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.

Chemical pollution is, one researcher recently suggested, "a threat to the thriving of humans and nature of a similar order as climate change, but is decades behind global heating in terms of public knowledge." They went on to say, "a lot of people assume that there's really great knowledge and huge due diligence on the chemical safety of these things. But it really isn't the case."

This illustrates how what we know and don't know sits at the centre of some of today's most charged debates about how we deal with societal and planetary challenges. Typically, and perhaps not unreasonably, it is assumed that both experts and the public should have the proper knowledge to identify solutions and drive positive change. This is what makes 'misinformation' such a potent topic, as it is fundamentally a debate concerning what is known and what is not known, what is legitimate and what is illegitimate knowledge. Media literacy and critical thinking are tools to navigate our ‘knowing’ and, as such, are often called upon as part of this information 'warfare'.

If 'knowing' is central to how we manage the big issues of our day, then what are the implications for policymakers and marketers who hope to influence change in behaviour? At a basic level, it makes sense to us that to know something is a prerequisite for taking action. But, as we shall see, there is also a great deal of evidence that whilst simply giving people information (so they 'know') is important, it is far from sufficient.

Our pathway through this is to make the counter-intuitive case that 'not-knowing' can, in fact, be much more important and at times more helpful than 'knowing'. And whilst there is much researched and theorised about knowledge and 'knowing,' much less is explored and written about being in a state of 'not-knowing,' arguably a much more familiar human condition.

We argue that being willing to accept states of not-knowing is not only inevitable but also something to welcome and support if we are to address the complex challenges we now face, such as chemical pollution.

The case for knowing

But before exploring the power of not-knowing, it is worth acknowledging why knowing, or at least the perception of knowing, matters so much in the behavioural science literature.

One of the clearest cases is made through what is known as the Competence Hypothesis. This body of research suggests that people are more likely to take action when they feel knowledgeable in a particular domain, even when that knowledge is superficial or incomplete. In other words, we don't just act when we are competent; we act when we feel competent – a small but significant distinction.

A well-known example comes from a study by Chip Heath and Amos Tversky comparing how likely sports fans are to place a bet on a match versus a random lottery. Despite the statistical odds being similar, the fans were far more comfortable betting on sports. This was due to how they knew the teams, or at least felt they did, as they had watched the games, recognised the players, and heard the commentary. This domain familiarity gave them perceived competence, which in turn reduced perceived risk, increasing their willingness to act in a way they did not with the lottery. Hence, this is not simply about statistical reasoning but about affective trust in one's own judgement.

We also see this echoed in other behavioural domains. For example, people are more likely to invest in companies they have heard of, regardless of whether that knowledge is meaningful. And this is why brand familiarity has long been recognised as a potent factor in decision-making. On this basis, the act of knowing doesn't just inform the decision; it legitimises it, giving people a sense of control, even if the control is ultimately illusory.

In behaviour change interventions, this matters. When people feel equipped, such as by understanding the wording, seeing examples they relate to, and having prior exposure to similar scenarios, they are more likely to engage. Whether quitting smoking, changing diets, or switching to renewable energy, a sense of competence makes the leap feel safer.

So while we will be making an argument for the power of not-knowing, for now, we start with this acknowledgement: in many situations, perceived knowledge increases behavioural willingness. It makes action feel less like a gamble and more like an informed choice.

But knowing does not always work

It is generally understood that while improved knowledge is often considered necessary for good decision-making, it is far from sufficient, as simply giving people information does not guarantee that they will act on it.

The scale of this discrepancy is illustrated by a well-known meta-analysis on financial behaviour by Daniel Fernandes, John Lynch, and Richard Netemeyer examining financial education programmes. They found that these programmes only explained 0.1% of the variance in financial behaviours, a vanishingly small effect. So, despite the widespread belief that better literacy should lead to better decisions, in financial behaviours at least, there is significant evidence that knowledge alone does not always translate into action.

Part of the issue here is that behavioural interventions all too often assume people act as purely economic actors, so that if we are well enough equipped, we will make good choices. But, of course, daily life rarely plays out that way - we are busy, distracted and overwhelmed. Making choices in a complex, seldom-visited financial market requires time and mental effort, which are often in short supply when managing relationships, work, bills, or just trying to get through the day.

And even when knowledge is delivered, it does not always stick. The paper's authors show that the effects of financial education tend to decay over time, quickly forgotten unless anchored to a real, immediate decision. That's why they advocate for ‘just-in-time’ education: targeted interventions delivered at the exact moment a decision is being made. Timing, it seems, and not just content, matters.

Other promising approaches shift the focus from abstract knowledge to practical relevance. Economists Alejandro Drexler, Greg Fischer, and Antoinette Schoar tested this in the Dominican Republic, working with small businesses. Rather than offering textbook financial training, the team distilled simple, context-relevant 'rules of thumb' drawn from the habits of successful local enterprises. These heuristics were short, concrete, and directly tied to everyday business needs: those who received this rule-of-thumb training saw sales increase by up to 25%. In contrast, those who received standard financial literacy training saw little change.

This supports a broader point: people don't just need to know more, they need to feel that what they know fits into the rhythm of their lives. Knowledge that is not readily understandable, relatable, or actionable can quickly fade.

But what we might call this 'limits-of-knowing problem' is not just about attention or relevance; it's also about appetite. Even when knowledge is delivered effectively, it can demand more from people than they can offer. This is the Cassandra effect: when knowing too much does not spur action but instead shuts it down.

Not wanting to know too much: The Cassandra problem

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was cursed with the gift of true prophecy, but no one believed her. Today, the 'Cassandra effect' has become a modern parable: not just about being ignored, but about the emotional toll of seeing what is coming and being powerless to stop it.

Gerd Gigerenzer and Rocio Garcia-Retamero developed a psychological underpinning to this, arguing that people often avoid foreknowledge not out of irrationality, but to shield themselves from anticipatory regret. Using a nationally representative survey across Germany and Spain, they showed that deliberate ignorance is widespread, finding that between 85–90% of respondents preferred not to know about impending adverse events (such as the time of their partner's death), and 40–70% even avoided foreknowledge of positive outcomes (such as the sex of a child).

The study also found that people are more likely to avoid knowledge as the anticipated event draws nearer, because the potential for regret intensifies. Hence, 'not-knowing' often functions as a rational strategy for preserving dignity, hope, and the possibility of joy in the present by refusing to let foreknowledge impact current lived experience.

This very issue was illustrated in the film The Farewell, directed by Lulu Wang. Based on a true story, the film follows a Chinese-American woman who returns to China to visit her grandmother, Nai Nai, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But Nai Nai doesn't know; her family has chosen not to tell her, instead gathering under the guise of a wedding to say goodbye. The decision reflects a practice common across East and South Asia: shielding loved ones from harsh truths not to deceive, but to protect. For Nai Nai, not-knowing becomes a kind of mercy, allowing her to continue living with dignity and joy, unburdened by fear.

And deciding to 'not-know' is widespread. A Reuters Institute study across 17 countries recently found that 39% of people actively avoid the news, up 10% in less than a decade. For many, this is not about disinterest but protection against emotional fatigue, especially visible around environmental concerns. For example, 69% of Gen Z feel anxious after encountering climate content online, far higher than older generations, reinforcing the point that people may reject information not because they disbelieve it, but because they cannot sustain the emotional weight of knowing.

For policymakers and communicators, it is therefore very helpful to recognise that more information is not always better. What may well matter more, in fact, is whether people feel supported and able to act without being overwhelmed.

How risks are becoming less knowable

Adding to the way that not-knowing can act as an adaptive strategy, is that way that the risks we face are becoming increasingly less knowable than in the past. Ulrich Beck writes about this in the Risk Society: he suggests that the science, industry, and technology that have been built to manage old dangers have created new ones, which often exceed comprehension. How we then deal with them is also less 'knowable' as they now cross borders, generations, and systems, making them indeterminate and unmanageable through traditional means.

Chemicals appear to embody this shift from old dangers to new. They were first hailed as solutions: fertilisers to tackle famine, pesticides to safeguard crops, chlorine to make water drinkable, flame retardants to prevent household fires. Each was designed to shield humanity from threats that had haunted earlier generations, such as hunger, disease, accident, and decay. And they have been hugely successful in these missions.

But the very tools that solved yesterday's challenges all too often seem to generate new dangers of their own. Fertilisers now leach into rivers, creating dead zones; pesticides accumulate through ecosystems, destabilising species and human health; chlorine derivatives linger as toxic by-products; flame retardants are found in human blood and breast milk.

It’s well known that the industrial economy has created millions of novel chemical entities, and yet we lack the tools to trace their long-term effects. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, for instance, can produce more potent effects at low doses than at high ones, a pattern that defies traditional toxicology models. Here, the risk is not just considerable; it is structurally resistant to being known.

The uncertainty does not end here either. Sociologist Anthony Giddens wrote that we now live in a condition of ‘reflexive doubt’, where established sources of authority and expertise are continuously questioned, and knowledge is subject to constant scrutiny and revision. Climate scientists update projections with every new dataset; economists re-run forecasts in the face of unpredictable shocks; epidemiologists adjust guidance as viruses mutate. And the public, increasingly aware of these revisions, is less willing to treat expert pronouncements as settled fact but as provisional, subject to correction, contradiction, or reversal.

Artificial intelligence also plays into this atmosphere of unknowability. Algorithmic decision-making introduces risks that are not only opaque to laypeople but often to the specialists who build or regulate these systems. Black-box models can deliver outputs that are difficult to fully explain, leading to consequences such as biased hiring systems and misfiring credit scores, which often go undetected until after the harm is done.

All this suggests that the challenge is not simply that risks are multiplying, but that they are becoming resistant to complete comprehension. They defy the older dream of mastery through calculation and instead demand that we navigate ‘not-knowing’ as a permanent condition.

Institutions of knowing could do more to help navigate uncertainty.

Although the world may be less knowable, some critics suggest that our institutions all too often push in the opposite direction. These critical voices suggest that schools, universities, and workplaces can be reluctant to acknowledge uncertainty, all the while performing certainty. Success, it is argued, is measured by confidence, fluency, and decisiveness, even when the underlying knowledge is partial or fragile. The result is a culture with little room for doubt or hesitation.

The university, long imagined as a place of exploration and doubt, has come in for particularly sharp criticism. Scholars such as Bill Readings (The University in Ruins) and Martha Nussbaum (Not for Profit) argue that universities have shifted from cultivating open inquiry to producing measurable outputs such as rankings, impact metrics, and employability scores. This is not just bureaucratic drift but a profound epistemic narrowing. As the theorist Stanley Fish once put it, universities increasingly reward "being right" over "learning to think."

The state of knowledge reflects what William Deresiewicz calls "world-class hoop jumping": signalling authority or inferring there is a solid position even where the knowledge is fragile. In his book Excellent Sheep, he describes how elite students are trained to be 'overachieving but under-inquiring': brilliant at fulfilling expectations, but rarely asking why those expectations exist. On this basis, not-knowing quickly becomes a marginalised activity - economically punished, socially pathologised, and pedagogically erased. Knowing becomes less a process of discovery (which inevitably involves not-knowing) than an identity, a signal of belonging.

