges we have are less about how to produce change and more about how to sustain life under pressure.

So how well does behavioural science align with these wider themes? At first glance, it appears as if the discipline tends to focus on moments of activation: decisions, nudges, incentives, interventions. Ordinariness is perhaps what happens between decisions: how people manage disappointment and ambiguity and sustain effort in systems that rarely work as designed. Its effects are long-term, cumulative rather than immediate, perhaps not quite where our focus typically lies.

Psychologist Leidy Klotz offers some helpful evidence for why ordinariness, maintenance, and subtraction are so hard to legitimate as forms of improvement. Across a series of experiments reported in Science, Klotz and colleagues show that people typically fail to consider subtraction as a way of improving systems, even when it is objectively superior. Participants asked to improve Lego structures, written essays, policy scenarios, or organisational rules overwhelmingly added components rather than removing them, despite clear incentives to subtract.

Further, the subtraction was typically not rejected, but it was overlooked. So when participants were gently cued that removal was an option (“you can remove pieces at no cost”), rates of subtraction increased dramatically. This suggests that subtraction is not counter-normative so much as cognitively invisible. Adding feels like doing something; removing does not register as action unless attention is deliberately redirected.

This finding has direct implications for how ordinariness is treated in social and institutional life. Maintenance, simplification, and easing demands are behaviourally disadvantaged because, in some sense, they look like subtraction: they remove strain rather than add value signals. As a result, systems gravitate toward escalation of more rules, more reporting, more engagement, more justification and so on, even though these additions increase fatigue and thin participation. From this perspective, the erosion of ordinariness is not only cultural or moral, but behavioural. We lack the cognitive habits to see less as a legitimate mode of care, competence, or progress.

Seen this way, defending the ordinary requires more than a normative argument. It requires countering a systematic bias toward addition, a bias that quietly undermines sustainability, liveability, and endurance across work, public services, and everyday life.

Conclusions

The historian E. P. Thompson famously showed how everyday expectations form a moral economy: a shared sense of what is tolerable, fair, or decent in ordinary life. When these expectations are violated, resistance does not necessarily take the form of overt confrontation but as withdrawal and non-compliance. We necessarily stay inside systems of everyday life but adjust how much effort and visibility we share.

The work of Leidy Klotz shows how culturally attuned we are to making improvements by adding or enhancing rather than by stripping back and simplifying. This suggests that the challenge is not always to increase motivation or intensity, but to design and defend the ordinary and to design systems that do not require exceptional effort, constant vigilance, or moral performance to function.

And as we operate in ever more complex, difficult environments, we need ordinariness to absorb and manage challenges. Seen in this way, reclaiming the ordinary may well be the most important and radical act, as it sets out how a human life can be liveable.

Implications for Brands:

Ordinariness is a mode of trust, not invisibility: Brands that fit easily into everyday routines without attention, novelty, or engagement can be experienced as more dependable than those that continually signal distinctiveness.

Think less not more in customer experience: Rather than adding options, complexity, emotional resonance, people may in fact want smoother, more ‘ordinary’ interactions.

Treat opting out as information, not failure: Muted engagement may not be a sign of disengagement but as a signal to simplify.

Implications for Government and the Public Sector:

Don’t design as if capacity were unlimited: Many public systems can assume citizens can continually justify, or self-advocate, which excludes those living with constraint or care responsibilities. Designing for ordinariness means minimising the need to perform legitimacy.

Treat endurance as a warning signal, not consent: When people continue to comply with complex or strained systems, this is often read as proof they are tolerable. But ordinariness frequently conceals overload.

Prioritise background functioning over engagement: Legitimacy is built less through moments of participation than through systems that recede into everyday life. The goal is not constant engagement, but livability.

Waiting is one of the most ubiquitous yet perhaps most scholarly-neglected experiences of time in contemporary life. It is rarely far from the news, whether waiting for a stock market crash, waiting times for operations in the NHS, or even whether queuing in line is the new ‘cool thing to do’. People will wait for hours to see the queen lying in state, but will not wait but click away if an online ad does not catch our attention in the first few seconds.

It can feel as if much of our lives is characterised by these ‘temporal intervals’ that interrupt our flow and defer action. Despite this, waiting is frequently dismissed as a minor inconvenience rather than as something that offers broader insight into our lives and psychology.

We make the case for rethinking waiting, that it not only tells us something about our patience and resilience (or lack of it): it also tells us something about the world we inhabit. Who is kept waiting, for how long, under what conditions, and with what information? It shows us whose time is treated as valuable, and whose is not.

But there is also something even more profound, more radical and uniquely diagnostic. It viscerally exposes our inner lives: there is emotional and cognitive labour involved in anticipating an uncertain future. But of course, this future is often out of our hands, external conditions shape our waiting, and with that, our inner lives.

Hence, a person waiting for a delayed medical call-back, for example, may cycle through fear, hope, irritation and self-reassurance, yet every feeling is dependent on the tempo of an institution they cannot influence. On this basis, their inner landscape cannot be disentangled from the system that determines their wait. Few other everyday experiences make the link so clearly between internal states and external structures quite so tangibly.

And it is this that makes what seems a very humdrum, everyday activity so potent and valuable. And definitely worth a closer look to better understand why.

Antechambers, hierarchy, and the staging gates of time

The roots of waiting have a long history in early modern Europe. As historian Helmut Puff sets out in his analysis of waiting spaces, the ‘antechamber’ was a key architectural form through which aristocratic courts organised hierarchy and deference. The antechamber was a space positioned just outside the rooms of a monarch or high-ranking official where you waited for admittance. It was not simply or functional area but served to make waiting an expression of social order (and your place within it).

In these courts, access to powerful individuals was determined by which waiting room you occupied and how long you were made to wait, signalling your rank and the level of privilege you enjoyed. As Puff writes,

“waiting in the antechamber was an embodied acknowledgement of hierarchical order”

The architecture was deliberately layered: outer chambers for the lower ranks, inner chambers for those of higher status. Waiting was a visible performance of humility, with swift access signalling favour and political intimacy.

But for our purposes, the most interesting and important point that Puff sets out is what he calls the ‘dual focus’ of waiting in the antechamber: waiting draws us inward (toward self-consciousness, anticipation, emotional intensity) whilst at the same time drawing us outward (toward the social structure and its hierarchies that determine the waiting). Waiting, therefore, means that our attention swings between internal uncertainty and external observation. This dual focus reflects the way in which waiting always has been surprisingly psychologically complex.

A contemporary version of the antechamber could be the television green room. At one level, a functional holding space, it also operates as a carefully managed zone where guests are present but unable to act until summoned. As in courtly settings, Puff suggests that waiting here demands ‘managed comportment’: the ability to take care of how we stand or sit, to keep a calm manner, to make small talk whilst simultaneously being permanently ready for interruption. The green room itself subtly signals hierarchy (with VIPs escorted quickly or given private rooms), but also its very presence is designed for anticipation, putting people into a state where their mood, focus and expectations adjust to the organisation’s pace.

Definitions of waiting

Although waiting has a distinctive quality compared with many other emotional states, the everyday use of the term means it can overlap with delay, boredom, inactivity, anticipation and endurance. Yet research across social sciences suggests that waiting is a distinct condition with its own characteristics.

Sociologist Stefano Gasparini’s classic definition suggests that waiting is:

“an interstitial time that functions both as a gap and as a link between the present and a future that has not yet arrived”

Unpacking this, we can see that waiting is not just an empty pause; waiting is always in relation to the future.By contrast, a delay is an external event, such as the train being late or the server stalling, while waiting itself is the subjective experience that arises due to that delay. This means that waiting involves the expectations, trust, and perceived risk that the future will not arrive as promised.

Waiting also differs from boredom: whereas boredom dulls attention and engagement, waiting is a mix of both under-stimulation alongside anticipation and vigilance, the sense that something may happen at any moment.

And nor is waiting the same as inactivity; this lacks a focus, whilst waiting is saturated with it, being directed toward a ‘not-yet’, which means we then struggle to fully relax into the present, as the future is intruding.

Waiting is usually more short-lived than endurance, which stretches across long periods of difficulty, although repeated or prolonged uncertainty can make waiting feel like endurance in slow motion. And while anticipation is often energising, waiting blends that feeling with dependence on others and a loss of control.

So, despite overlapping conditions, waiting has distinctive qualities; but the one characteristic of most interest to us is its dual exposure of Interiority alongside Social structure. We will now look at each of these in turn.

Our experience of waiting (Interiority)

Most emotional states either lean inward (such as grief or boredom) or outward (such as deadline pressure). But waiting is distinctive because it brings both the self and the system into the same frame of reference. In other words, as Lisa Baraitser suggests in her book ‘Enduring Time’, waiting draws attention to our subjective experience of time.

Waiting heightens our consciousness, producing a period of intensified self-observation in which emotions such as anticipation, vigilance and meaning-making come to the surface. We notice things we would normally ignore such as the sound of a clinic door opening, the shift in a colleague’s tone, the movement of a queue, a status bar that refuses to budge. In this sense, waiting can be activating. It forces us to interpret our situation: Has something gone wrong? Am I being overlooked? Is this delay meaningful? It pushes us to rethink expectations and attend to signals, or to the telling absences of signals, around us.

Yet the very same dynamics can also be depleting. Because waiting suspends our agency while amplifying uncertainty, it easily becomes a space for rumination (“Did I make a mistake?”), self-blame (“Maybe my CV wasn’t good enough”), or threat sensitivity (“What if the test result is bad news?”). We can easily escalate into elaborate internal narratives, each with high degrees of worry or self-doubt.

Context shapes which the way this experience unfolds. In situations like waiting for medical results, or waiting for confirmation of work hours in a precarious job, the delay can foster a kind of readiness. We are in a state of heightened alertness for the moment action becomes possible. But in prolonged, unclear or imposed waits (such as the indefinite timelines of immigration processes), waiting can produce resignation, fatigue and a gradual eroding of a sense of agency.

Waiting, in this sense, can prepare us for movement or quietly deaden our capacity to act. But the difference, it seems, depends less on personal capabilities and more on the reliability, transparency, and fairness of the systems that hold us in a state of suspension.