In a Risk Society defined by reflexive doubt, this is a dangerous irony: critics suggest that the very places that should surely teach us to navigate uncertainty, instead run the danger of training us to deny it.

We live in the not-knowing (whether or not we know that!)

Perhaps most importantly, philosophers have long pointed out that not-knowing is core to the human condition, the ground we all stand on. In fact, societies only function because we live with, and through, what we don’t know (rather than what we individually know). Philosopher of language Paul Grice showed that communication rests less on fact-checking of knowledge than on co-operation, we assume sincerity, and we trust without verifying the facts. As psychologist David Dunning (of Dunning-Kruger effect fame) has argued, without this tacit willingness to take others at their word, everyday life would be unworkable. We don't interrogate every claim from friends, colleagues, or strangers; we have to inhabit a world where some ignorance is not only tolerated but necessary.

This extends to how, despite this state of not-knowing, we think we know. As we have often pointed out, psychologists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach have demonstrated that we all operate with a knowledge illusion: that people routinely believe they know more than they do, because they intuitively outsource detail to their community. We can say 'mortgage,' ‘arthritis,' or 'algorithmic bias' without being able to explain them entirely, because the social world provides scaffolding that makes our individual shallow knowing usable. Hilary Putnam called this the division of linguistic labour: words and labels carry the weight of communal expertise, even if no individual holds it all. In this sense, our not-knowing is not a bug but a design feature.

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously understood this when he insisted that meaning is not held privately in our heads but in shared use. A label is meaningful because others can agree or reject it; its explanatory force comes from communal entrenchment. Knowing, then, is less about mastery than about being able to move fluently in a system where the bulk of knowledge is elsewhere.

Seen this way, not-knowing is not an obstacle to social life; instead, it is its very medium. We survive, coordinate, and build futures not by erasing ignorance but by weaving it into a collective fabric, as the demand that every individual always know is unrealistic. Our capacity to live together depends on accepting that much of what sustains us, from trust to expertise to shared labels, rests on things we do not, and cannot, fully know.

It seems odd then that we fetishise knowing when in fact our more common state is not knowing - and likely becoming more so as the risks we face become more unknowable.

Curiosity is an important characteristic of not-knowing

One very helpful human characteristic of not-knowing is that it can spark an essential human characteristic - that of curiosity. We see this reflected in Nick Chater and George Loewenstein's paper, where they set out the case that the curiosity that comes from not-knowing is not a luxury but a drive (like hunger or thirst) borne of where we notice an information gap and feel compelled to bridge it. And if the gap is closed too quickly, then the drive dissipates. So whilst having a sense of certainty satisfies in the short term, it risks shutting down the energy that fuels exploration and learning. In other words, premature 'knowing' can act as a 'curiosity kill switch'.

By contrast, leaving some questions open sustains the drive to make sense. Behavioural research suggests that grappling with competing cues and partial truths, rather than being fed neat answers, can result in longer-lasting engagement and deeper understanding. The discomfort of ambiguity is not an obstacle to change but the ignition.

And linked to this is the collective nature of not knowing: if the problems we face are full of collective uncertainty, then curiosity also becomes collective, a resource we pool and protect. Citizens' climate assemblies across Europe have shown what this looks like: when ordinary people are invited to grapple with messy trade-offs, rather than being handed neat conclusions, the result can be deeper trust, greater legitimacy, and more robust recommendations. Another example of this is from Ireland, where assemblies on abortion and same-sex marriage created the conditions for historic constitutional change because citizens were treated as capable of holding uncertainty together.

And during the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence suggests that countries that openly acknowledged uncertainty and explained what was known and unknown maintained higher public trust than those that insisted on false clarity. In the current heated debates over AI governance, we see something similar: the most credible conversations seem to be not those promising 'safe AI' through technical fixes alone, but those that admit the limits of knowledge and invite citizens, workers, and affected communities into ongoing negotiation.

It may be time to rehabilitate 'not-knowing', as there is a strong case that it is not the opposite of progress but its very condition. It legitimises hesitation, sustains contestation, and keeps questions alive. It creates the space for course correction and collective learning. Which is why rushing to foreclose uncertainty, to insist on the performance of certainty, doesn't just flatten curiosity but undermines our ability to act together at all.

The politics of knowing versus not-knowing

One important consideration here is, of course, that we do not live in a world where all parties might agree to 'not-knowing' and curiously respectfully debate the points!

For example, on the topic of chemical pollution, consider the recent debate about synthetic food dyes, fuelled by wellness influencers and politicians such as RFK Jr. The claim that dyes like Red 40 are 'derived from petroleum' has been made as though it were evidence that children were "eating gasoline." In reality, as immunologist Andrea Love points out, this is a category mistake: petroleum-derived building blocks are transformed into entirely new molecules through chemical processes, just as bread is not "wheat stalks" and salt is not explosive sodium.

This is an example of the debate being less about the chemistry and more about the performance and politics of knowing - what we might call 'inflated knowing'. Love suggests that these sorts of claims work rhetorically because they create two camps: those who are 'awake' to (and ‘know’ about) hidden dangers and those who are 'sheep’ and ‘don’t know’.) In that sense, Love argues, some actors can also monetise these concerns by selling supplements, ‘natural’ dyes, or lifestyle hacks, dramatising knowledge as something withheld by 'corrupt experts' and revealed by 'brave truth-tellers.'

Conversely, (and equally unhelpful but from the other direction) is the taking of a position of wilful ignorance (or as we might call it for our purposes, ‘wilful not-knowing'). One recent meta-analysis found 40% of participants avoid easily obtainable information about the consequences of their actions on others, leading to a 15.6-percentage point decrease in altruistic behaviour compared to when information is provided. In chemical risk, there are claims that strategic ignorance has historically been incentivised by fragmented testing regimes and liability design, making the absence of evidence look like evidence of absence.

In conclusion

The implications for those involved in behaviour change suggest a delicate balance between knowing and not-knowing. It would be a foolhardy act to design a behaviour change programme without recognising the importance of information, albeit delivered in a way that is relevant, timely and consistent with the way the target population understands the world.

But to leave it at this means we risk acting in a manner that is too 'top-down', appearing to dispense explanations (with accompanying guidance on what to do) to an uninformed population who 'ought to know better'. This approach is rapidly looking outdated; people want to learn from each other, be 'part of the solution'. Curiosity is what researcher Carmen Valor might call an 'activating emotion', something that encourages behaviour to change.

Of course, this creates a challenge for those who represent bodies of expertise – how to navigate the knowing versus not-knowing. Someone coming in for advice on a medical condition may not want to be made aware of the limits of medical knowledge, but others might definitely want to. However, some actors may also attempt to undermine bodies of expertise by claiming what we don't know, when in fact these are issues with firm bodies of evidence to support them. There is a need for experts to develop the necessary skills to navigate this rapidly changing epistemic environment.

But, despite the complexities, there is a good case for a greater openness about what we know and don't know. While governments, brands and regulators may at times be uncomfortable taking a more nuanced position on issues such as chemical pollution (as there is then an opportunity for some actors to take advantage of this nuance), it does seem that a shift is inevitable as people look for information and guidance from more horizontal sources (e.g. such as social media).

Overall, not-knowing is the condition under which we have always lived and will continue to do so (perhaps even more so). While much critical work goes into mastering what we know, we surely also need to focus more on how we can better navigate not-knowing together.

The debate about trust tends to be framed in terms of accuracy, a concern with true vs false information. This is understandable: our democratic systems rely on a baseline of shared facts to function. Which means that the policy response has so far tended to focus on identifying, flagging, or removing falsehoods, often through fact-checking, media literacy programmes, and regulatory frameworks targeting misinformation.

But this emphasis on truth value can miss how much of what people encounter does not fall neatly into categories of right or wrong, true or false. In many domains from health and wellbeing, financial planning and education to career decisions and environmental responsibility the relevant information is often uncertain, value-laden, and contested. This means that what counts as ‘good advice’ is rarely universally applicable as it is shaped by our particular circumstances, identities, and competing priorities.

On this basis, the problem is not just misinformation or disinformation, but the difficulty of adjudicating between partial truths, selective framings, and emotionally compelling narratives that may mislead without technically being wrong. For example, a government urging people to retrain or reskill can easily feel misaligned, unrealistic, or even coercive depending on an recipient’s circumstances.

It is precisely in these sorts of ambiguous zones that people may not reject a claim because it is factually wrong, but because they see that the advice does not match what they know, intuit, or experience about the reality of their lives. And it makes sense that this act that we shall call ‘clocking-it’ is often practiced by those with less power, because they must stay alert to how what is seen as sensible by others will adversely impact their lives.

This is an under-researched topic, perhaps because psychologists tend not to think in traditionally sociological terms. And yet failing to do so may mean that the marketers, policy makers and others that are in the business of encouraging behaviour change find their messages ignored because of this very issue.

How messages can fall flat

There is no shortage of behaviour change programmes and campaigns that simply fail. The message may be clear and the intentions sound, yet no behaviours shift. Which typically leads to a lot of forensic investigation as to what went wrong. But it may not be due to obvious issues such as the media used or the aim of the campaign somehow being wrong. Instead it can be the result of a subtle misalignment in the tone, message or style that patronises, hectors, or simply poorly misappropriates the cues and culture of the target audience. And it is this subtle mismatch that the audience ‘clocks'.

For example, the ‘Get Brexit Done’ slogan adopted the cadence and tone of working-class common sense: brisk, no-nonsense, anti-waffle. While factually oversimplified and politically complex, the slogan didn’t aim to persuade through accuracy but instead signalled alignment. It borrowed the aesthetics of straight-talking honesty, which, for many, felt emotionally and culturally right. But for others from outside that resonance field, the slogan was roundly criticised, not in the copy alone, but in the gap between how it felt and what it delivered. But when such cues are mobilised without corresponding structural understanding or accountability, they risk being clocked as hollow, simply an aesthetic proximity that conceals, rather than bridges, material distance.

And another well known example from the private sector is Pepsi’s infamous 2017 ad featuring Kendall Jenner, which attempted to tap into the aesthetics of protest culture. The ad showed Jenner leaving a photoshoot to join a generic-looking street demonstration, culminating in her handing a can of Pepsi to a police officer, implying that a soft drink could dissolve social tension. The campaign appeared to appropriate the visual grammar of Black Lives Matter protests but viewers clocked the gap between the mimicking of the look of solidarity without the lived experience of struggle. The backlash was swift, with critics highlighting how the ad trivialised systemic injustice for commercial gain. What was intended as a gesture of unity became a case study in aesthetic proximity masking structural cluelessness.

From occupational psychology ,clocking-it is also reflected in the phenomenon of psychological reactance, a state triggered when individuals perceive a threat to their sense of agency or interpretive freedom. For example, when corporate wellbeing programmes offer mindfulness apps while maintaining tough workloads faced by people on the factory floor, then employees may recognise their performative nature.

When people 'clock' the appeals to change behaviour that fail to reflect the reality of their lives, we could also seem them as exercising what Dan Sperber calls epistemic vigilance: a capacity to detect deception, irrelevance, or incompetence in what others communicate. In this context, clocking-it is a form of vigilance towards the language and signals used by powerful bodies.