Psychological research shows the complex set of emotions that waiting induces and how they influence this activating-depleting continuum. For example, waiting is fraught with uncertainty, one of the most challenging of human experiences. This can be uncertainty about timing, outcomes, consequences and others’ intentions, which then triggers hypervigilance and potential threat processing. Yet at the same time, it increases the need for meaning-making - we try to make sense of what is going on, filling time with speculation about what is happening.

Waiting also disrupts attention, because the awaited event might arrive at any moment, which means we cannot fully invest in doing something else. This leads to the fragmentation of attention, reducing cognitive bandwidth and draining memory, planning, and self-control.

Temporal forecasting is also engaged, as we think about multiple possible futures, trying to prepare for the consequences of each. This amplifies stress, especially in cases where outcomes really matter (e.g., health results, job decisions, immigration processes). Emotional regulation strategies such as distraction or resignation also become central to the experience of waiting.

In summary, there is a huge amount of internal activity involved in the act of waiting that it seems we all know about but perhaps we often do not consider.

Exterior: What shapes waiting

Time is not distributed equally, Sarah Sharma argues, when she suggests that late capitalism produces a “temporal inequality”: we have unequal access to the responsiveness and timely service from others. In fact, waiting is a marker of one’s position in social hierarchies because those with economic capital can outsource or bypass waiting; those without must absorb delay.

Studies of government welfare offices show that bureaucratic waiting is a political instrument. Waiting disciplines, exhausts, and renders populations governable - on this basis, delays are more than inefficiencies; they signal who is valued and who is not. We can extend this to asylum and immigration systems, where waiting becomes a condition of suspended life, unable to plan, work, or move on.

‘Temporal injustice’ arises when groups are consistently exposed to more uncertainty than others, experienced not only as wasted time but as reduced agency and eroded dignity. We see this in healthcare disparities, where delays in diagnosis disproportionately affect women and racialised groups; in labour markets, where precarious workers wait for shifts or contracts; and in digital systems that ration access through opaque queues.

As we see, waiting is not simply a neutral interval but a means through which inequality is distributed: the capacity to plan, to hope, and to project oneself into the future is differentially applied to the population.

These two sections have allowed us to see the complexity involved in waiting both from an interior perspective, but also the structures that create this wait. And a famous experiment from psychology helps to nail the essence of this relationship between the inner and outer.

Marshmallows and waiting: The relationship between inner and outer

Walter Mischel’s now-iconic marshmallow experiment was long interpreted as evidence that waiting was simply an internal capacity, a form of self-control possessed by some and lacking in others. A child, left alone with a marshmallow and promised a second one if they wait, was considered to reveal something fundamental about their prospects.

This notion fitted with a preference for psychological explanations, supporting moral claims about who deserves success. Those who can wait are mature and responsible; those who eat the marshmallow, not waiting for a second are impulsive and lack the inner resources needed to wait, and therefore thrive.

But later research changed the story. showing that children’s waiting times depend heavily on environmental reliability. In the experiment, when the researcher broke a promise (“I’ll bring you new crayons” but didn’t), children stopped waiting and ate the marshmallow straight away. This showed that their behaviour is not impulsive but rational, because if the world does not keep its promises, it makes no sense to wait.

We can extend this to see how children from poorer households wait less, not because they lack discipline, but because they do not believe waiting will pay off. Economic instability encourages vigilance, rather than patience. So what looks like a personal failing in fact turns out to reflect the broader conditions of a child’s life.

This shift is important because it speaks to our key point about waiting as a relationship between a person and their environment, not simply a matter of inner willpower. The marshmallow test is a miniature version of an everyday truth: people garner their inner resources to wait but only when they trust that the external world will reward the delay. On this basis, it is one of the few ordinary experiences in which our inner life and social structures come into clear view at the same time.

The legibility of waiting

Herman Puff set out the way that the institutions shaping our lives developed their own material architectures of waiting that allowed us to understand the basis on which we were waiting. So even if it was unfair, at least we understood it.

Following the antechamber, nineteenth- and twentieth-century waiting rooms in railway stations, government offices, hospitals, and welfare agencies each carried a distinct message through their design and organisation. These were never neutral holding areas: they played out relations of power. A crowded clinic corridor or a slow-moving benefits queue signals institutional strain; a first-class lounge or priority lane communicates privilege. Crucially, these arrangements offer shared cues, we can exchange glances with others, the workloads of the staff are visible - all this helps to explanation to individuals how their own waiting fits within a broader context. Waiting is still frustrating, but it is legible: we can understand something about system capacity, fairness, and hierarchy from the room itself.

By contrast, this visible architecture is replaced by algorithmic opacity: systems that mean we wait, but without offering any corresponding cues as to why. We see a spinning wheel, a “pending” notification, or countdowns where the time-based logic is not always easy to understand. This matters earlier forms of waiting allowed us to see our relationship with wider structures, offering some explanation for our complex internal responses. But digital waiting all too often does the opposite, which can lead us to instead amplifying the inner side of the equation while concealing structure as the system continues to generate the emotions of waiting, but the system itself is harder to see.

It seems to us that a good illustration of this is the shift from traditional restaurant service to places that are also servicing digital ordering. Before the rise of online delivery platforms, diners could read the room: they could see how many tables were occupied, which groups had arrived before them, how pressured the staff appeared, and therefore infer something about why they were waiting and how long they might continue to do so. The wait was not necessarily pleasant, but it was something we could make sense of as we could see the activity that provided cues about workload and where we were in the sequence.

But with the introduction of digital delivery systems, this ability to interpret our waiting collapses. A restaurant may appear half-empty of diners, but the kitchen could be overwhelmed with online orders. Those in the restaurant have no access to any information about whether their meal comes next or after a batch of (higher-margin) delivery requests. This lack of external clarity means we are thrown back into an inner space where

Here, too, delay becomes personalised: “Why is my food taking so long?” rather than “What system am I inside?” This small but familiar example underscores the central claim of this section: the more algorithmically mediated the architecture of waiting becomes, the harder it is to locate its causes outside oneself. What used to be legible about the environment becomes murky but the intense emotional experience of waiting remains.

In these circumstances, as we have set out before, paranoid cognition can take hold. If the (more powerful) party is keeping us waiting without us being able to understand why, then we are likely to construe this as neglect and bad faith rather than simply a capacity issue. This is not because we have become inherently more suspicious, but because the system no longer provides signals of trustworthiness. The emotional heft of waiting is intensified not only by the lack of visible cues to understand why, but by the absence of reasons to trust that the system is acting in our interests.

Waiting and the economy

Much of the narrative about the economy is based around patience - for example, the notion of ‘Bidenomics’ was heralded on the importance of patience, to take time for people to feel the effects of an economic recovery. And embattled political leader Keir Starmer calls for patience to fix things, saying how the challenges the current government inherited require solutions that will take the long term to see the rewards.

In both cases, waiting is positioned as a civic virtue: responsible citizens are asked to hold steady, trust the process, and accept delay as evidence of seriousness rather than failure.

The challenge is that this appeal to patience can be at odds with people’s lived experience of economic unreliability. As the marshmallow experiment made clear, waiting is tolerated when we can interpret the environment as credible and responsive, but becomes problematic if promises are deferred without good reason. Added to this is asymmetric waiting. Much has been written about an emerging K-shaped economy, where high-income earners benefit from booming stock markets and property prices while low-income households face financial strain from inflation, high housing costs, and debt.

In this situation, we will scour the environment for meaning (given the way waiting has both inner and outer elements), and it is here that the fair process effect comes in. We are generally OK with unequal outcomes if we if we consider that the procedure that created this is fair. But if this process is seen to be unfair, then we are much more likely to have a negative reaction to an outcome where we have less than others.

This helps explain why economic patience narratives are met with scepticism: people are not rejecting long-term thinking as such; they are responding to environments where waiting is perceived both to be unreliable and procedurally unfair.

Waiting-for-harm or waiting-for-reward?

Much analysis of waiting assumes an orientation toward some form of reward or resolution. But it’s not difficult to make a case that a growing share of waiting is in fact related to anticipated harm. People are waiting for climate breakdown, for redundancies they suspect are coming, for economic conditions to worsen. This is not hopeful waiting, but defensive waiting.

For hopeful waiting (e.g. the economy will improve), the cost of waiting is still paid in advance, but it can feel meaningful because it is experienced as preparation. However, if waiting becomes defensive, then it engages threat anticipation and not goal pursuit, which is much more draining energy rather than preparing action. Prolonged exposure to anticipated stressors contributes to our ‘allostatic load’, the cumulative wear and tear produced by sustained uncertainty.

The role of behavioural science

This analysis of waiting arguably highlights a limitation in much behavioural science: a tendency to explain things mainly in terms of inner capacities - such as self-control, or motivation - rather than as a relational experience shaped by the environments in which waiting occurs.

For decades, the marshmallow experiment was seen as evidence that some people are better at tolerating delay than others, and it is only fairly recently that it has been shown that children’s willingness to wait is not simply an internal matter, but it is an assessment about the reliability of the world.

Waiting highlights this issue as it is one of the few experiences where the inner and outer are engaged at the same moment. Behavioural science all too often treats these domains separately - for example, COM-B identifies motivation ‘inside the person’ and opportunity ‘outside the person.’ But waiting shows us how limited this is, as what might look like low motivation may in fact be the result of repeated encounters with unreliable systems. What looks like impatience may be a reasonable response to delays that are opaque or unjustified.

We exist within a ‘system’ of people and their behaviours that shapes what is acceptable or expected of us - understanding how our response and behaviour is shaped by this is critical for a rounded understanding of people.

Conclusions

Waiting is one of the ordinary places where people learn what kind of world they inhabit: how trustworthy promises are, how responsive institutions can be, and where they sit within hierarchies of attention and care.

It also reminds us that humans do not merely move through time; we experience it, stretching ourselves toward imagined futures, holding past and present in mind at once. Waiting brings this distinctively human temporality into sharp relief.

Seen this way, waiting is a lesson in how power operates, what institutions can reliably deliver, and whose time is treated as valuable. It is therefore a very human, ordinary, and often overlooked trait that offers us considerable insight into the world we inhabit.

Implications for brands

Waiting is a signal of trustworthiness, not just another service metric. How delays are handled shapes perceptions of care and competence.

Unclear or unexplained waiting pushes customers into personalised interpretation (e.g. “I’m not valued”) creating distrust and paranoia.

Reducing wait time does not matter as much as making it understandable: explain what is happening, why, and what comes next.

Brands that rely on customers’ patience without demonstrating reliability risk disengagement, churn, and reputation damage.

Implications for government and public sector

Waiting is the public's frontline experience of state power and legitimacy, not an administrative by-product.

Long or indefinite waits are experienced as judgements about citizens’ worth, not just capacity constraints.

Appeals for patience succeed only when processes are seen as fair and transparent.

Public systems need to consider how waiting is effectively an issue of distributed justice, not just operational efficiency.

In the early 2000s, comedian Dom Joly stood on a train with a cartoonishly oversized mobile phone shouting “HELLO? I’M ON THE TRAIN!” at baffled commuters. It was a satire of a behaviour that felt new and socially disorienting: the idea that private communication about where we were at any given moment could suddenly spill into public space. Two decades later, the situation has been upended - we no longer shout our presence into the world; instead, we broadcast it silently.

In 2025, 65% of US Gen Z routinely share their location with others, and almost half of all US adults say they keep at least one person updated on their movements. What once felt intrusive is now automatic for many. At one level, this seems sensible – why would we not let others in our lives know where we are?

But as ever, when it comes to people and their tools, it is not that simple. In fact, it is starting to become clear that location sharing has implications for how intimacy is constructed: could it be that this simple shift is in fact undermining the everyday actions on which our intimacy is based?

Intimacy through shared moments and feelings

It is well known that intimacy in our relationships is not only predicted by big set pieces (such as a weekly ‘date night’) but by what psychologist Zizi Papacharissi calls ‘affective traces’, small, voluntary disclosures that express care and attention. These operate as ‘relational maintenance,’ keeping a sense of mutual involvement: we are not simply issuing information but expressing our care and attention for the other person.

Then what if location-sharing renders this no longer needed, and instead of intentional communication, family and friends receive automated visibility? Communication theory would set out the distinction between message content (functional information of our whereabouts) and its relational function, the interpersonal signal carried by the act of disclosure. On this basis, automated location updates weaken the second layer; we receive knowledge but stripped of the interpersonal element.

The risk is that we erode what anthropologist Kathleen Stewart calls the “ordinary affects”: the small gestures and micro-encounters of everyday life. Stewart’s work shows how the pleasures of the ordinary, such as a morning walk or a familiar shopkeeper’s greeting, form the ‘affective fabric’ through which people feel connected to their worlds. It is easy to dismiss these mundane interactions as trivial, but Stewart makes the point that they are the subtle materials from which our collective identities and relational belonging are made.

These small disclosures are part of the everyday atmosphere that can keep relationships alive. They are gestures of care and attunement - the low-level background work that holds intimacy together.

Visibility becomes expected

Location-sharing is no longer a marginal or highly personal practice but a familiar mode of social belonging. Again, the same study found two-thirds of Gen Z share their location, along with 45% of millennials and 42% of Gen X. And among those who share, most make their whereabouts known to multiple people: 61% share with several individuals rather than just one. In fact, this behaviour, which might once have signalled closeness (if perhaps we just share with one person), now seems to signal ordinariness – it is the social norm.

This creates new complexities, given people such as Alice Marwick and danah boyd have long found that young people negotiate their privacy more by managing boundaries (who gets in) rather than guarding secrets (what you say). But location sharing norms are putting this under pressure, as now a state of constant visibility demonstrates trustworthiness and transparency. On this basis, declining to share (to protect privacy) can start to feel difficult, even in otherwise healthy relationships.

‘Privacy resignation’ also reinforces these norms. Many of us believe we have already handed over significant personal data to governments and technology firms, which leads us to consider additional sharing, particularly with friends or partners, as relatively inconsequential. If institutions already know, the logic goes, then sharing with a family member or friend seems trivial, thereby normalising interpersonal surveillance.

Internalised visibility

And the act of location sharing, increasingly the norm, not only seems to erode our ‘affective fabric’ but also creates a sense of being observed by others. Philosopher Michel Foucault famously articulated this idea through the Panopticon: a prison design in which prisoners internalise discipline not because they are constantly observed, but because they can never know when they might be observed. Fast forward a century, and research on parental tracking suggests that young people frequently modify their behaviour pre-emptively, not because a parent is tracking them, but because they could be.

danah boyd calls this the erosion of “unobserved space”: the disappearing places in which young people can linger and experiment without anticipating an external gaze. This space has historically played a key developmental role in establishing autonomy and internal decision-making. But studies now suggest that early normalisation of being trackable encourages children to interpret their behaviour through the imagined perspective of others.

And as adults, we can also experience similar dynamics. Even when location-sharing is consensual, the awareness of potential visibility generates a kind of background accountability. So now if we decide to take a detour and delay our route home, then this might be something to be explained if called upon later. In other words, our internal world and the choices we then make become ‘digitally disciplined’.

Linked to this, perhaps there is also something important in the uncertainty of not knowing quite where someone is. In her book ‘Mating in Captivity’, Esther Perel suggests that relationships have always relied on elements of not-knowing, what happens in the gaps in someone’s day, what is going on in their heads in the pauses before they reply. This is where our curiosity kicks in, we think about each other and speculate, drawing on the small acts of imagination.

Philosophers of relational life, such as Perel, have long argued that these intervals are not blackages but openings where curiosity, generosity, and meaning are formed. Think of waiting to hear whether someone has finished a meeting or arrived safely: in that small pause, you wonder how they are, you stay alert to their mood, you think about what they might need from you. But when every movement becomes instantly visible, those spaces begin to shrink.

Intimacy through shared meaning-making

You get the impression that Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin would have taken a hard line on the use of location sharing. For him, everything we say is an “answerable act,” a moment in which a person steps forward and allows another to see how they interpret their situation. And as we set out earlier, this is never a neutral transmission of facts; it is shaped by the speaker’s sense of what matters and how they wish to be understood in that instant. So even a simple message such as “I’m just leaving now” reflects how the speaker understands the moment and how they want that moment to be understood by someone else. Taking that simple phrase, it might mean:

a small apology from someone who’s running late

said after a long day, it can signal tiredness and a hope for a nice reception at home.

a cue for timing and care, sent to a partner cooking dinner, not just movement

from a teenager, it might show responsibility or avoid worrying a parent

said to a friend, it can express enthusiasm

and so on

And crucially, the way the listener receives and interprets a small disclosure also acknowledges them as a partner in meaning-making. “Just leaving now” might be heard as stress and met with making things comfortable for them that evening. The response itself might be sympathetic, such as “Take your time, no rush,” or on the other hand it might push back on the implied meaning: “Just leaving now? I thought you said the meeting finished earlier.” In each case, the utterance becomes something that can be embraced or contested, but not simply absorbed.

Whichever route, the exchange on location shows that the utterance has been taken up and worked on within the shared rhythm of the relationship. To speak, in Bakhtin’s view, is to enter a small ethical relation, to offer something and allow it to be met, questioned, or affirmed by another.

Location-sharing bypasses all of this, it delivers the fact without the framing. What disappears is not just the information update but the small moment in which a person ‘narrates themselves into view’ and the equally small moment in which that narration can be received, interpreted, and recognised.

Final thoughts

Location-sharing clearly has value. For many people, it provides reassurance, protection, and a sense of being held in mind. It answers a genuine human need for safety. But safety and intimacy are not, of course, the same thing.

What location-sharing ultimately reveals is not simply where someone is, but what can be lost when technology speaks instead of us. Intimacy is not built from perfect knowledge of another’s movements, but from the small stories we choose to tell about ourselves, turning information into relationship.

Safety may well require us to know where someone is. But intimacy still depends on knowing how they are, and that part cannot be automated.

Witch-hunts have returned to public conversation, with the recent film Wicked: For Good reviving the familiar question of who gets cast as a witch and exploring how women’s reputations can be destroyed by narrative rather than evidence. While witch-hunts often reference the trials of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, more recently, the term has also been used to describe the online abusive campaigns that target women, especially those who are in public life. Some commentators have argued that these modern attacks belong in the same category as historical witch hunts, whilst others disagree, suggesting that the definition of witch-hunts excludes online misogynistic abuse.

This is not an abstract theoretical debate. How we define things matters: a definition not only provides us with a shared frame of understanding, but also allows us to properly say what something is not. We can then communicate effectively, knowing we all broadly understand what we mean: people who need to can also conduct research and policy makers can make recommendations on best practice, with a shared understanding of terms.

At first glance, the definitions we live by often look solid and stable. We frequently accept them as they stand, assuming that’s just how things are. But when we start probing, they can quickly break down into competing perspectives: Is wellness a form of healthcare or a consumer identity? Is an ‘expert’ someone who is credentialled through qualifications, or is it simply a matter of being experienced or even being widely followed online?

We take up this topic to understand how women today become targets of deepfakes, smear campaigns, and waves of online hostility. For some commentators, these attacks can be defined as being in the same category as the early modern witch-hunts that led to the execution of thousands of (mostly) women, giving today’s abuse a clear historical and moral lineage. But as writer Sara Ahmed suggests, we should be cautious: while powerful labels can work symbolically, there is a danger that they can signal concern without actually enabling change.

A second definitional tension runs through the debate on misinformation. Researchers and practitioners disagree on whether existing definitions of misinformation properly account for the gendered abuse faced by women online. Indeed, media researchers Marília Gehrke and Eedan R. Amit-Danhi argue that gendered disinformation “has scarcely been addressed by scholars”. The concern here is that narrow definitions can create blind spots: if the most gendered forms of online harm fall outside the frame of misinformation, they become less visible to researchers, policymakers, and platform designers.

So in what follows, we examine the definition of ‘witch-hunt’ and assess whether, and on what grounds, contemporary online attacks against women could fall within that category. We also consider whether these forms of abuse fit within existing definitions of misinformation and what is at stake if they do not.

Our aim is to explore the implications for addressing this deeply concerning issue and to consider what this definitional debate reveals about the current state of thinking on misinformation.

The witch hunt industrial complex

Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, roughly 60,000 people, overwhelmingly women, were executed as witches across Europe and its colonies. The popular narrative has long been that this was a case of collective hysteria, driven by irrational crowds. Arthur Miller explicitly framed the Salem witch trials in this way, using them as an allegory for the McCarthyism at the time of writing.