For people who occupy marginalised or precarious positions, then misreading a situation can carry serious consequences. If you misinterpret a manager’s tone, a social worker’s question, or a police officer’s instruction, the cost isn’t simply awkwardness but it can mean something much more severe. This fosters a kind of attunement where you learn to ‘read the room’ not as a soft skill, but as a survival strategy.

Pretentiousness as camouflage for privilege

Of course, if the ways in which powerful actors seek to shape behaviour are always easy to spot, this wouldn’t be worth exploring. But they often aren’t. In domains where truth is partial, outcomes are uncertain, and authority is dispersed, influence tends to operate through tone, framing, and emotional appeal rather than outright falsehood. It is precisely because this influence can feel plausible, (despite being misaligned), that clocking-it becomes such a vital capability.

Take again the example of campaigns urging workers in declining industries to ‘retrain for the jobs of the future.’ On the surface, this seems pragmatic. But of course it is not quite this simple as the call to retrain ignores structural barriers that those with less power may face, it also erases their histories of neglect, and implies that the problem lies in their personal inadequacy rather than systemic abandonment of the less well off.

This kind of dissonance between what seems superficially familiar and reasonable but at a deeper level deeply disconnected is not confined to policy. It can occur in all sorts of situations where institutions and elites try to secure legitimacy or relatability to encourage certain outcomes. In these circumstances cultural markers associated with working-class life (such as plain speaking, modest origins, aesthetic restraint) are often selectively appropriated to lend authenticity to messages or campaigns.

Take the way Silicon Valley has long traded in a ‘hero’s journey’ narrative, the plucky startup in a sweatshirt managing to battle against adversity with a brilliant idea to go on and succeed. At least, that’s the story but many of the Silicon Valley founders are far from self-made. Mark Zuckerberg attended the elite Phillips Exeter Academy before Harvard, with a supportive family of professionals behind him. Elon Musk grew up in a wealthy South African household; his father owned an emerald mine and other lucrative ventures. Jeff Bezos graduated from Princeton University after a privileged education and a stable upbringing supported by his stepfather, a successful Exxon engineer. Each have a background of comfort, connection, and elite education that obscure the role of networks, luck, and safety nets in making success possible.

This sort of disconnect is what Jarvis Cocker and the band Pulp sing about in ‘Common People’ where a person from privilege wants to live like ‘common people’. They skewer the way that people from affluent backgrounds often learn to stylise their efforts, dress down their advantages, and rehearse humility. The goal isn’t to look impressive, but keeping with the notion of meritocracy, to look as if they have earned their elevated position.

Sociologist Sam Friedman calls this “studied ordinariness”: when the privileged intentionally underplay their credentials, cultural capital, or class background to avoid alienating peers or provoking resentment. This was at play when Rishi Sunak, son of a doctor and educated at the elite Winchester College, tried to hark back to his immigrant grandmother to ground himself in a rags-to-riches story in the 2022 Tory leadership campaign. Or when he claimed he ‘went without lots of things’ as a child, including Sky TV.

This is not confined to those in the public eye; when Friedman and others interviewed those working in professional and managerial occupations, many of them were of middle-class backgrounds but identified as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. They found the main source of such misidentification is elaborate ‘origin stories’ the interviewees tell; these tend to downplay important aspects of their own, privileged, upbringings and instead emphasise affinities to working-class extended family histories. As Friedman sets out, this:

“deflect[s] attention away from the structural privileges these individuals enjoy, both in their own eyes but also among those they communicate their origin stories to in everyday life. At the same time, by framing their lives as an upward struggle against the odds, these interviewees misrepresent their subsequent life outcomes as more worthy, more deserving and more meritorious.”

At one level we may shrug our shoulders, thinking of it as an affectation. But when this stylised effort isn’t clocked, it feeds a ‘meritocratic hubris’, leading to people from less privileged backgrounds to assume they’ve simply failed to work hard enough. This misperception can then result in real damage, fostering shame, eroding confidence, and distorting people’s sense of what success requires.

How this plays out in change programmes

And back to the implications of this for the design of policy, marketing or behaviour change programmes: the disconnect between the assumed familiarity of message-creators and the lived realities of those they seek to influence helps explain why certain campaigns or communications can feel intuitively ‘off.’

The audience may not always be able to explain exactly why a message feels wrong but they sense that something is off. Perhaps it is the tone, the timing, the source, or a subtle mismatch between what is said and what is done. This sense of dissonance, what we might call a ‘vibe mismatch’, can prompt people to become more guarded. As Olivier Morin and others argue, it is precisely in such moments that people begin to withhold trust, not because they are misinformed, but because they are being careful.

Morin’s work suggests that people often underuse social information because they are unsure whether the source is trustworthy. What may look like stubbornness or ‘ignoring advice’ is, in fact, a reasonable response to a social environment saturated with PR, persuasion, and partial truths. In such contexts, people treat information more sceptically, not because of any failure of reasoning, but because they deploy an adaptive filter to protect themselves from being misled.

The intelligence involved in clocking-it

Historian Jonathan Rose explored the nature of this adaptive filter in his book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. The book documents a rich tradition of self-teaching in which ordinary people turned to literature, philosophy, and political thought - not to mimic more formally educated elites, but to make sense of the world that misnamed them:

“They read not to escape their world, but to understand it.”

Rose sets out how between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, thousands of Mechanics’ Institutes, reading rooms, adult education centres, trade union classes, and cooperative societies were established to support working-class study. The Workers’ Educational Association, founded in 1903, partnered with Oxford and Cambridge to bring lectures to industrial towns. Working-class newspapers like Reynolds’s News, The Clarion, and The Labour Leader provided accessible political thought. These infrastructures supported a collective intellectual life in chapels, pubs, allotments, and union halls.

These activities nurtured what Rose describes as a “hermeneutics of suspicion”, ways of spotting when something doesn’t quite add up, of noticing when people in power talk down to you, dress things up, or say one thing and do another.

This tradition of ‘perceptual resistance’ arguably persists in contemporary digital culture, through memes and group chats. In these settings, particularly within marginalised communities, people may engage in affective signalling rather than overt confrontation. This could be a screenshot accompanied by a nonverbal emoji, or a quote tweet marked only by ‘lol.’ These gestures signal shared recognition of dissonance between surface narratives and perceived intent.

Quiet resistance

This sort of clocking-it is not always articulated not, (as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? suggests,) because marginalised people lack voice, but that their speech is routinely co-opted, filtered, or flattened through elite frameworks. The person with less power does not speak into a neutral space but instead speaks into systems which may well be primed to mishear. What is expressed as complexity may be reframed as confusion; what is voiced as pain may be dismissed as grievance; what is offered as insight may be repackaged as victimhood. On this basis, not speaking can become a way of preserving clarity and retaining authorship over one’s own meaning.

This is something that was operating in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where the Stasi operated with approximately one in six citizens in some capacity as informants. Within this environment of pervasive surveillance, overt, spoken dissent carried significant risk. And yet people found ways of maintaining their moral integrity: through carefully managed silences (e.g., not singing along during state anthems at public events) orindirect refusals or shifts in affect (e.g., maintaining a flat or unreadable expression during party meetings to avoid signalling enthusiasm). These subtle practices signalled dissent without transgression. Historian Wolfgang Leonhard characterised this phenomenon as “inner emigration”, a form of internal withdrawal whereby people mentally and emotionally disengaged from the dominant ideological narrative while preserving outward compliance. In this context, clocking-it took a form that enabled people to preserve mental clarity and moral autonomy in an environment structured to erode both.

Arguably this sensibility again persists in contemporary forms albeit of course in a very different environment. One example is perhaps the public discourse around Gen Z that frames them as ‘snowflakes’ or ‘too easily offended.’ Yet what is often read as hypersensitivity may in fact represent a heightened form of emotional discernment or clocking-it. Raised in a media-saturated, hyper-performative environment, Gen Z has developed fluency in aesthetic cues, irony, and affective contradictions. They are attuned to the gap between language and intent: between institutional messaging and structural inaction. Their refusals to engage, use of memes, strategic silences, or digital withdrawal are not necessarily signs of disengagement but could be read as forms of interpretive resistance. Like the “inner emigrants” of earlier regimes, their clockings are quiet but arguably precise.

Conclusions

This kind of perceptual intelligence has implications for those seeking to engage others in change. Whether in public health campaigns, political movements, or organisational transformation, the nature of vertical communication, (where information or appeals are issued from a position of assumed authority), risks misfiring when it fails to respect the emotional literacy of its audience.

People have long developed the capacity to clock condescension, detect tokenism, and decode the affective signals that betray disinterest or control. They may not push back overtly, but they will quietly disengage. They will not amplify the message, join the campaign, or shift their behaviour: not because they don’t care, but because they’ve seen this play out before.

By contrast, horizontal communication, grounded in mutual recognition, emotional nuance, and shared cultural referents, offers a more credible pathway to engagement. It avoids the traps of performance and speaks instead to lived experience.

To engage people meaningfully in change today requires more than clarity or evidence, it requires tone, humility, and the capacity to withstand being clocked. Because those being asked to change can tell, often instantly, whether a message sees them or simply wants something from them (that is not necessarily in their best interest).

In this light, clocking-it is not just a defensive posture. It is an intelligent response to asymmetrical communications that all too often underestimate the interpretive competence of those they wish to reach. To ignore this is to risk mistaking silence for assent and mistaking compliance for change.

There does not seem to be all that much in the news to make to joke about right now. In fact, it often seems tasteless to do so. But nevertheless, we do of course joke, whether about the news, people in power, about taboo topics or simply at each other’s expense, jokes seem to be an ever-present characteristic of human relationships.

And jokes are in fact often in the news – take White Lotus star Aimee Lou Wood pushing back at her teeth being the subject of a joke suggesting “there must be a cleverer, more nuanced, less cheap way” to make jokes. Or how Alice Fraser, an award-winning Australian comedian, has cancelled a planned trip to the US after receiving legal advice that she could be stopped at the border due to her previous jokes about the Trump administration. Jokes, it seems, are powerful, and will provoke reactions.

But what exactly it is about jokes that gives them a power beyond their words? We can comment on someone’s appearance, or we could criticise their political position, but these are not remarked or acted on in quite the same way as if these are delivered in the form of a joke. Somehow a joke has more power to create a response than a comment alone, whether positively or negatively.

A joke therefore seems to be more than simply making a sharp point. Looking at the literature on jokes, often from philosophy (perhaps not the wittiest of disciplines) but also from the social sciences, a theme emerges that the power of jokes is due to something that can be quite hard to achieve by others means: a sense of alignment with others. In a world where we often occupy our own individual thoughts, a well delivered joke has the power to allow us to collectively recognise we see and feel the same thing.

Philosopher Ted Cohen makes this point when he argues the pleasure of a joke is the feeling we get that tells us we are not alone in our thoughts, but instead we have a shared understanding of the world with others. The fact tat we are all laughing at the same thing, allows us to know what is in their mind, when at other times we are having to guess. This, combined with the way that jokes allow us to challenge existing norms and set new boundaries, suggests that they may in fact be a human characteristic that is instrumental to changing behaviour.