However, it is increasingly recognised that these mass killings were not collective panic but systematic processes with a high degree of organisation and structure. Theological guidebooks such as the Malleus Maleficarum set out rules for what could be used as evidence of witchcraft. This included testimony that a ‘witch’s spirit’ appeared to the victim, which was to be admitted as proof, and that any denial itself was read as guilt. Another set of rules involved interpreting misfortune as the result of witchcraft, so a failed harvest became proof of ‘cursing’. These guidebooks offered a receptive audience a set of mechanics that allowed rumours to readily be converted into guilt and, from there, into punishment.

The resulting trials were not only legal procedures but public spectacles designed to make persecution of witches visible to a wide audience. Pamphlets carried sensational accounts of witches’ confessions, which allowed suspicion to spread beyond the courtroom. Public executions provided spectacle, with hangings and burnings before crowds to dramatise the triumph of authority over evil. Witch trials served as public lessons in godly behaviour and social discipline, operating as platforms for authorities to communicate moral boundaries to the wider community.

And historians point to the way this machinery was useful for those in positions of power. For vicars and priests, witchcraft claims drew a scattered set of lay beliefs into a narrative about evil with the church at the centre of interpretation. For magistrates, it expanded their reach, as manuals and ‘experts’ ensured that rumours and neighbourly disputes were translated into evidence that was admissible in court, allowing the state to claim authority over what would otherwise be unseen. For rulers, it offered political expedience: crop failures, epidemics, and fiscal crises could be attributed to hidden enemies, thereby redirecting resentment away from institutional failings.

Of course, as political philosopher Silvia Federici argues, misogyny was at the heart of this: the social ordering of the period made women disproportionately vulnerable to accusation. For example, midwives and healers held reproductive knowledge that challenged the emerging professional power of male physicians. But more generally, women who deviated from prescribed norms of obedience, chastity, or economic dependence were recast as dangerous. In Federici’s famous book, Caliban and the Witch, the figure of the witch serves as a vehicle for disciplining female autonomy and reshaping the moral and economic order.

Seen in this way, witch-hunts were clearly never simply outbreaks of hysteria. They were a whole ecosystem, with courts, clergy, magistrates, neighbours, and professional witch-finders, all working together in a structured process. It was, in effect, an early industrial complex for identifying, trying, and ultimately murdering those marked as suspect.

Digital hunts: deepfakes and the manosphere

Returning to our question of definitions, is it legitimate to say that the witch hunt has now taken a different form, one that today operates through digital media?

Campaigners point out that just as then, women today are subject to considerable violence by men: an estimated 736 million women (almost one in three) have been subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence, or both at least once in their life (30 per cent of women aged 15 and older). And there is a huge amount of non-consensual deepfakes and other forms of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) overwhelmingly targeting women with devastating impacts.

We can see the parallels: early witch-hunts relied on public trials, sermons, and executions designed to be watched. And today, in much the same way, deepfakes and doctored images are created for maximum visibility and circul­ation. Their purpose is not only to humiliate a particular woman but to send a wider message that women should be scrutinised for signs of guilt or shame, and to assume wrongdoing even when none exists.

On the other hand, it could also be argued that today’s online misogynistic abuse is not a witch-hunt in the strict sense: it lacks the codified rules and formal pathways through which historical hunts converted accusations into punishment, given that today’s digital persecutions are driven by online environments, anonymity, and networked misogyny. And some digital scholars caution that broad labels can flatten crucial distinctions, flattening important differences and obscuring the specific dynamics that drive contemporary forms of harm to women.

But if we can find these parallels, then we make them politically salient, giving them a moral weight that comes from aligning it with what is widely recognised as one of history’s most shameful chapters (though in some parts of the world, it is not yet history at all). Thus, the point is not just analytical but political: naming creates resonance. It reframes what might otherwise be dismissed as private, individual hostility, or indeed, ‘mass hysteria’ as something collective and structural, an enduring pattern of control.

Structural orchestration: the social and systemic forces across the centuries

However, the basis on which we construct our definition is an important consideration, as it is not fixed but reflects our choices about where to look and what to make visible. Our preceding discussion has focused on the mechanics of these accusations, which draws on a cognitive or information-processing perspective, concerned with how claims are formed, spread, and judged. By contrast, a lens that centres the victim (rather than the process) could also be the basis on which we define witch-hunts. Defining in this way shows more clearly the way that it is predominantly women who are positioned as dangerous or deceitful, making them ready targets. This broader socio-cultural definition allows us to more easily see the narratives and power relations that make certain accusations possible in the first place. It addresses the underlying conditions, rather than the mechanics of how these are then activated, shaping who becomes a believable target and why.

To examine witch-hunts using this socio-cultural lens, we can turn to writer Sian Norris, who argues that misogyny is anchored in narratives about zero-sum: women’s gains are men’s losses. Norris gives an account of the way deindustrialisation, the rise of precarious labour, and the retrenchment of welfare offer a fertile ground for zero-sum logic to reframe laws on workplace equality or protections against gender-based violence as attacks on men.

Polling supports this, with recent research finding more than half agreeing both that women’s rights have gone ‘far enough’ and that men are being asked ‘too much’ to support equality: claims that are clearly at odds with persistent gaps in pay, safety, and political representation.

Now, using this broader socio-cultural definition, we can more clearly see the parallels: In the past, crop failures and disease were blamed on women who were already viewed with suspicion; today, the data suggests that feelings of status loss and economic insecurity are often redirected toward feminism or women’s independence.

In both eras, misogyny provides the lens through which problems are interpreted, and the surrounding infrastructure helps accusations spread. The systems differ, but the underlying logic is similar, with women framed as the source of others’ misfortune. Seeing witch-hunts within this wider pattern of misogyny shows why definitions matter: the terms we use determine whether we recognise these continuities or overlook them.

For example, in Britain, overt endorsement of the statement “a man’s job is to earn and a woman’s job is to care for the home” fell from 48% in 1987 to just 9% in 2022, suggesting a shift in gender attitudes. Yet deeper, more essentialist attitudes proved to be resilient. As late as 1990, 45% agreed that being a housewife was as fulfilling as paid work, and nearly a third thought women “really wanted” home and children above all. These long-term, perhaps less visible, assumptions have surely meant misogyny can be reactivated quickly when economic or cultural shocks hit.

And if we take a long-term historical view from the early modern witch-hunts to today’s digital attacks, we can see a long arc of gendered accusation. The public head-shaving of women in liberated France, the Victorian policing of ‘fallen women’, the sexualised smears used against suffragettes, and the child-abuse accusations of the Satanic Panic all appear to rest on the same logic: suspicion attached to women’s bodies, spectacle used to enforce moral order, and punishment delivered through shame rather than evidence. These episodes span centuries, showing that while the infrastructure may have changed, the underlying logic of gendered accusation has been shockingly durable.

Where does misinformation sit?

On the same basis, it is worth considering whether witch-hunts can sit within the broader category of misinformation. Just as situating today's online misogynistic abuse as witch-hunts offers visibility and policy leverage, so would defining this as a form of misinformation.

However, we quickly encounter challenges to suggest that they are not the same: the dominant frame used to define misinformation is an information-processing one, focusing on how information is produced, transmitted, and consumed. Within this framework, misinformation is typically understood as false or misleading content that distorts belief or knowledge. The focus lies on the mechanics of diffusion and cognition: how people encounter, assess, and share claims.

From this vantage point, misogynistic attacks online appear less as ‘misinformation’ and more as smears, as their harms arise through narrative framing and amplification rather than factual inaccuracy. As Deen Freelon and Chris Wells observe, we can see how truth-centric definitions of misinformation overlook the political and social harms that narratives inflict, regardless of whether they contain verifiable falsehoods.

Seen through that lens, the online vilification of women falls outside the definitional frame as it typically manipulates stereotypes and emotion, rather than verifiable facts. Yet, as Rachel Kuo and Alice Marwick argue, this narrow reading of the issue reflects a depoliticisation: focusing on accuracy, misinformation research often ignores the power structures that give false claims their force.

The same principles surely apply now as we saw with the definition of witch-hunts: misinformation based on information processing obscures the underlying gendered dimensions, making the problem one of individual reasoning.

Misinformation frameworks tend to privilege perspectives that fit cleanly within an information-processing model: for example, political misinformation (e.g., false claims about elections), or public-health misinformation (e.g., misleading vaccine content), are treated as reporting core, legitimate harms. Likewise, accounts that involve verifiably false statements, something a fact-checker can label true or false, are granted immediate credibility because they align with the tools the system knows how to use.

These experiences are seen as central evidence of what misinformation is. But women targeted with gendered online abuse don’t fit this template: they are rarely being ‘misled’ so much as being undermined. Their harm comes from smear campaigns, insinuations, and reputational attacks - all forms of narrative manipulation that are harder to categorise as ‘false claims.’ As a result, their voices are pushed to the margins.

A socio-cultural lens can restore what that framework misses out: the histories and narratives that shape the behaviours. When online abuse of women is excluded from misinformation frameworks, the result is a blind spot: it contributes to an invisibalisation of this type of abuse that requires a focused response.

This is why we need a plurality of lenses. Cognitive perspectives explain mechanisms of spread; socio-cultural perspectives explain meaning, power, and vulnerability. The question, then, is not simply whether today’s attacks count as witch-hunts or misinformation. It is whether our definitions help us see the pattern clearly or whether they leave the experiences of some groups of the population, in this case, women, out of the frame.

Conclusions

Debates about definitions can sound abstract, the kind of thing only academics care about. But in practice, definitions are some of the most powerful tools we have for making sense of the world. They determine what we notice, what we name, and what we treat as worthy of action.

The question of whether today’s digital targeting of women constitutes a witch-hunt, or whether it belongs within the domain of misinformation, is not simply semantic but shapes which harms come to the attention of policymakers, platforms, and the public. A definition built around the mechanics of accusations will see one kind of pattern; a definition built around the experiences of those being targeted will see another. Both viewpoints reveal something important, but neither is sufficient on its own.

And as the history of witch-hunts teaches us, societies are often most vulnerable to their most enduring patterns when they fail to name them. The challenge, then, is not simply to decide whether modern attacks ‘are’ witch-hunts or ‘are’ misinformation, but to ensure that our definitions, whichever we use, are reflected on and allow us see clearly rather than look away.

“The idea that you work hard, pay your dues and follow the rules is being pushed back on,” Mike Nicholson of Progressive Masculinity explains in an interview. The former English teacher observes this during his workshops with boys across the UK: the questioning of old social contracts and ideas such as the notion that hard work will bring you success over time, or that if you follow the rules, you’ll be okay.

He says, it’s not about laziness or entitlement, but rather a growing feeling that schools don’t provide what’s needed to equip you for life. This is not entirely surprising, Mike points out, as cuts have gutted careers advice and practical subjects. The route from school to livelihood now feels blurred, making it harder to believe in the deal itself, causing a crisis of faith. Mike suggests that this creates frustration, making boys vulnerable to predatory online actors promoting hustle culture and harmful ideologies

But it isn’t just that they’ve stopped believing the system will open up for them; there is also what Mike describes as “a growing sentiment that real-world knowledge is being concealed, especially around business and finance,” something we’ve seen in our ethnographic research with boys and young men in particular. It’s the belief that the system is fixed against you, and to get anywhere, you almost need to shortcut or circumvent it and the institutions involved.

For anthropologists, this makes today a critical time to understand the shifting norms that aren’t always easy to decipher. What appears to have shifted is that, for much of the modern era, institutions mediated public life; this basic arrangement is now being challenged, as we see in our research on topics such as health and wellness and elitism. Even though there have always been other streams of knowledge, institutions broadly told us or guided us as to what counted as knowledge, what counted as good behaviour, and how we should live together. But that vertical order is faltering. As political theorist Margaret Levi writes, trust is “a contingent exchange between citizen and institution.”

That exchange now seems to be weakening, with only 11 per cent of Britons saying they trust politicians to “tell the truth.” And more broadly, professions tied to media or politics are among the least trusted.

The pushback against handing over trust and the deference it requires comes through strongly in our ethnographic work with young men in the US and UK. Many describe a void now filled by online mentors and influencers, fuelling an interest in hustle culture and ‘bro-finance.’ These narratives promise money now and respect now: invest in crypto, buy NFTs, take these supplements. For many, this feels far more compelling than a vague route to ‘who knows where,’ managed by a faceless ‘them.’ As one viral video puts it:

“They don’t teach you life skills in school because independent people can’t be controlled.”

Sociologist Anthony Giddens described modernity as disembedding, the way social life gets lifted out of local contexts. His classic example is simple: buying bread no longer involves the baker you know, but an app, a warehouse, and a logistics chain you will never meet. In this shift, trust itself moves from people to systems. Today, we may be seeing an extension of this: ‘knowledge disembedding’, where what counts as ‘knowing’ detaches from institutional guardianship and is instead reassembled through platforms and peer publics.

In this environment, self-publishing is seen to convey a sense of transparency, of horizontal knowledge that can be easily accessed. And rather than being hidden behind a paywall, it is often pitted against institutions seen as over-complicating issues. As political analyst Katherine Fieschi recently told us in an interview:

“The minute anybody asks a good question to which there’s no easy answer, they’re branded part of the elite, trying to bamboozle you.”

Complexity itself becomes suspect.

As William Davies describes in Nervous States, “the politics of feeling” means that truth is not necessarily judged by evidence but by resonance. The question morphs from “Is it true?” to “Who seems honest saying it?” Authority seems to have shifted sideways - from institution to individual, from mandates to gut feel. The social contract is being rewritten through self-made expertise and performances of legitimacy. Authority has become distributed via the podcaster, the YouTuber, the “citizen investigator.”

And this horizontal learning shapes wellness culture more broadly, with 65 per cent of young people getting health information from friends and family, or social-media peers rather than professionals. Even powerful medications like GLP-1 weight-loss drugs migrate into this peer space: influencers on TikTok and Telegram share experiences, side-effects, sourcing tips, and even unlicensed versions such as retatrutide. We are seeing a growing buzz around micro-dosing, and for many, a discourse that is morphing into a form of modern self-care that sits alongside supplements and hormone balancing.

But there can be consequences, as one of our participants recently told us:

“I try anything my friends at the gym suggest or if it feels right on TikTok.”

This has led him into danger, notably a series of debilitating headaches for which he was sent to the neurologist for an MRI.

“I was really panicked. I had the MRI and as soon as I had it I remembered - I put two and two together and I realised it must be the high quantities of salt I was drinking every day that my friend at the gym recommended. I came off it pretty quick!”

And it’s no wonder; in a recent interview Colleen Derkatch author of Why Wellness Sells, explains that the wellness industry “offers little ways to cope with big problems, if only momentarily,” by reframing structural pressures such as inequality, insecurity, climate despair and even illness as matters of personal discipline. In other words, people naturally want agency over their health, but rather than addressing structural causes (such as lack of access to quality healthcare or long working hours), individuals are told to detox or self-manage.

But perhaps as Colleen Derkatch tells us, this amounts to a kind of soft gaslighting: structural incapacity becomes private fault. In this ‘disembedded knowledge frame’, the social contract of support, of state and citizen, becomes a contract of self-improvement. As one young participant told us,

“TikTok has started whole new concerns in my body I never worried about before: now there are so many things I should be doing to look after myself.”

In our online research, we found a barrage of messages suggesting that most illnesses can be avoided, with one influencer stating, “There is no such thing as illness.”

However, as Mike Nicholson notes, this pushback extends beyond health and finances. He is seeing some emerging trends online as part of this breaking down of social contracts, for example, the rise of vigilante groups. With trust in governments, media, universities, and police falling, it feels like citizens are no longer waiting for permission to act. People don’t stop caring about their idea of right and wrong; these groups want to reestablish a moral order, and new moral actors have stepped in where they feel official ones are faltering. Paedophile-hunter groups pose as minors online, confront alleged offenders and post the footage; a 2022 University of Hertfordshire study found nearly half the public approve of these tactics. Citizen patrols and anti-migrant groups, documented by The Guardian, claim to ‘protect communities’ amid migration tensions. Online, shame pages and doxxing operate as informal courts of public justice. They may not always be violent, but they are acts of moral authorship in spaces where legitimacy feels up for grabs.

As anthropologists, we know that every society has established cultural norms regarding what is acceptable behaviour, but today these are being questioned. But when public figures mock civility and official channels lose credibility, those who feel excluded from authority construct their own.

But perhaps people are not retreating from civic life but rebuilding it through immediacy, such as peer judgment and participatory scrutiny. There is an argument that trustworthiness now depends on ‘showing your workings.’ For institutions, this might mean shifting from a command-and-control approach to one of collaboration, explaining decisions and sharing ownership of knowledge, a point made by political analyst Katherine Fieschi in a recent interview with us. Or we morph into what Byung-Chul Han calls a ‘society of transparency’, a world in which legitimacy is earned by visibility rather than process, the performance of authenticity through, for example, livestreamed meetings or CEOs on TikTok.

And perhaps this is where modern anthropology has something vital to offer. It helps us understand how old norms of work hard and wait are being replaced by new reflexes: see for yourself, make your own authority. Citizenship only works when people are engaged as participants rather than managed as subjects, and we may be watching that renegotiation happen in real time. Maybe the task now is not to restore hierarchy, but to practise a kind of responsible horizontality, a way of sharing knowledge, authority and accountability between institutions and citizens without abandoning rigour or public trust.

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The Amazon TV series The Girlfriend follows a wealthy man who becomes romantically involved with Cherry, a woman from a less privileged background. While on the surface the story is a psychological thriller about love, deceit, and class tension, the subtext is the notion of the home, and how an outsider’s presence can unsettle the existing order within it. Similarly, this is what the 2023 film Saltburn was about: both are stories of walls thought to be secure being breached and outsiders slipping through.

These cultural stories can be called on to highlight something beyond a gripping drama - they illustrate a societal shift. There is an argument that affluence and legitimacy were once grounded in the workplace; today, it is increasingly apparent that the domestic environment has become a new frontier for playing out our financial lives and political positions. Our homes, via property, inheritance, and housing markets, now represent new battle lines, with accompanying vulnerabilities and anxieties.

As writer Alva Gotby argues in her most recent book, domestic life was once thought to be quite separate from our wider economic lives, while today, as we will set out, it seems central to it. Of course, the home has long been a site where economic and emotional life intersect, where labour is reproduced, care is performed, and social order is maintained. But what has changed is its centrality in political life.

This means that homes are not neutral containers for private life; in fact, scholars have long shown how the built environment encodes political visions of who belongs, how families should live, and what relationships are valued. In fact, the ‘ideal’ single-family house, with its private bedrooms, fenced gardens, and self-contained domestic unit, emerged from nineteenth-century middle-class ideals that aimed to naturalise the nuclear family and the passing of property through inheritance. This did not merely reflect social order but also helped to produce it, embedding privacy and ownership as cultural norms.

For those working in behaviour change and policy design, this matters a great deal. This is because the home is not a neutral space of decision-making, but a site where economic structures and moral expectations meet. All of which implies that we need to consider the embedded politics within the house and map how they influence engagement and behaviour; we argue that any programme hoping to change household behaviour that ignores this can risk failure.

From labour to living space

To unpack these assertions about the home, Gotby explains how the industrial era conferred legitimacy on certain groups in the population: their financial well-being was justified by claims to enhanced productivity, innovation, or management. Workers, too, could imagine upward mobility via labour or union power. But increasingly these certainties are eroding: stable employment is giving way to short contracts, wages have barely moved, and insecurity defines more and more lives.

And if the traditional connection between work and reward has weakened, and stable, well-paid employment is no longer the primary route to security or status for many, then advantage increasingly depends on access to assets, particularly housing and inheritance. To this end, homes have been financialised, transformed into speculative assets and rental streams.

But if advantage is now maintained less through labour and more through the ownership of assets such as housing and inheritance, then claims to social legitimacy (via meritocracy) are surely much harder to sustain.

This is because property-based affluence very tangibly exposes inequality rather than disguising it: it depends on prior ownership, inheritance, and exclusion. For the very well-off, then, maintaining moral credibility requires concealing this dependence. This, says Gotby, is done via the language of taste, stability, and family responsibility, with property ownership being reframed as ‘good’, a sign of prudence, discipline, or good citizenship rather than structural privilege.

In fact, following this argument, the household now performs much of the social and ideological work once performed by the workplace. Where once it was the factory or office that taught dominant societal values, now it is the home that increasingly carries this burden: property ownership becomes proof of responsibility, inherited advantage is framed as good planning or hard work, and caring for family is seen as a virtue.