Which brings this directly into the sphere of behavioural science: we start with this point, the theory of mind and its importance for landing a joke.

The joke as theory of mind

To laugh at a joke, we need to understand more than just the words: we need to understand the speaker’s intention. This is where the psychological explanation of Theory of Mind (ToM) helps us, as we need to understand what is going on in another person’s mind. For example, perhaps you notice a colleague near your desk, glancing at you but not saying anything. You infer they might want to talk but don’t want to interrupt you. You pause your task and say, “Everything okay?” This simple act relies on ToM: you attribute to them a desire to speak, a belief that interrupting might be rude, and an intention to get your attention subtly. Without ToM, you'd see only the outward behaviour, not the social signal that flags an internal intention.

The same mechanism is present when we laugh at a joke, it is not only because it may be somehow intrinsically amusing but because we recognise the speaker has observed something that is also in our minds. This creates a moment of mutual recognition when the joke ‘lands,’ giving us the realisation that the other person sees the world in the same way, even if only for a brief moment'.

As Cohen argues, to ‘get’ a joke is to prove oneself a kindred mind. It is this which means the emotional satisfaction derived from a joke goes beyond surface amusement, and starts to answer why jokes can be powerful social tools. They offer us a mirror to see how much we truly align with others. When a joke resonates with a group, it signals not just our understanding but our belonging and social cohesion. As Cohen says:

“When we laugh at the same thing, that is a very special occasion… It is the satisfaction of a deep human longing, the realization of a desperate hope. It is the hope that we are enough like one another to sense one another, to be able to live together.”

It seems ToM is then a potent mechanism sitting behind the power of jokes. But this is not the only consideration. Sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that moments of collective effervescence (intense collective emotional experiences) are crucial for maintaining societal cohesion. On this basis jokes are tools of communal engagement, turning private thoughts and experiences into something collective.

Jokes as shared identity

This leads us onto a wider consideration of the way that jokes are inherently social. We typically do not tell jokes to ourselves but also, as social psychologist Rod Martin reports, we laugh more frequently when we are with others than when we are alone (perhaps reading or watching TV.) This is a key difference between jokes and other socially-engaged activities, where communication might be focused on collaboration or information exchange. With jokes, the connection is more immediate and emotional, momentarily placing us on the same mental wavelength as those around us. This creates an alignment based not on facts or goals, but in terms of shared recognition and mutual understanding.

This feels adjacent to the research that psychologist Stephen Reicher conducts on crowds. While the traditional view of crowds is that they are irrational, a place we are can lose our sense of self to the mass, Reicher by contrast argues crowds can amplify what were previously individual thoughts and intentions. This creates a shared sense of purpose and collective identity. In the same way, we laugh together not just because something is witty, but because we recognise that we are experiencing the same reality. Psychologists Philip Sloman and Steven Fernbach also argue that we don’t just share experiences with others – we also know we are sharing them. This awareness of our shared experience alters how we navigate social interactions, creating alignment and mutual recognition. This is exactly what makes laughter so powerful: it’s a collective acknowledgment that we are aligned, not just with the joke, but with each other.

And this starts early, suggesting it is an essential characteristic of humans: research by Elena Hoicka finds that by the age of one, children begin laughing at surprise (like peek-a-boo). By age three, they’re already playing with taboo, deploying 'naughty' words for effect. This supports the idea that humour is a core part of how we learn to navigate norms: how to follow them, how to test them, and how to connect through as we subvert them.

We are starting to see the way that jokes are more than mechanisms for social alignment but a mechanism for navigating the way we live together.

Jokes as confession

This is a topic explored in a paper titled ‘Nymph piss and gravy orgies’ by Cynthia Siew, Tomas Engelthaler, and Thomas Hills exploring the concept of ‘expectation violation’. They asked participants in their study which combination of word pairs was most funny. Incongruent pairings such as ‘gangster pasta’, was rated as funnier than more conventional options like ‘insult nickname’ indicating that challenges to our intuitive cognitive patterns can create the surprise and pleasure that makes us laugh.

This ties into a broader notion that jokes do not simply offer a clever perspective on a topic; instead, they actively invite us to align with new, often subversive ways of interpreting the world. By defying cultural norms and expectations, jokes can, for a moment, shake up our habitual ways of thinking, creating a realisation that both parties are engaging in a small act of cognitive rebellion together.

The success of this subversion is seen in shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Larry David often plays with social conventions. In one notable scene, David’s character disrupts the seemingly innocuous act of saying ‘thank you’ by questioning its use in social interactions. The humour comes from the recognition that while ‘thank you’ is a socially ingrained practice, its necessity or meaning is often taken for granted. By disrupting this small ritual, David’s character creates a collective, albeit uncomfortable, moment of realisation about how absurd and arbitrary some of our interactions can be.

In the same spirit of exposing the inner lives that guide us, philosopher Simon Critchley argues that humour is a form of ‘communal confession’. Much like religious confession, where individuals admit their sins, jokes function as a collective truth-telling, exposing uncomfortable truths, revealing what we’ve collectively hidden or ignored. And just as religious confession is designed to cleanse and absolve, jokes offer a momentary release from the tension of societal expectations. They strip away the weight of social conformity whilst allowing us to confront uncomfortable truths together. Through this collective ‘confession,’ we gain the freedom to laugh at what we once could not face.

Extending this, anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that societies create boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and that jokes can be a way of ‘boundary-breaking,’ enabling people to challenge the limits of what is culturally acceptable. This means that what is deemed taboo can often be explored or violated through jokes, allowing us to reveal and explore uncomfortable truths about society in a way that is often less confrontational than direct critique.

As writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips puts it, jokes are ‘contraband’, delivering pleasure around what is socially unacceptable. “Wherever in the system you can be amused,” Phillips writes, “you’ve touched something that cannot be discussed.” We see this reflected in the carnival season in Germany which has a long tradition of mocking figures of power and authority, sparking heated debate about what is and is not acceptable humour.

Pushing the boundaries of what we consider to be socially acceptable is a key part of joking: what we can talk about, when we can talk about them (too soon) and how we talk about them. Of course, jokes are not the preserve of the progressive, they can also be used by dominant members of society to exert their authority.

Jokes as weapons

Theodor Adorno famously said, “He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof,” meaning that jokes can shut down dialogue whilst simultaneously allowing for a critique to occur under the guise of harmless amusement.

Take, for instance, the infamous example of Donald Trump mocking a reporter with diaabilities during the 2016 presidential campaign. His joke was used to reinforce harmful power dynamics, mocking those at the margins to solidify one's own position without fear of immediate consequence. This is not unlike the Roman Emperor Augustus who used public humour, including satire and mockery, to consolidate his power and discredit rivals. Humour was used to pacify the population, ensuring that dissatisfaction with the empire was suppressed.

On the other hand, humour can also be wielded to good effect by progressive groups to challenge dominant ideologies. For instance, the TV show Fleabag challenges gender norms by satirising the expectations placed on women. The protagonist, Fleabag, constantly questions whether she is a ‘good feminist’ and regularly challenges conventional ideas about femininity. In one episode, Fleabag and her sister attend a feminist lecture titled ‘Women Speak: Opening Women’s Mouths since 1988,’ only to later participate in a retreat where women are expected to remain silent. Here, the humour doesn’t just ridicule; it creates an opportunity for reflection and transformation of what it means to conform to, or reject, societal norms.

However, for jokes to land there is a tricky balance between challenge and safety, as Catherine Jansson-Boyd notes. Humour that pushes the boundaries too far may alienate the audience, while humour that doesn’t go far enough may fail to generate the necessary reflection. The power of a well-timed joke lies in its ability to provide just enough challenge to force a new way of thinking, while also creating a shared understanding among those who ‘get it.’

If done thoughtfully however, it seems that jokes are not just a tool for amusement but can disrupt, offering new ways of being and seeing that might otherwise be silenced by conventional discourse. Which means that surely, they can be tools for reimagining the world

Jokes as acts of subversive imagination

Psychologists Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie explore the topic of imagination and suggest it is it is deeply social. Our ability to imagine alternative futures is shaped by the cultural tools around us: stories, rituals, and, of course, jokes. In this way, jokes offer us a chance to practice thinking about how the world might be outside of the dominant frames that shape our worldviews. And Critchley underscores this when he argues that humour’s true power lies in de-familiarising the world, breaking the illusion that things must always be the way they are.

We can see this play out through the work of Mark and Paul Engler who document how humour played pivotal roles in transformative movements. For example, they describe how the Serbian resistance group Otpor used hundreds of small, humorous actions to undermine the Milosevic regime. One memorable act involved activists in a small town staging a birthday party for Milosevic, presenting him with handcuffs and a one-way ticket to the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague. This made people laugh, but more importantly, it made change feel imaginable.

And there is a long history of humorous messaging in environmental protests: Extinction Rebellion, the direct-action movement used stunts involving nudity, fake blood and people literally sticking their heads in the sand to draw public attention to the climate crisis.

In oppressive regimes, jokes often become a currency of coded resistance. In East Germany under the Stasi, political jokes were passed secretly, not just to mock those in power, but to test trust. If someone laughed, it meant they were safe. These jokes weren’t mere entertainment—they were tools of social calibration. Laughing together in this context was an act of courage. It signalled dissent, but also alignment.

Jokes then, can offer a counter-narrative to mainstream ideologies or state-sponsored narratives. On this basis they may serve as resistance even before the political system realises it is under attack.

Jokes and behaviour change

For those involved in encouraging behaviour change whether in the public of private sector jokes, and humour in general, seem to be an important device. And this is something that people seem to be open to – indeed, research by Ipsos found that 80% of the US population indicate they would see a brand in a more positive light if they partnered with their favourite comedic content producer. In commercial advertising, humour has been shown to attract attention, promote the memory of and positive attitudes towards an advertisement or brand, and encourage positive affect and purchase intent. Humour has also been used by social marketers to tackle public safety issues such as road and rail safety.

So what is it about humour that is helpful for behaviour change? Subversive power seems to be central, particularly in health promotion, where humour is often used to introduce new ways of thinking about health behaviours. It can normalise discussions about previously taboo topics such as sexual health or substance use. For instance, using humour in a mental health intervention led to an increase in help-seeking behaviour, suggesting that humour can provide a safe space to imagine new possibilities for action and change.

Conclusions

Perhaps we should take jokes more seriously, not just for the truths they reveal, but for the way they disrupt, reframe, and expose we had already collectively suspected. They aren’t mere outlets or observations; they are acts of “epistemic mischief” as Cohen called them. They not only help with sense-making but bring us along collectively to challenge existing norms and encouraging new behaviours.

Philosopher Peter Rickman notes that jokes function as "meta-activities"—second-level reflections on how we live, speak, and think. They operate through estrangement: short-circuiting ‘common sense’, bringing a critical eye to the ordinary, and destabilising our usual ways of meaning-making. This is why laughter can be so destabilising, because it is a recognition of something real that has been hiding in plain sight.

And as we have seen, our laughter at a joke lets us know we were part of something larger all along, suggesting that jokes, far from simply being witty releases, can in fact be harbingers of change.