In this way, ownership and privilege are reinterpreted through a virtuous moral lens, with a whole set of societal expectations. The social and economic inequalities that, in fact, underpin this are harder to spot as they have been turned into everyday moral behaviour of ‘good people’.

As academic David Harvey and others have noted, housing is “capital fixed in space”: not only a way of absorbing investment but materialising particular ideas of citizenship and belonging. From Victorian slum clearances to Thatcher’s “Right to Buy,” the built environment has been repeatedly remade to express and stabilise the dominant social and political relations of the day.

Homes and privacy

Given that housing is a very tangible expression of inequality, it is no wonder that its design has long served as a means of maintaining privacy via control and surveillance. Estates, corridors, gated entrances, and concierge desks operate as ‘architectures of exclusion’, transforming inequality into something that appears like ‘good design’ rather than a political choice.

In this sense, (with reference to Gotby,) privacy disguises the everyday mechanisms on which affluence and comfort rest: the labour, inheritance, and social advantage that can underpin a household. For the well-off, privacy is arguably more important than ever as it not only protects possessions but also the illusion that their position is self-made.

That this is important is perhaps reflected in popular culture, where anxieties about the fragility of this privacy privilege seem to be a recurring theme. In Saltburn, scholarship student Oliver Quick struggles to fit in at the University of Oxford because of his inexperience with upper-class manners. He befriends Felix Catton, an affluent and popular student who invites him to spend the summer at his family’s country house, Saltburn. Oliver learns the rhythms of the household, mirrors the family’s tastes and manners (both hidden from view to the broader public) and manipulates their sympathies to secure his place within the home. His charm grants him access to both emotional and physical spaces that were never meant to be shared with outsiders.

The stately home itself is designed to enforce separation with long drives and locked gates that set out who belongs and who merely visits. Architectural features such as grand entrance halls, private wings, and servant corridors materialise hierarchy, keeping the labour that sustains privilege out of sight. Yet in Saltburn, these boundaries fail. The estate becomes prised open, its private rituals exposed to imitation and manipulation by Oliver.

In The Girlfriend, Cherry is initially portrayed as the wronged outsider, unfairly judged by a very affluent family. But by the final scenes, her deceptions and manipulations are revealed, exposing how easily an ‘intruder’ can disguise themselves to enter what appears to be a safe, private world. The family’s modern home, consisting of glass walls, open-plan spaces, and minimalist design, is meant to project taste and control. Yet these same features mean that every movement is visible, every conversation overheard. What was designed to display confidence instead leaves its inhabitants constantly on show, their domestic life as transparent as the architecture around them.

And when outsiders violate the once private household, the response can be visceral, as both Cherry and Oliver found to their cost. Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory explains this by linking privacy intrusion to notions of purity and sanctity: breaches of the private home can feel like contamination, not just disruption.

And this also aligns with Paul Rozin’s research on disgust as a ‘boundary emotion’, where the response helps guard the body and the family from what feels contaminating or out of place.

This supports a Gotby perspective, with the incursions saying less about the threat posed by outsiders and more about the unease of those inside, an awareness that their comfort and security rest on what are perceived as fragile foundations of ownership and exclusion. This same sentiment was expressed by billionaire Nick Hanauer when, in an open letter, he warned that:

“If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us plutocrats.”

In this sense, the fear that someone like Cherry or Oliver evokes is the fear of exposure, an acknowledgement that privilege in fact rests on fragile foundations.

Property, and the politics of change

If a behavioural lens is to account for these dynamics, it must move beyond treating the household as a simple unit of analysis. As we noted, domestic life now performs much of the ideological work once done by the workplace: it is where inequality is normalised and moralised through everyday acts of ownership, care, and responsibility. But these processes look very different depending on one’s relationship to wealth and property.

For the affluent, the home represents control and insulation, a private space where social and economic advantage can be performed as moral virtue. Through the management of domestic order, sustainability, and taste, the affluent transform economic privilege into evidence of character and ‘stewardship’. Installing heat pumps, recycling diligently, or investing in long-term financial planning for inheritance becomes a way to demonstrate these values. Such actions are not only about reducing emissions or saving money, but about maintaining a sense of worth and belonging in an economy where the link between work and moral legitimacy has weakened.

At the same time, this sense of stewardship can turn into defensiveness. When interventions such as smart meters, mandatory energy audits, or housing regulation appear to threaten autonomy, they are resisted as intrusions into private life. The same desire to perform virtue through domestic responsibility thus coexists with a fear of surveillance or loss of control. What we might interpret as ‘inertia’ or ‘status quo bias’ can instead be seen as a form of protection, a defence of a space where personal sovereignty still feels possible.

For those without wealth, these dynamics take another form. Renters, precarious workers, and those in shared or temporary housing live with limited privacy and agency. Their homes are not sites of moral display but of constant negotiation, with landlords, neighbours, and the state. In these contexts, sustainability initiatives that assume autonomy or disposable income can feel irrelevant or moralising. Installing a heat pump or retrofitting insulation is rarely a matter of choice; it depends on ownership structures and access to capital. Even everyday acts like recycling are shaped by material constraints, lack of space, poor waste infrastructure, or time poverty, yet are often interpreted as signs of moral failure.

This means that interventions designed for ‘households’ often reproduce the very hierarchies they seek to address. Among the wealthy, behavioural programmes can reinforce moral self-regard, rewarding those already able to act. Among the less wealthy, they can intensify the burden of having to take personal responsibility in systems designed to limit it. The same policy, framed as empowerment, can thus produce guilt, shame, or disengagement depending on who receives it.

For behavioural science, this underscores the need to move beyond individualist framings of choice or habit. The home is not a neutral container for decision-making; instead, it is an emotional and political infrastructure that distributes autonomy unevenly. Designing effective interventions, therefore, requires attention to how these inequalities shape both motivation and meaning.

Behaviour does not unfold in a vacuum, but within systems of property, politics, and power. This is what Saltburn and The Girlfriend dramatise so effectively. The intrusion of an outsider, whether Oliver or Cherry, does not merely threaten privacy; it reveals the mechanisms that are otherwise hidden from everyday view.

Conclusions

For those with an interest in behaviour change, these narratives underscore that the household is not a passive backdrop to social life but a place where inequality, legitimacy, and aspiration are continually negotiated. This means that a recycling campaign, financial planning, or a home-energy programme may be technically sound may well falter if they clash with people’s lived experiences of ownership, precarity, or fairness.

It seems we need a politically informed behavioural science that not only references nudges but also structures. It recognises that behaviour is mediated by class, gender, and geography as much as by individual motivation or cognitive bias. And on this basis, it understands the household as a microcosm of broader social and political negotiation.

To the online uninitiated, people can seem to be speaking in code. On TikTok, “unalive” has replaced “death.” Sex becomes “seggs,” porn is “corn,” whilst a vast array of emojis stand in for words that are at risk of being flagged by algorithms as inappropriate. What at first sight seems to be playful slang can, as we shall see, be a form of survival, as users shape language to hide from algorithmic detection.

At the same time, when people use AI tools, there is another quirk — the sudden proliferation of em dashes (see below):

—

What was once a somewhat bookish punctuation mark, it is now the ‘fingerprint’ of text created using Generative AI (specifically Chat GPT). This anachronistic punctuation appearing in the midst of the latest tech feels like a ghost from another age.

These points are not unconnected, as, taken together, they hint at how our everyday language is being reshaped by machines into what writer Adam Aleksic calls ‘algospeak’. These shifts are not merely stylistic but strike at something more significant: they change how we think.

The medium has always been the message

Of course, our communication has always been determined by the medium through which it is carried. But to understand how this is playing out today, we need to go back over 5,000 years to an age when we lived in oral cultures, where knowledge had to be transmitted through rhythm and formula in order to be embedded in our memories. For example, to modern ears, Homer’s famous “rosy-fingered dawn” phrase sounds like a decorative flourish. But Walter Ong, in his famous book, ‘Orality and literacy,’ suggested it was in fact a stock phrase that made long stories easier to recall. It’s an example of how orally based thought worked differently from ours. It built ideas by adding one thing to another, always tied to the situation at hand, and circling back with repetition, thereby keeping stories alive in our memories and, therefore, our ability to repeat them to each other.

A storyteller describing a hero might say they were “strong and brave and wise,” piling traits on top of one another rather than distilling them into one abstract category (such as “virtuous”). In epic tales, battles are narrated blow by blow, with stock phrases for weapons and wounds repeated across episodes. The point was not about precision but keeping the rhythm moving and, with that, the tale memorable. So, phrases like “rosy-fingered dawn” offered scaffolding, stabilising the speech in a world where memory was fragile.

Surely we can make a case for algospeak operating in a similar manner. For example, “Unalive” or 🍑 are today’s stock phrases, but instead of being the result of the constraints of memory, they are, in fact, a function of the constraints of algorithmic detection. Both are formulations created under pressure, repeated until they stabilise, and shared because they help communication survive. They show us that when language is under threat (whether by memory or algorithm), solutions emerge to hold it together.

But to understand the significance of this, we need Ong’s analysis of the enormous shift that occurred with the invention of writing, which spelt the end of oral cultures for much of the world’s population. Writing involved “lock[ing] words into space,” as Ong put it, making them permanent and external, encouraging a mode of thinking that revolved more around abstraction, categorisation, and criticism. This is fundamentally different to the more fluid, performative, and memory-sensitive character of the oral tradition. Importantly, this meant that thoughts could then be more easily debated and rearranged. Print accelerated this change, creating cultures of commentary as words themselves had become much more stable objects that could be compared, contested, and preserved.

Ong also suggested that a new broadcast age, which he was living through during the Twentieth Century, layered on a “secondary orality”: speech that was immediate and communal but shaped by microphones, mass audiences, and the knowledge of being overheard. This didn’t just change the format; it became more self-conscious. Politicians and performers began to craft their words for the microphone, adopting slower pacing, lower pitch, and catchphrases designed to resonate across millions.

Families learned to experience themselves as part of vast, simultaneous audiences, gathered around the radio or television set. This, argues Ong, meant that everyday speech grew more cautious, carrying an implicit awareness that one might be speaking to an unseen wider audience.

The next wave of change

The question we now surely need to ask is whether Ong’s analysis needs updating, as another shift now appears to be underway.

As we have explored, social media today seems to reintroduce many of the traits Ong associated with the oral cultures from centuries ago: posts and memes are endlessly repeated and remixed so that they lodge in memory through sheer frequency. They rely on ‘stock phrases’ such as catchphrases, hashtags, and soundbites that can be easily reused across different situations, carrying a shared tone or meaning wherever they appear. And they spread through communal uptake, gaining force when echoed, liked, or stitched by others.

The parallel with earlier oral cultures is uncanny, but where oral traditions relied on formulaic techniques to embed stories and meanings into memory, today’s digital cultures rely on formulaic techniques to sidestep algorithms.

And it is this, says Aleksic, that influences how we think: to call death “unalive” means we subtly reshape the concept itself. Of course, we know that the words we use shape how we see the world; the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis has long held that language doesn’t merely reflect thought, but shapes it. When linguistic structures shift, so too do the perceptual categories through which experience is filtered.

“Death” is blunt and final, while “unalive” softens it, turning into the absence of life rather than its end. The grammar also displaces agency. Someone can be killed, but to be “unalived” seems to happen without a subject, blurring responsibility and cause. This can serve a helpful purpose for some communities, such as reducing stigma around suicide or violence. However, this shift also risks vagueness at a time when clarity is crucial.

On this basis, Aleksic argues that the word “unalive” only exists because a machine’s presence has entered the conversation: when people anticipate moderation (related to the use of the word “death”), they invent detours. This is what Ong meant when he said technologies “technologise the word”: the phrase has become newly literal as language itself is re-engineered to side-step the algorithm.

The em dash ghost

And in the midst of this, almost as a side note, perhaps the em dash points to something else — the reminder of print. ChatGPT’s punctuation habits can feel odd, not because they are incorrect but because they belong to another communicative order, one built on more around permanence and polish. This feels like an example of philosopher Mark Fisher’s notion of hauntology. He might have suggested that the em dash only feels odd because it is like the ghost of print culture haunting digital speech. As Generative AI is trained on the archives of print, it drags stylistic residues of book culture into a world at odds with this, dominated by fragments, emojis, and immediacy.

Conclusions

If oral cultures stabilised knowledge through formulae because memory was fragile, and print cultures stabilised knowledge through writing because permanence was possible, we might characterise our present condition as managing knowledge in a provisional way. Words are used in a tactical rather than eternal manner, given they survive until the algorithm notices, or until another code takes their place. And as words shape how we think, then the world surely looks less like a set of fixed categories than a shifting landscape in which survival depends on agility.

In the early 90s, before the widespread use of social media, the sociologist Anthony Giddens described the time as being marked by reflexive doubt. Even in an era of expanding science and expertise, knowledge could never be fully settled: it was always provisional, subject to revision, constantly reinterpreted in light of new evidence and shifting contexts.

Social media has arguably accelerated this condition. In feeds where words can vanish overnight, where meanings shift with each update to the algorithm, reflexive doubt is no longer an abstract sociological diagnosis but an everyday experience. Em dashes attract our attention as they are remnants of a more stable, written culture that, whilst not dead (not least by virtue of you reading this!), does seem to be struggling to have the same hold on our collective thinking that it once did. On this basis, “Unalive” is not just a euphemism but a hedge against algorithmic erasure, a stopgap word until the rules change.

To speak today is to anticipate misrecognition and adapt in advance, to live with language, and therefore an understanding of the world, that are both permanently in beta.

At the Ryder Cup golf competition in the US, player Rory McIlroy became a lightning rod for the crowd, pushing well beyond the sport’s usual boundaries of civility. From the very first tee, the official MC whipped the audience into chanting “fuck you Rory!”, with spectators hurling homophobic abuse, and his wife being pelted with a beer cup.

Was this an unusual lapse in etiquette, or is it a marker of something more significant? Some commentators are suggesting that what we saw was, in fact, a crack in the fragile infrastructure of norms that determine how we behave in public, what is permitted, and what is beyond the pale. So, the deeper question is less about whether fans went “too far’ and more about what today counts as acceptable behaviour in public life? And if more people feel emboldened to cross those lines, whether on golf courses, in theatres, and in politics, what does that reveal about our shared social contract?

Fear of the crowd

Concerns about today’s Ryder Cup crowd are not new. In 1895, Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind defined crowds as irrational mobs, driven by unconscious forces and stripped of individual reason. Despite evidence to the contrary, this view has persisted, resulting in a century of widespread suspicion about mass gatherings. More recent readings suggest that Le Bon’s theory reflected his time: the upheaval of post-1871 Paris, class conflict, and the fear of a socialist uprising. As crowds expert Fergus Neville argues, calling crowds irrational was also a way of delegitimising dissent that concerned the wealthy classes:

“By a priori pathologising alternative visions of society as irrational, any challenge to the hierarchical social and political status quo was rendered mindless”

Of course, this framing is a familiar one even today, where any crowd, from protest to football terraces, is readily cast as a threat to order, as if any gathering is always dangerous.

The crowd as a place where social norms are enacted

Other thinkers saw crowds differently than Le Bon. Writer Barbara Ehrenreich pointed to medieval carnivals, occasions when authority was inverted, with peasants mocking priests and slaves serving their masters. She set out how these events were often politically ambiguous, acting as both a challenge to hierarchy and a safety valve for discontent. In one sense, perhaps the rowdy golf crowd had a similar air of inversion, albeit not in a carnivalesque way; nevertheless, etiquette was mocked, order turned upside down.

Sociologist Émile Durkheim famously suggested that crowds generate a ‘collective effervescence’: shared emotion that binds individuals into belonging. Stephen Reicher, builds on this, suggesting that crowds involve a cognitive transformation from personal to social level identification. It is through this that crowd members act meaningfully, reflecting the norms of their salient shared (social) identity. On this basis, studies of riots and protests have long shown that crowd actions are patterned and intelligible, not indiscriminate.

The question then is not whether crowds are rational or irrational, but which norms are being enacted, and who defines them.

Seen this way, the Ryder Cup crowd wasn’t losing a wild crowd out of control but instead was performing a script: triumphalism, masculinity, domination. In this distorted world, booing McIlroy was arguably a perverse act of solidarity to a set of shared norms.

How this reflects a new window of permission

The same apparent shift in norms is visible beyond sport and entertainment. In Manchester earlier this year, a Dolly Parton-themed musical was suspended after audience members shouted homophobic abuse at the stage. And the pattern stretches wider. NHS staff report unprecedented levels of aggression: attacks on A&E nurses in England have nearly doubled in six years, with staff describing being punched, spat on, and even threatened with acid. Nor is politics immune: more than half of UK MPs now say they feel unsafe because of threats from the public.

And surveys suggest this is widespread in everyday life. One recent survey found that nearly half of U.S. adults (47%) say the way people behave in public these days is ruder than before the COVID-19 pandemic. That includes 20% who say behavior today is a lot ruder. Another 44% of adults say public behavior is about the same, while only 9% say people are behaving a lot or a little more politely in public.

Cultural theorist Kirsty Sedgman explains this with the concept of a “window of permission.” She suggests that social norms are never fixed; they widen or shrink depending on what dominant cultural figures signal as acceptable. “As we see more politicians and public figures voicing these views,” she notes, “the window of what is acceptable is widened to encompass these abhorrent ideas”.

This helps explain why behaviours that once would have been unthinkable might now be experienced by perpetrators not as disruption but as righteousness. Like the Ryder Cup crowd, theatregoers, patients, or those challenging elected representatives may not see themselves as abandoning norms, but rather as enacting newly licensed ones.

Shitposting as statecraft

In late September, the White House circulated a video of its new presidential “Walk of Fame.” As the video moves along a sequence of portraits, it arrives at a framed photograph of an autopen signing Joe Biden’s name, an allusion to conspiracy theories about his supposed incapacity. Media scholar Robert Topinka suggests the clip is designed to elicit a dual response: amusement among supporters and indignation among critics. Crucially, he suggests it is this very polarity that constitutes the communication strategy, that of a shitpost: low-effort content, deliberately provocative, structured to rule out the possibility of good-faith engagement.

The outrage these sorts of posts provoke isnot incidental but integral to the narrative. As Topinka observes, the communicative cycle is straightforward: a meme is released, critics denounce it, supporters take pleasure in their anger, and the clip circulates far more widely than it otherwise would. Outrage generates visibility, and visibility becomes a measure of success. In this logic, the reaction is the mechanism.

Topinka argues that shitposting has morphed into a mode of governance, designed not to communicate policy detail but to define tribal political belonging through ridicule. The more opponents protest, the more the content is judged to have succeeded.

Here, too, Stephen Reicher’s research seems to apply: if crowds enact the norms they see modelled by dominant cultural figures, then when a government embraces trolling and mockery, a new set of behaviours becomes the collective script.

The psychology of norm breakdown

Social norms are best understood as fragile, contingent agreements that enable cooperation in collective life. At the Ryder Cup, verbal abuse directed at McIlroy was perhaps interpreted by participants not as transgression but as an affirmation of loyalty to the in-group, where hostility toward McIlroy marked belonging within the American crowd. In Manchester, the homophobic heckling is likely reframed by some audience members not as disruption but as a form of moral self-assertion, an expression of virtue framed as defending traditional values against what they perceived as progressive overreach.

And drawing on less extreme examples, we can see a range of differences in what people consider to be acceptable. Drawing on the same survey findings from the US, 89% of adults 65 and older say it is rarely or never acceptable to swear in public, but only 38% of adults under 30 say the same. And Americans in the oldest age group are also far more likely than the youngest adults to say it’s unacceptable to wear headphones or earbuds while talking to someone in person (76% vs. 36%).

This is consistent with Sedgman, who points out that social norms are never static, but shift as the “window of permission” expands, especially when political and cultural elites signal that once-taboo forms of hostility are acceptable, even virtuous. Topinka takes this further, demonstrating how political communication itself has begun to model trolling and shitposting as legitimate forms of statecraft.

Seen together, these perspectives reveal not a breakdown of order but a redrawing of its boundaries: as Reicher shows, crowds are not simply losing control; they are following new scripts written by the dominant figures.