Rather than passively relying on hope, disappointment compels us to confront reality. We see reason for disappointment everywhere, from the climate emergency creating a sense of a lost future, a disillusionment with elected politicians delivering on their promises to a brand rowing back on their ESG commitments.

Its pervasiveness suggests we are living through an ‘Era of Disappointment’, with multiple, overlapping forms of letdown. Popular culture reflects this lived experience from ballads lamenting lost love ("The winner takes it all, the loser standing small") to game-shows that zoom in on losing contestants' faces, disappointment is a deeply ingrained human experience.

Not only do we have to deal with our own disappointments, but we also have to navigate the weight of others' disappointments in us, whether as individuals, professionals, or as collective entities like brands or governments. It is such a central facet of our lives that the way we respond to this has the potential to shape our relationships and reputations, influencing whether others' disappointment in us hangs about, or transforms into something more positive.

It could be tempting to consider disappointment solely an emotional reaction, but it is also a cognitive, social, and, as we shall see, political process that shapes how we think about and engage with the world. The substantive nature of disappointment perhaps explains why it is such a critical part of our lives.

We will explore why disappointment is so psychologically disruptive and why some of us can process it better than others. But at the heart of this is the notion that disappointment can force us to think, allowing us, or indeed forcing us to consider a different way to approach a challenge. In this way it can have an important role in change, both individually and societally.

And if the ‘Era of Disappointment’ we are experiencing is to be a force for change rather than one of blame and disillusionment, then exploring the psychology of this is an important topic for behavioural science to explore.

Defining disappointment

There is plenty of evidence that disappointment is a frequently experienced emotion. Ulrich Schimmack and Ed Diener's study on the intensity and frequency of affective experiences found that disappointment is the third most frequently experienced negative emotion (after anxiety and anger). Despite its prevalence, disappointment has not been widely studied in the academic literature, although there does seem to be an unusual level of understanding and agreement on what disappointment is, stemming from outcomes that are worse than expected.

Its importance and impact on behaviour has been covered in decision research known as Disappointment Theory. More recent research in marketing has shown that disappointment influences dissatisfaction and encourages related behaviours such as complaining.

Disappointment research also makes a distinction between outcome-related disappointment (ORD) and person-related disappointment (PRD). ORD arises when an expected outcome is not achieved—such as failing an exam or missing out on an opportunity. PRD, on the other hand, occurs when another person’s actions fall short of expectations—such as a friend breaking a promise or a colleague spreading rumours.

Michael Hviid Jacobsen in his book ‘Dark Emotions’ suggests that people experiencing ORD often reflect on lost opportunities, express a desire for a second chance, and may feel motivated to try harder or engage in activities that lift their spirits. Those experiencing PRD, by contrast, often seek to distance themselves, ignore, or avoid the individual who caused their disappointment. They may feel a strong urge to be far removed from the person altogether. Either way, there is arguably an action tendency related to each type of disappointment.

There seems to be much more coverage about disappointment in the media; one example is ‘Paris Syndrome’, referring to a very specific type of disappointment allegedly suffered by holidaymakers when visiting the French capital for the first time and feeling 'extremely' disappointed that the city did not live up to their prior expectations.

Another media topic relates to the way we respond to disappointment, examining the reaction of English football players at the Euro 2020 final. After losing to Italy in a penalty shootout, many players immediately removed their silver medals during the trophy ceremony. This act visibly expressed their disappointment, implying that only winning the final would have been acceptable. While some fans and pundits empathised with their frustration, others saw it as disrespectful or indicative of a sense of entitlement.

Across all this, it is clear that we are disappointment-averse, (unsurprisingly) prefering to be satisfied and to have our desires fulfilled. No wonder then that the topic of optimism garners more publicity than disappointment!

The optimism bias

Psychologist Tali Sharot's neuroscience research on optimism shows how we selectively update beliefs in response to desirable information while discounting undesirable news. And that people are more likely to take action when given positive expectations of the future rather than warnings of disappointment or failure. Sharot suggests that framing communication in a way that harnesses optimism may be more effective in changing behavior than warning about possible disappointments.

But while there is little doubt that a hopeful and positive outlook is often adaptive, does this really hold up when we examine the collective responses to major societal challenges?

For example, when a major report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that we are unlikely to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, many scientists and journalists nonetheless still presented the 1.5-degree goal as achievable. This is despite most scientists believing that warming will reach at least 2.5 degrees Celsius, according to a survey by The Guardian newspaper. It seems that while staying optimistic may be helpful in some instances, it can also be problematic, leading to a misdirection of much-needed efforts in others.

Philosopher Lauren Berlant wrote about the way people cling to hopeful narratives in the face of adversity in the aptly named book Cruel Optimism. It explores how we can individually and collectively get trapped by maintaining optimistic illusions even when they lead to disappointment and suffering. This feels similar to the Just-World Hypothesis, where people believe that the world is fundamentally fair and that individuals get what they deserve: good things happen to good people, but also that bad things happen to bad people. Or stock-market bubbles, where a collective optimism that over-priced assets will continue to rise has given rise to many financial crashes.

Indeed, there is also experimental evidence that our optimistic belief in a better future is not necessarily helpful and can even prevent real structural change. In a study from 2011, college students who were instructed to imagine that the following week would be great, felt significantly less motivated and energetic (and were academically less productive) than those who were told to visualise all the problems that might take place during the coming week.

It seems that in difficult times, optimism can actually disarm and relax us, preventing actions that could bring about that sunny imagined future. However, while it seems there is a case that optimism does not always live up to its promise, disappointment hardly seems a suitable candidate for delivering positive outcomes.

The job of disappointment

Countering this, early 20th-century psychologist Wilfred Bion argued that it is precisely through disappointment, rather than optimism, that meaningful thought emerges. This is because being thwarted forces us to engage with reality in a way that optimism does not. Rather than dismissing disappointment as a setback, Bion saw it as an opportunity—albeit an uncomfortable one—to reflect and reconsider.

Take the challenge a brand can face when it changes its rewards programme, making it harder for customers to earn points. Loyal customers who have built a relationship with the brand based on predictability and perceived fairness may well feel let down. This creates a moment of disappointment, forcing customers to think about whether to continue spending their money with the brand or abandon it. Either way, consumers are now reflecting on their relationship with the brand in a way that, in a steady-state environment, they had no incentive to do so.

Of course, it is hardly in a brand manager’s textbook that disappointing customers is a solid strategy, but it is also fair to say that it is through this disappointment we can see the depth of people's expectations of the brand: if we did not care, and the loyalty programme was not of interest in the first place, then we would not feel frustrated, and we would not see the same intensity of disappointment. So, if a brand manager finds they have disappointed customers, then this means the brand’s actions matter; disappointment can therefore be a signal of value or importance.

Responding to disappointment

Of course we cannot always hope to meet the expectations of all the people in our lives - a brand cannot service all its customers without falling short, and a government cannot make all the people happy all the time. Anticipating and bracing for disappointment is simply something we do as humans. As W. B. Yeats famously suggested, life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

Because disappointment is inevitable then it might be less important whether we create disappointment than how we respond to it or the possibility of it. Bion considers that what is needed is (using a concept he borrows) 'Negative Capability' - the ability to tolerate disappointment without rushing to a resolution. Those who lack Negative Capability feel compelled to find an immediate explanation, blame someone, or use some other means to escape the discomfort of disappointment.

So if a brand disappoints a customer, the customer services team are often tempted to rush to an immediate resolution. However, if they rationalise what has happened or defends itself too quickly, there is a danger that customers feel the issue has not been considered enough, or responded to in a sufficiently thoughtful way.

A brand that is able to successfully 'hold space' for disappointment, acknowledging it without rushing to solutions, may, at first glance, seem to be failing to correct failure quickly enough. However, Bion would suggest that this approach can in fact foster deeper trust by demonstrating a genuine commitment to understanding concerns before offering a meaningful response. It is this 'Negative Capability' that perhaps explains why some brands navigate disappointment successfully while others struggle, determining whether consumers remain engaged or disengage in anger.

In another example, politicians' ability to hold the space for disappointment could be why some are able to navigate difficult events, such as when UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced significant disappointment over accepting gifts and hospitality, including clothing, event tickets, and accommodations. In response, rather than seeking to blame others or angrily deny it, Starmer took a number of steps, first repaying more than £6,000 in gifts. He then put in place stricter internal guidelines to address the problem more widely, announcing that senior ministers would no longer accept free clothing.

Starmer was displaying what Bion calls a 'container' strategy for executing Negative Capability well. He considers that ‘containing’ - carefully acknowledging the issue and taking time to determine the right corrective measures - helps transform disappointment into something that can be thought about, rather than 'evacuated' through denial, rage, or blaming others.

Although undoubtedly damaging, this containment appeared to help control the disappointment and maintain public engagement. Through this there is a possibility of transforming disappointment into long-term positive outcomes.

Seeking out disappointment

It seems then that disappointment can in fact lead to a deeper engagement with the issue, which is no bad thing. This is the underpinning of health psychologist Fuschia Sirois's research on ‘defensive pessimism’. She suggests that individuals who anticipate potential challenges by considering possible negative outcomes are better equipped to handle setbacks. This is because we are more likely to be motivated to proactively prepare to prevent those outcomes occurring. For example, defensive pessimists might prepare thoroughly for a job interview by considering what could go wrong and taking steps to mitigate those risks.

German academic and psychologist Gabriele Oettingen goes one step further, arguing for mental contrasting, a strategy that encourages us to actively seek out disappointment by requiring us to consider both our aspirations and the obstacles that stand in their way. Oettingen suggests this means we can develop resilience, improve our planning, transforming disappointment into a tool for growth rather than a barrier to progress. Indeed, mental contrasting has been shown to help people improve their relationships and recover from chronic pain, possibly because it undercuts the complacency that can be the result of unrealistic optimism.

What matters then is not so much whether a person feels hopeful or unhopeful about the future but how constructively they deal with the feelings of disappointment about the possibility of poor outcomes.

The political nature of disappointment

Climate change is one area which people have good reason to feel disappointment in the futures they are facing. However, in the vein of its how we deal with this that is important, a survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults found that people experiencing psychological distress related to climate change were more likely to engage in collective climate change action or to report a willingness to do so. And other research has found a positive correlation between climate anxiety and climate action.

While anxiety or distress are not exactly the same as disappointment, it does seem close enough to consider this an important avenue for climate campaigners and those seeking change in other areas to engage with.

Disappointment therefore has wider implications because it is not simply a personal response, but arises in reaction to unmet expectations that are often shaped by social systems, institutions, and cultural narratives. Added to this is that disappoinment happens when we compare what actually happened (or is likely to happen) to what we expected or hoped for—especially when we believe a better outcome could have occurred. Unlike regret, which arises when we feel personally responsible for a bad outcome, disappointment tends to involve less self-blame and more focus on external factors. This focus on external factors and possible futures means disappointment is often deeply political.

Added to this, as philosopher Rafael Holmberg suggests, disappointment is never just an isolated feeling; it is open-ended, with the potential to linger rather than resolve. This endurance makes it particularly potent in political discourse, calling on actors to step in and address the issues through containment. All too often it seems this does not happen, resulting in blame, anger and displacement, thereby further aggravating the issue.

Andreas Reckwitz expands on this idea, arguing that modern society itself functions as a disappointment generator. We are conditioned to strive for uniqueness and exceptionalism, yet this very pursuit sets many up most of us for failure. When everyone is trying to stand out, the reality is that most will not, fuelling feelings of frustration, and societal discontent.

Conclusions

A key reason disappointment feels so powerful is counterfactual thinking, our tendency to imagine "what if" or "if only" scenarios. This means that even if the better outcome wasn't guaranteed, just thinking about how things could have been different can intensify our disappointment. We can see how this is aligned with societal challenges, for example, the notion of sostalgia, where we are nostalgic for a life that is no longer possible due to climate change.

We do not like disappointments, and yet it seems that they offer us a path forward, allowing us to see possibilities for change and to determine what we want more clearly. It it is this that makes disappointment politically significant. Its open-ended nature does not merely signal failure but instead demands a response. Far from being a purely negative emotion, disappointment, when engaged with constructively, can lead to deeper insight, more thoughtful action, and, ultimately, meaningful change.

Looking back at 2024, we can see it as a year when war, political division, climate crises and technology disruption have dominated headlines. But perhaps what does not make the news in the same way are the small but striking moments of kindness that have run through our lives. Take the way that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese praised Australian breaker Rachael 'Raygun' Gunn’s courage and commitment in the face of widespread ridicule for her Olympics performance. Or how, during her Eras Tour, Taylor Swift distributed $55 million in bonuses to her production crew, including $100,000 to each truck driver involved in the tour logistics. The total amount and per-person bonuses far exceed standard practices in the entertainment industry, which are often limited to higher-ranking staff. Or how a man was caught on camera rescuing a little dog that was shivering in the rain. And this is before we even count the millions of people that regularly volunteer for good causes.

These stories remind us that, despite the often-depressing news cycle, kindness continues to thrive. But are these really acts of kindness, or deeds that have a selfish undertone because we are chasing the warm glow that comes from doing this? Based on survey results with the general public, one UK paper suggests that kind deeds result in a 'buzz' that can last four hours.

This is the challenge when we think about kindness: are we simply being kind so that people reciprocate? Perhaps it is networked reciprocity, where people give, knowing they may never be directly repaid themselves but believing that their kindness will 'snowball' into a larger, self-sustaining system of support. But even here, where does this leave a form of kindness where nothing is expected in return?

Perhaps the most human of all characteristics, kindness is surprisingly little examined, and its relevance today for people, governments, and brands is often not all that considered. In our first post of 2025, we make the optimistic case for kindness as an important tool available to effect real change in the world.

But first, let's take a closer look at the way kindness is talked about as a form of reciprocity.

Kindness as reciprocity

Often, kindness is understood through the idea that performing good deeds will inspire others to do the same. In this view kindness functions as a social contract, where acts of generosity and care are part of a complex and subtle exchange system. One example is the tradition where people buy gifts for family members and friends on their birthday. This widespread activity is often linked to expectations of reciprocal giving – if we give a present to a friend on their birthday but are not given a comparable present on our own birthday, we will probably feel a bit disappointed or offended. Likewise, in business settings, companies may receive criticism for making charitable donations with the primary aim of enhancing their reputation, thus treating kindness as an investment with measurable returns.

Based on this perspective, kindness operates as a transaction within established exchange systems, whether in personal relationships, workplaces, or commercial environments. Instead of being performed for their own sake, kind acts are often motivated by the desire for an emotional reward, referred to by economist James Andreoni as a "warm glow."

Kindness as part of a social contract isn’t necessarily inherently bad given it reinforces social bonds, encourages cooperation, and often leads to positive outcomes. However, when kindness becomes overly transactional or performative, it surely risks becoming a mechanistic self-serving process.

But how can we view kindness differently?

But why do we view kindness in this way? Sociologist Max Weber argued it was due to the way modernity has "disenchanted" the world by removing magic, mystery, and intrinsic meaning, reducing everything to mere resources or problems to be solved. Our experiences become a series of challenges, hurdles, risks, and stresses—such as paying bills, understanding conflicts, and managing environmental crises. This mindset gives priority to what is effective and practical and, in doing so, makes kindness appear inefficient and sentimental.

Taking this even further, acts of kindness can have an insidious undertone, serving as tools for establishing and reinforcing societal norms and values. In a consumerist system, individual acts of kindness, like buying a coffee for a stranger, focus attention on personal morality while diverting attention away from systemic issues, such as financial inequity. Writer Richard Seymour describes this phenomenon as creating a state of "disavowal," where people "know but act as if they don't know." This means systemic pressures easily sway individuals despite the internal conflict they may feel. For instance, people may be fully aware of the climate crisis but continue behaviours like flying on planes or buying imported fruit. Instead of seeing this as moral weakness or insincerity, Seymour suggests it is a required response to systemic disempowerment. In a world where most people feel politically powerless, we retreat into personal lives, focusing on small, individual acts of kindness (such as helping a stranger) that are more manageable.

From this perspective, kindness is not simply a series of positive, selfless actions but a mechanism that is all too often used to sustain existing systems.

The Oppressiveness of Kindness

Looking at kindness in this way allows us to see more clearly that acts that could be labelled as kind are not always entirely virtuous but can be co-opted to maintain power structures, perpetuate inequality, and quash dissent.

Sara Ahmed aligns with this, pointing out how kindness is often weaponised to enforce compliance, particularly by urging people to ‘be kind’ to mute valid anger or criticism. For instance, marginalised individuals expressing frustration over systemic injustice might be told to 'stay civil,' effectively prioritising politeness over accountability. During the height of the BLM protests, Obama warned against "heated" protests, which many critics felt risked side-lining the valid frustration and anger of marginalised communities.

Similarly, writer and activist Sophie Lewis critiques systems of care that burden women and caregivers, framing kindness as an expectation disproportionately placed on those already marginalised. Marginalised groups, particularly women of colour, often carry the disproportionate burden of caregiving and emotional labour. And marginalised individuals are expected to maintain kindness at the expense of their well-being. For instance, in family and social structures, women are often tasked with emotional support and forgiveness, roles that reinforce traditional gender norms while simultaneously keeping these systemic inequalities intact.

This means there is a danger that kindness is a deeply conservatising force, but what alternatives are there, and how do these rather gloomy assessments of kindness square with the acts of kindness we see daily?

Kindness as a rupture in norms

If we consider that we live in a technocratic world where everything is reduced to mere resources or problems to be solved, it can be hard to see how acts of kindness without any expectation of reciprocity really have a place.

However, some voices suggest things look very different if we seek out 're-enchantment', creating a 'rupture' or disruption in the logic of seeing every action as a cost-benefit calculation, as Seymour suggests. So rather than acts of kindness being prompted by the direct benefit they provide to the giver, they are acts that come from a place of awe, imagination, and moral adventure. It shifts human action from being driven by utility to being driven by wider, more transcendent considerations such as value, beauty, or shared purpose. But does this actually stand up to empirical scrutiny, or is it simply wishful thinking?

One person whose career has been spent exploring this very question is psychologist Dacher Keltner, with his research on the emotion of awe and its impact on human behaviour. He found that experiencing awe fosters a transcendent 'other-focused' mindset, diminishing the sense of self and expanding one's perspective beyond personal concerns. As he put it recently:

"Awe transforms you in terms of your orientation to other people….It surfaces what's meaningful to you, what you care about."

A wide range of studies have backed this up - a recently published meta-analysis found a positive correlation between awe and prosocial (kind) behaviour, and another found that attending festivals resulted in kinder behaviour a year later, with a greater sense of universal connectedness being a key factor. Moreover, of course, it is not simply festivals that can result in this; interacting with literature and music, practising meditation, immersing oneself in nature and psychedelic substance use are associated with universal connectedness and positive mood.

Activist organisations attempt to pull people into mindsets where they feel connected, as engaging and caring require us to remove ourselves from everyday concerns. Hence, the climate action group Extinction Rebellion uses symbolic rituals such as dressing as 'red-robed figures', symbolising blood, sacrifice, and mourning. These rituals tap into symbolic associations of mourning and tragedy which can of course create a powerful emotional experience for onlookers.

It seems that when we are encouraged or forced to go beyond the usual bonds of reciprocity, acts of genuine kindness become possible. One example is how grassroots mutual aid networks spring up during crises that often operate without the expectation of recognition or emotional reward. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, volunteers didn't just provide food and water but helped people rebuild entire homes, going far beyond the "bare minimum" of disaster relief, which might only provide temporary shelter. This was often done without compensation or notions of reciprocity, with many travelling from across the U.S. to live and work in the ravaged neighbourhoods for weeks or months. Sociologist Kai Erikson notes how these shared experiences of suffering can unite people, creating a "democracy of distress" where communal bonds are strengthened through collective adversity.

Another example comes from "The Kindness Pandemic." Launched during the early days of COVID, it was designed to highlight acts of kindness. It became a worldwide platform for sharing stories of kindness, from neighbours delivering groceries to healthcare workers providing emotional and practical support under huge pressure.

From these examples, it appears crises can offer opportunities for kindness. While they have devastating outcomes for people, they also perhaps create a 'rupture' in the usual ways of operating, tearing up the existing norms and systems.

Kindness as a Tool for Transformation

Building on this point of challenging the status quo, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida set out the notion that significant change only ever comes about through the "impossible gift" of kindness that cannot be repaid. This radical notion suggests that great steps in history can, almost by definition, not be from reciprocal actions that maintain the status quo but have to come from kind acts which simply cannot be repaid. The Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, Nelson Mandela's forgiveness and reconciliation after apartheid, and the Marshall Plan after World War II are examples of how kindness transformed societies.

This suggests that kindness often aligns with prefigurative politics, where we embody the principles of a desired future within present actions. Kindness initiatives like those on display in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina not only address immediate needs but also create tangible examples of the collective, equitable societies they envision.

Of course, the consequence here is that kindness is not always warm and comfortable. Sara Ahmed's concept of killjoy suggests that true kindness requires confronting discomfort and hard truths rather than perpetuating oppressive systems under the guise of civility. For instance, extending kindness to those all too often dehumanised by mainstream societal norms, such as queer individuals, refugees, or unhoused people, is an act of resistance, challenging notions of who is 'worthy' of care.

Overall, kindness can, therefore, be a means of driving systemic change. While reciprocity often creates feedback loops that sustain existing systems, genuine kindness can cultivate a culture of care rooted in notions of abundance and shared responsibility. But the way this challenges existing norms means that it can be challenging to actually make happen.

But Do We Dare Be Kind?

Psychotherapist Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor have argued that kindness is indeed often viewed with suspicion, associated with weakness or naivety. This scepticism, they say, comes from contemporary culture's emphasis on self-interest, which undermines the value of compassionate behaviour. They suggest that genuine acts of kindness require vulnerability and openness, qualities often perceived as liabilities in a world that places greater value on invulnerability and dominance. And on this basis, kindness is disappointingly rare. As they put it:

"Modern life encourages us to present a façade of invulnerability, making genuine kindness—a form of vulnerability—appear as a weakness."