Why this matters

To be sure, every generation has worried about declining standards. Plato lamented the volatility of the Athenian mob; Victorian critics fretted about disorderly theatres. Such anxieties often reflect a misplaced sense of cultural nostalgia as much as they do reality.

However, critics such as Topinka might suggest that the present moment is not a historical cycle of a lapse in civility, but a normalisation of aggressive behaviour as a legitimate form of participation. Behaviours once considered marginal are perhaps now increasingly reframed as loyalty and even patriotism. Sedgman warns that once the window of permission shifts, it is rarely restored to its earlier boundaries.

If you drive around the small town of Royston, in the UK’s Hertfordshire countryside but close to Cambridge and London, you quickly see a huge number of lampposts festooned with Union Jacks and St George's flags. The BBC names Billy Crotty, a tree surgeon, as the person responsible for the near-300 flags that line the road. He is quoted as saying, “We just wanted to make a stand for our country. We're proud to be English," and says that the reaction has been "99% positive."

This official story is a surge of patriotism, but of course, this is not how it is felt by many in the community, such as restaurateur Akbar Hussain, who the BBC reports as saying, "We're a little bit panicky. We're a little bit worried about what it all means for us."

Arguably, a decade ago, the received wisdom was that protest had moved online and the concern was about the rise of superficial engagement (or ‘clicktivism’), where users feel a sense of accomplishment from liking or sharing posts, but it rarely translates into meaningful political participation. A study by the Pew Research Centre found that while 66 per cent of users engage with political content, only a fraction participate in offline activities such as attending meetings, voting, or volunteering for campaigns. This apparent disconnect between online engagement and practical action was a source of concern about the effectiveness of social media as a tool for genuine involvement and engagement.

Flags as offline feeds

But surely there is something oddly ‘online’ about the display of flags. While each individual flag might not seem like much on its own, when you see dozens or hundreds lining a street, the sense is akin to posts on social media: one post might go unnoticed, but a constant stream grabs attention.

This copy-and-paste pattern, the same image repeated over and over, arguably mirrors how content spreads online. Media researcher Limor Shifman describes how internet memes rely on repetition to create impact. But while memes online often invite playful reinterpretation, in Royston the repetition is designed to reinforce a particular meaning, not open it up. The St George’s Cross isn’t being debated in a way that offers new ideas and framing, but, like a viral post that appears in every feed, the flags create saturation, with a particular dominant meaning rather than dialogue.

This is where cultural theorist Nathan Jurgenson’s concept of an “augmented society” is useful. He argues that online and offline life aren’t separate spheres, but are fused, constantly bleeding into each other. This means that what we’re seeing is political signalling ‘in real life’ that is shaped by the aesthetics and dynamics of the internet. As academics José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, Martijn de Waalargue argued as far back as 2018, contemporary protest is shaped by the infrastructures of platforms - including the incentives they create for visibility, repetition, and emotional intensity.

More recently, political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo argues that social media enables a particular ‘choreography’ where symbolic cues are substitutes for the formal organisation of party politics. The flags are what Gerbaudo would see as staged political performances that are governed by viral cues and group signalling that is informed through online conventions.

That said, it's important not to treat the aesthetic logic of repetition and symbolic saturation as fundamentally new. Northern Ireland has long provided a template for how flags and symbols structure political belonging. Here, flags signal territory, identity, and control, policing who belongs where. While these practices long predate the internet, social media seems to be accelerating and amplifying the same logics. Offline symbolism doesn’t disappear in a digital age; it gets accelerated and reformatted.

In fact, a three-year study of Hungary’s Fridays for Future finds that online and offline activism form a mutually reinforcing cycle: frontstage visibility and backstage organising develop in parallel, each fuelling the other. If we translate this to flag politics, the pattern seems clear: flags put up offline produce online content; the content drives more flags; the loop intensifies emotion and surveillance, on both sides.

Part of this intensification is the act of watching and being watched. In some areas, residents who remove flags have reported being filmed or photographed, their actions shared and condemned in local Facebook groups or Telegram channels. This echoes the online tactics of doxxing or brigading: public shaming, exposure, and a low-level form of digital policing. The aesthetics of online protest spill over into the affective economies of intimidation and control.

The fragility of online logics

And if we continue to import the logic of online into political life, we can see how this also imports its vulnerabilities. For example, just as hashtags can be hijacked, so too can flags. A famous example came in 2020 when the #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag, originally launched to undercut the Black Lives Matter movement, was overwhelmed by activists posting K-pop fancams, GIFs, and random videos, rendering the hashtag incoherent and unusable. This tactic, known as hashtag flooding, disrupted the intended message through saturation and absurdity.

A similar kind of subversion played out offline in Blackburn, where filmmaker Aeman Afzal created a spoof video that quickly went viral. Styled like a patriotic propaganda reel, it shows a man triumphantly painting a St George’s Cross on a roundabout, declaring “We are taking back our streets” only to be told he’s painted the wrong flag. He’s actually painted the Danish flag by mistake. Afzal, who is British Pakistani, said the film was about challenging division through humour. Just like flooded hashtags, the video disrupts symbolic certainty: it shows how even the most rigid displays can be re-coded, reframed, and given different interpretations.

What the Blackburn spoof seems to indicate is just how much the power of a symbol depends on everyone treating it seriously. As Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner argue, symbols gain force not simply because of what they depict, but because of the collective seriousness people attach to them. It’s like an unspoken agreement: the flying of this flag stands for something important, and we all act accordingly.

But the moment you introduce humour, irony, or even a simple mistake, that seriousness starts to be less certain, and the solemn performance becomes absurd. Once the emotional grip is loosened, the meaning of the flag becomes more open to different interpretations. This is precisely what meme culture does so well: it shows how even the most forceful images can lose their power when their seriousness is disrupted.

Back to Gerbaudo, he argues that digital platforms have shifted political parties away from deliberation and programme (the logic of parties), towards emotional expression and symbolic branding (the logic of digital platforms). The resulting ‘platform politics’ demands a constant performance of visibility, in order to resonate like a meme or a trending hashtag. But the strength of this visibility is also subject to the mechanisms that mean it can come with fragility, as in a world where political identity is constructed by internet logic, reputation and recognition can also be fleeting.

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Celine Song’s Materialists arrives in the aftermath of acclaim for Past Lives: this follow-up was billed as an “anti-capitalist romcom,” complete with an A24 “syllabus” of influences ranging from Broadcast News to The Age of Innocence. While reviews have been divided and wherever you land on its cinematic merits, one subplot deserves more scrutiny than it has received: the reveal that Pedro Pascal’s Harry has undergone limb-lengthening surgery to add six inches to his height.

Harry’s confession in the film is delivered without melodrama. Once 5’6”, he describes feeling invisible to women. Now, taller and smoother, he can stride into a room with the kind of confidence money usually buys. Lucy (Dakota Johnson), the professional matchmaker caught between Harry and her ex, John (Chris Evans), insists his height makes no difference to her attraction. And yet by the end, she chooses John: taller, conventionally alpha, the cultural script fully intact.

It is the neutrality with which Song treats Harry’s surgery that is striking. It is presented as one more rational investment in the marketplace of desire, akin to Lucy’s own “work” on her nose and chest. Beauty and height become capital; surgery becomes leverage. But it is at this point that the film stumbles: by not interrogating the assumption that women universally prefer taller men, Materialists ends up echoing a misogynist agenda. In manosphere and “looksmaxxing” communities, height is treated as a biological destiny. Women are framed as shallow arbiters, men as competitors forced to mutilate themselves to survive.

The data tells a very different story: Ipsos found that while two-thirds (65%) of men aged 16–24 believe women prefer taller partners, when asked what they actually value, the same age women prioritise humour (60%), kindness (53%) and honesty (49%). Only 4% rank height among their top five traits. This is pluralistic ignorance in action: people acting on what they think others want, even when those beliefs are wrong.

What Materialists dramatises is mirrored off-screen. A Guardian investigation this summer followed men travelling to Istanbul to have their legs broken and extended by a millimetre a day. The procedure is projected to be worth $8.6bn by 2030, with patients, primarily men, paying between $30,000 and $80,000 to gain a few inches. They endure months of physiotherapy, learn to walk again, and risk blood clots, nerve damage, and even death. One man, Frank, described turning the key on the rods in his femurs each day while his wife helped him on and off the toilet. His dream seems modest: to reach “average height” and be taller than his wife, but the road to getting there is harsh.

History shows this is nothing new. Chinese footbinding reshaped women’s feet for centuries to fit elite ideals. Prussia’s “Potsdam Giants” regiment prized extreme male height as a mark of national prestige. Cosmetic nose reshaping in the 19th and 20th centuries was marketed as essential for marriage prospects. Across time, myths about desirability have been reflected in bodies, painful, permanent, and always more about status than love.

But here we must consider a crucial gender-based asymmetry. Women have long endured a culture of body modification: breast augmentation, Botox, rhinoplasty, liposuction, not to mention the daily grind of dieting, waxing and make-up. These interventions are so normalised that they barely register as headline news. They are policed as “vain” or “tragic” but not treated as existential revelations. When men undergo similar modifications, however, it becomes spectacle, an object of fascination, ridicule, or pathos.

Why is this? Because masculinity has historically been constructed as “natural,” unadorned, authentic, which, in contrast to femininity, is framed as artificial, painted, and enhanced. Limb-lengthening punctures this illusion. It exposes male bodies as just as anxious, malleable, and commodified as female bodies have long been. That is why Harry’s surgery feels shocking: it forces recognition that men, too, are caught in the machinery of optimisation.

We may therefore consider this a levelling up – finally, men now get to experience what women have long lived with. But there is a difference, which is not in the act of surgery itself but in its framing. Women’s modifications have often been explained as submission to male ideals. Men’s, by contrast, are frequently narrated as competition with one another for scarce female attention, a logic that fits perfectly into manosphere discourse about “sexual marketplaces.” What is framed as individual choice is in fact gendered labour: women reshaping themselves for men; men reshaping themselves because they believe women demand it, even when women say otherwise.

But in the portrayal of Harry’s surgery as a rational choice, Materialists risks naturalising this script. Lucy may protest that height doesn’t matter, but the film’s resolution, choosing the taller man, re-inscribes the myth. In effect, it stages the manosphere’s case study: women’s stated preferences are dismissed as unreliable, while their “true” desires are confirmed through the narrative of the film.

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