But can we really be sure this the case? In reality, it is hard to tell – one survey suggests people do an average of 223 acts of kindness yearly although, admittedly, those appearing on the list were not exactly high-stakes activities (e.g. holding open a door for others, taking in a delivery for a neighbour, or giving someone directions).

In Rutger Bregman's book Humankind: A Hopeful History, he challenges the dominant narrative that humans are inherently unkind and driven by self-interest. Instead, he argues that people are far kinder, more cooperative, and more altruistic than we might believe. He cites the case of the "real Lord of the Flies" — a group of Tongan boys who were stranded on an island for over a year. Unlike the fictional version of the story, the boys did not descend into violence and chaos; instead, they collaborated, cared for each other, and created a well-functioning society. Another key example is the Stanford Prison Experiment, where, on closer inspection, he found its portrayal of human cruelty was significantly overstated and shaped by the experiment's design

In an era marked by political turbulence, systemic injustice, and global crises, kindness does appear to be a much-needed transformative force. However, it surely requires strong leadership to harness this potential and be able to turn opportunities into meaningful change. But how easy is this?

How we become unkind

To answer that we go back to Keltner and his book, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence, where he explores how power fundamentally alters individuals. He suggests that while people often ascend to positions of power through being kind, the accumulation of power can lead to increased self-focus, diminished empathy, and, at times, unkind and exploitative behaviours. He stresses the importance of maintaining an 'other-focused' mindset to balance the corrupting influences of power.

On the other hand, Bregman argues that it is not power itself that corrupts; instead, it is social and institutional frameworks that determine its distribution and use. For example, Bregman argues that the Nazi regime's efficient and impersonal bureaucracy meant that ordinary individuals participated in atrocities without feeling personal accountability, while pervasive propaganda normalised hateful ideologies and dehumanised targeted groups. Additionally, Bregman sets out that societal pressures to conform and the diffusion of responsibility led to widespread participation and the passive acceptance of oppressive policies.

This perspective shifts the focus from individual wrongdoing to understanding how structured systems and cultural conditioning can perpetuate unkindness and injustice on a massive scale. So with this in mind, the fostering of genuine kindness is not only about individual virtues but also involves fundamentally addressing and reforming the underlying societal and institutional frameworks. By deconstructing discriminatory systems, improving transparency, and cultivating a culture of empathy and accountability, we transform kindness from individual, isolated acts into a foundational platform for systemic change.

Conclusions

Looking more closely than we tend to at acts of kindness has shown us how it has the potential to transcend entrenched conflict and injustice even in the worst of circumstances. Central to kindness is our collective imagination, which requires us to look beyond the boundaries of our existing systems. Engaging in the imaginative pursuit of a kinder, more just society, is when significant societal shifts can happen. Kindness requires us to challenge the mechanistic, utilitarian view of the world and consider one made up of more meaningful transformation.

There are real opportunities to better think about and consider the value of kindness, not just for each other as individuals but for governments and brands and indeed any type of organisation. There is widespread acceptance that we need change, and it needs to happen fast. Kindness, far from being the refuge of the weak and the sentimental, could well in fact be the potent force needed to make change happen.

Why are things sometimes awkward? We have all experienced interactions that are, well, awkward. And these unfortunate, awkward moments can sometimes forever be available online, such as the moment in 2017 when the Oscar for Best Picture was initially given to La La Land, only to be corrected shortly after to the real winner, Moonlight. Clearly, the cast and crew of La La Land felt very awkward when they were informed on stage of this error. And 'cringe comedy' gives us second-hand access to someone else's awkwardness: the TV show 'The Office' was based around this, such as the character David Brent's attempt to show off his "dance moves" to his co-workers created a famous scene of intense awkwardness.

In everyday conversations, things can get quickly awkward when we stray into sensitive territory, for which there is a long list - sex, salary gaps, menstruation, political affiliation or death, to name a few. But what are the implications of awkwardness? The temptation, of course, is to act on the very visceral feelings that engulf us and close things down as fast as possible. Or indeed to anticipate that risk and so avoid those situations or topics of conversation that run the danger of getting awkward. This means that despite the comedic associations of awkwardness, it has problematic implications for shaping behaviours in ways that can be unhelpful, particularly in relation to sensitive topics.

But perhaps making something awkward can also be a way of sanctioning poor behaviour. Many of us will have felt the discomfort of awkward silences following someone's problematic—perhaps racist or sexist—remark. This 'social freezing' can very saliently signal that what has been said is inappropriate. As such, it may be a useful tool to discourage certain behaviours.

Given this, awkwardness merits a closer behavioural examination to better understand what it is, how it unfolds, and how we go about addressing it to allow better conversations and for change to take place on tricky topics.

Awkwardness

In her recent book on this topic, philosopher Alexandra Plakias unpacks how awkwardness is a sign that the social scripts for a conversation, the tools we use for coordinating how to interact, are inadequate. When we lack the words to describe something, then our conversations with people can be difficult as we encounter the challenge of awkwardness.

Counter to other perspectives on this topic, she spells out how awkwardness is different from feelings of embarrassment or shame: she sets out how these 'self-conscious emotions' accompany awkwardness but that they are separate and distinct phenomena. Notably, she states that awkwardness is not an individual attribute, something that might feel counter-intuitive as we are used to describing people as awkward or to experience strong emotions ourselves when in awkward situations.

Instead, Plakias makes a compelling case that awkwardness occurs when participants in a conversation do not have the guidance of a 'script' and are at a loss for what to do next. By script, we mean the agreed-but-unspoken frameworks that we all use to guide our expectations and behaviours in particular contexts.

Awkwardness is when these scripts fail to give us the guidance we need, and we then do not have access to the social cues or language that would get us back on track. For example, the workplace can be an environment where things can readily get awkward. There are typically well-rehearsed scripts that work for many things, from casual greetings and meetings to conflict resolution and team collaboration. However, there are some areas where we might depart from these well-known scripts: for example, if a member of your team mentions that they are suffering from anxiety, as their manager you may feel uncertain about how to respond. This may well be the case if your employer is not a place where mental health is openly discussed. Should you offer support, suggest time off, or maybe change the subject is easier as quickly as possible? If there is a lack of guidelines or language to help the conversation flow, then there are not many social cues to know what is appropriate, both for the team member who is uncertain how their concern will be received and for you as their manager, not really knowing how to talk to them, what can be offered and so on. We can see from this example how awkwardness is less about the dispositions of the people involved but instead is a reflection of the absence of a shared script on how to handle mental health in the workplace.

Of course this is a problem: as we know, anticipating awkwardness means we are less likely to initiate a conversation, and we will seek to leave it as quickly as possible. This means that people are left isolated, without the tools to discuss and explore essential things going on for them. And not only that, but this limits what Plakias calls our exercise of 'epistemic agency'. By this, she means that it is only through sharing our experiences that others can learn, for mindsets to shift, and for change to occur. If people cannot talk about important issues, it is hard for others to understand their experiences.

Of course, awkwardness is not only about personal, sensitive issues. It may be awkward if we cannot quite articulate an issue: the other person may be frustrated with us and get irritated. Awkwardness stems from a gap in mutual understanding, maybe about how to navigate a situation or articulate an issue—again, it is about the way scripts fail to bridge the understanding gap between people. This aligns with Plakias' notion of epistemic agency, as not having the correct language can mean we fail to understand each other, and awkwardness then ensues. On this basis, perhaps we need to adapt words, sometimes even making them up.

Digital rights activist and writer Cory Doctrow did just this in 2022, coining the term ‘enshittification’. It was designed to capture something that many people had a sense of but could not quite put their finger on—the way in which digital platforms can become worse over time. It became so popular that it was voted word of the year in 2023.

In a quite different vein, English words are gaining ground in the US - with terms such as bloke (man), gutted (very disappointed), and bloody (a mild expletive) becoming more familiar to Americans. At one level, it is no surprise that we see it as a reflection of trends in language – after all, language is a living thing. But it is not just that, as we are not only borrowing words but also importing the concepts and encapsulating ideas that those words represent. For example, according to Ben Yagoda, the American professor who tracks 'Not one-off Bristishisms' (NOOBs), some words are simply better at describing certain things. For example, in British English, ‘queue’ implies orderly waiting, while ‘line’ in American English can feel less formal, which means that when Americans adopt ‘queue,’ it isn't just the word but also the cultural concept of a more orderly and polite waiting.

And this is not simply a matter of curiosity; the language we use shapes our ability to recognise an issue, or as Doctrow suggests:

"Creating a common vocabulary is a necessary precondition for having the substantive, vital debates."

Enshittification captured something that was not commonly understood before Doctrow's newly created word, so the term does a lot of heavy lifting in conveying a set of political and social messages.

Therefore, if we are seeking to engage people, change mindsets, and create new outcomes, understanding the mechanisms behind the words we choose is essential. Without this, we are left in a state of awkwardness, where, without the necessary language, we simply do not have scripts in place that allow us to navigate topics successfully.

Language and power

If the scripts are not in place to have conversations, then we have a bunch of awkward topics that do not get aired. Miranda Fricker writes about this in her 2007 book, 'Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing', setting out how language and knowledge structures interact with power. She introduced the concept of 'hermeneutical injustice' to describe the wrong that occurs when marginalised groups cannot properly articulate their experiences because of gaps or shortcomings in the collective framework of how things are discussed. This reflects what psychologists Steve Slomanand Philip Fernbach more recently pointed out: knowledge is not something that only resides in our heads but sits between us. As they put it:

"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."

This, of course, also means that the converse is true: when we fail to work together, this can be the source of collective failings, which falls disproportionately on marginalised groups,

Fricker uses the example of sexual harassment to illustrate this. Before the term ‘sexual harassment’ entered mainstream conversation, many women experienced unwanted advances or discriminatory behaviour but did not have the words to effectively describe it or call it out. Without the term, it meant their experiences were more easily dismissed, and they had few options to effectively communicate the impacts they were suffering. The introduction of the term ‘sexual harassment’ meant a conceptual tool was then available for women to both identify and articulate their experiences, which was an essential step for this issue to be taken more seriously and allow steps to be taken to change this behaviour.

Epistemic activism

Finding or even creating words to reflect concepts and experiences that are not properly represented in mainstream discourse, therefore, offers a route for bridging conceptual gaps and, with that, brings marginalised or little-understood issues to wider attention. The term that has been given to this by some is 'conceptual engineering'where philosophers like Herman Cappelen advocate for creating new concepts (with associated labels) when existing ones are inadequate.

An example of this is the concept of 'toxic positivity', a recently developed new term that refers to the pressure of maintaining a positive mindset at all times, even in the face of hardship. By naming this phenomenon, it is easier to see how there are societal expectations to be happy or optimistic, which can undermine genuine emotional challenges and lead to people not acknowledging their more difficult feelings. We can consider the work that is done to create the terms to bridge these gaps as a form of activism; this activism involves identifying the way power structures are reflected in the language we use and then identifying and seeking to popularise terms that challenge some of the dominant, often unspoken, narratives.

And this is an issue that does not purely sit within social activism. We can also see how brands carefully consider how they use language to capture a subtle new concept: for example, Patagonia coined the term "Worn Wear" to reflect the reusing and repairing of clothing rather than buying new items. Sportswear brand Lululemon has popularised the term 'athleisure', naming a concept of a previously unarticulated demand for versatile clothing that fits an active yet casual lifestyle. While these are, of course, not new ideas, the terms arguably make it easier to market and shape purchase decisions around a previously underdeveloped concept.

Epistemic fluency

When we have the absence of words or 'scripts' for discussing issues, whether sexual harassment, ethnicity, menopause or even clothing preferences, it also means we are unable to enact behaviours easily. For example, Ditte Maria Munch-Jurisic suggests a script that enables us to articulate emotions like anxiety in medicalised terms inclines us to seek help, whilst a script that conversely treats anxiety as a personal failing is likely only to increase the problem.

So, how might we facilitate this? There are a number of ways this can be done: professionals can offer language and guidance on how to talk about difficult and sensitive issues. For example, recent work undertaken by healthcare company Haleon where materials in pharmacies were designed to help prepare patients for a conversation with the pharmacists about the body pain they were experiencing. Social media also offers a means to do this, with research suggesting that online communities can help women navigate the often hard-to-articulate experiences of miscarriage.

Scripts, Power, and Privilege

Of course, the answer here is to allow an open conversation to take place, and together, people are able to explore and develop scripts. But it is not that simple, as scripts can also be tools we use to deny people access to certain social environments and subject matter. They become a form of 'privileged access' that can be tightly controlled. In the recent film Saltburn, an awkward moment occurs during a formal dinner at the family estate, where working-class student Oliver is surrounded by wealthy, well-connected guests. The conversation is effortless among the elite, referencing high-end art, luxury travel, and sophisticated cultural experiences. Oliver, coming from a much humbler background, sits in silence, unable to contribute and fumbles with his table manners, unfamiliar with the etiquette and codes that came naturally to everyone else.

This kind of exclusion isn't just about immediate awkwardness; it also limits access to social knowledge and skills that can only be learned through repeated exposure. For example, understanding the subtleties of a pause in conversation or a slight gesture often makes or breaks a social interaction. Yet, these cues are typically learned within environments where shared scripts are practised and passed down, leaving those without access disadvantaged. This ties into Kristie Dotson's concept of "contributory injustice." Dotson identifies how, through excluding social scripts, marginalised groups cannot contribute to the shared pool of knowledge or have their contributions recognised and valued. We can see how this leads to exclusionary cultures, again such as in the workplace that social psychologist Mary Murphy talks about when she references 'Cultures of Genius,' where the focus is mainly on the contributions of star performers, who are considered inherently more skilled than the wider workforce. By contrast, in 'Cultures of Growth,' positive mindsets are supported more widely, with the assumption that anyone in the organisation, given the right resources and structures in place, has the potential to contribute to success.

In her analysis of Fortune 500 businesses, she found that 'Culture of Growth' businesses, "which embrace learn-it-alls over know-it-alls," have more satisfied employees who collaborate and innovate better due to the growth mindset cultivated around them. This is a very tangible example of how contributory injustice harms us all.

Awkwardness as a Catalyst for Change

While the narrative so far is that awkwardness is more often something we aim to avoid, Plakias points out that it can also serve as a catalyst for social change. When social scripts are absent or unclear, awkwardness is a good reminder that the scripts available for these topics are not good enough. This indeed creates an opportunity for change to happen, as the awkwardness highlights the shortcomings of existing norms and the need for new language and concepts.

Given people will not be used to the new language and concepts, this requires someone with skill and confidence to take the conversational lead, and (to borrow Plakias' term) 'make a bid' to construct the script in a new way. For example, early conversations about mental health or sexual harassment were often met with discomfort and awkwardness, but over time, these conversations led to the creation of more inclusive and precise social scripts that better addressed these issues. The question comes, of course, about who 'owns' the awkwardness of that social situation. Plakias illustrates this with the case of gender identity, which has historically been thrust upon the person with the non-normative gender identity. If others can state their preferred pro-nouns then they 'own' the awkwardness, making it easier for those people with less normative gender identities.

Awkwardness, then, is a signal for the need to change and can be used by us all as a means to slow down and reflect on why a conversation feels uncomfortable. As Sara Ahmed points out in her work on ‘feminist killjoys,’ awkwardness is often a sign that someone is refusing to go along with established norms. The discomfort felt in these moments might be a barrier to change, but it can also be a sign that change is necessary. In this case, everyone knows that the sexist comment is unacceptable and that different ways of relating are required.

Thus, awkwardness should not always be avoided; it can serve as a signal to those in the conversation that there is a need for new social scripts. In these uncomfortable moments, conceptual engineering—the deliberate creation of new language and concepts—can be catalysed. This suggests, when handled thoughtfully, that awkwardness provides an opening to rethink traditional ways of interacting, presenting the chance to expand our collective understanding and create more inclusive and just social norms.

Conclusions

As behavioural practitioners seek to make change happen, it seems that awkwardness can at times have an important role to play. Both highlighting where our scripts are failing but also prompting us to identify new language and ways of communicating. In exploring this issue, we can see the interplay between our emotional states (of ease of discomfort), the social environment of adequate or inadequate scripts, and our conceptual grasp of issues all come together.

In a world of intense technological, political, economic, and climate disruption, we surely need new scripts and words to better articulate and conceptualise the ensuing challenges and experiences. For example, the term 'sostalgia' has steadily been gaining traction as a word to describe a future that was once available to past generations but is now lost for people living today.

As the world rapidly changes, there is a greater need for new concepts and 'assemblages' – and perhaps as we stumble around, finding that existing scripts simply do not do a good enough job, we are in an era of awkwardness. But rather than avoid this, there is surely a call to use that as a means to address the source of the awkwardness and find new language to reflect and navigate our changing lives.

As many in the northern hemisphere have been enjoying the sunshine on summer holidays, how should we square this with the climate breakdown that in some ways is contributing to this pleasure? Are our holidays in the sun a distraction of “languorous forgetting and fleeting escapism” from the duty and responsibility of taking action to prevent climate apocalypse as Molly MacVeagh asks?

We set this challenge, not to cast a downer on summer holidays, but because it serves as an opening for an exploration of pleasure. Not only has the legitimacy of taking pleasure long been a source of debate, but trying to pin down what we actually mean by the word is surprisingly tricky. One of most famous behavioural science contributions to this is the Marshmallow test, conducted by Walter Mischel in 1970. The research studied delayed pleasure gratification in children by asking pre-schoolers to choose between eating one marshmallow immediately or waiting for two. Mischel found that those who waited tended to have better long-term outcomes, such as higher academic achievement and improved social skills.

Although a more recent study has challenged the link between a child's ability to delay gratification and future success, there is frequently a sense that we are not as good as we should be at curbing our instincts for pleasure. Just recently for example, the apparent desire to satisfy the immediate pleasures of staying under the duvet rather than going to work, led the UK’s then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, to claim there was a “sicknote culture.” This is despite other analysis suggesting exactly the opposite, and that in fact people are more likely to engage in presenteeism –detrimentally working through sickness.

So whilst some have suggested pleasure is the ultimate good, suggesting the pursuit of immediate sensory pleasures should guide human conduct, the Sesame Street Cookie Monster instead embodies the more widely accepted cultural narrative in the song “Me want it but me wait.” Arguably this taught a generation of children that pleasure is something to delay rather than ‘succumb’ to.

So what should we make of our complex relationship with pleasure? And what light can behavioural science shine on this issue, so we can better understand the role and importance of pleasure in our lives?

Whose pleasure is it anyway?

There is no shortage of cultural discourse warning us about the dangers of pleasure; this was very much the theme of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," where pleasure is wielded as a tool for social control, with the World State using it to maintain stability and suppress individuality. The book depicts a dystopian society where citizens are conditioned to seek constant pleasure through ‘soma’, a drug that eliminates negative emotions, and encourages shallow, emotionless sexual relationships. The lesson is that a focus on immediate pleasure discourages critical thinking, which means deeper intellectual and emotional fulfilment is sacrificed for the societal harmony that pleasure gives us. This is the "doctrine of swine" argument, that pleasure is physical and base, akin to that experienced by animals.

Indeed, it seems judgement is never far from any discourse on pleasure: philosopher Michael Foucault argued that institutions such as the state, church, and educational systems promote certain types of pleasure while suppressing others. In a similar vein of identifying and challenging social controls on pleasure, adrienne maree brown argues that pleasure is a powerful tool against oppressive systems that have historically denied marginalized communities their right to experience it.

Our access to, and experience of, pleasure is clearly something that has deeply political agendas – but at the same time do we really know what we mean by pleasure?

Not purely sensory

When defining pleasure it is tempting to think of it in a one-dimensional, representing a fundamental ‘unit’ that sits underneath human behaviour. We can see this through much psychology: Freudian psychology has the pleasure principle at its core for understanding human motivation; hedonic adaptation describes how our experience of pleasure diminishes from repeated exposure; the peak-end rule that suggests people judge an experience primarily based on the pleasures they feel during its most intense moments.

In contrast, American philosopher Fred Feldman challenges this unitary notion by distinguishing between sensory and attitudinal pleasures. Sensory pleasures are linked to physical sensations, such as the taste of good food. In contrast, attitudinal pleasures involve a positive mental state or attitude, such as the joy of completing a challenging task or the satisfaction of learning something new. These pleasures aren't tied to physical sensations but rather stem from intellectual or emotional engagement.

It is in this vein that Psychologist Paul Bloom’s work suggests pleasure is not merely a result of simple sensory experiences but is intertwined with our beliefs, contexts, and cognitive processes. He argues that pleasure is often shaped by essentialism, where our enjoyment is influenced by what we perceive as the true essence or history of an object or experience. This helps explain the love of holiday souvenirs – the story of finding and buying an object is as much, if not more than the pleasure derived from the item itself.

From me-pleasure to we-pleasure

Building on the idea that pleasure extends beyond the sensory experience and is connected to our beliefs and context, we can start to see the social nature of pleasure. Sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote about the ‘collective effervescence’ of crowds, where pleasure can be gained from a sense of ‘emotional communion’. We can see this is in the “diffuse, headless, communal euphoria” that accompanies bands playing to their loyal fans.

And the political edge to pleasure is again be identified by Barbara Ehrenreich who set out the way that this is true through history with medieval carnivals being rumbunctious affairs of people engaging in pleasure, part of which involved mocking the authorities with peasants imitating kings. Back to the present and the UK’s Notting Hill Carnival, creates shared experiences and a sense of unity while being a symbol of Black Britain and its resilience to celebrate cultural pride in the face of oppression and discrimination.

Leaning on cultural theorist Sara Ahmed, it seems clear that pleasure is not about individual states but social and cultural practices. Her concept of "affective economies" is a useful term to reflect that pleasure is not simply a personal feeling but a shared social practice that reflects cultural norms and values.

We can therefore see the way that pleasure is less about an individual sensory state and more a range of experiences that are bound up in the social-cultural environment we inhabit. But this social-cultural aspect also means we can be led astray from what we really find pleasure in.

The pleasure illusion

Robert Pfaller’s concept of “illusions without owners" suggests we can comply with shared cultural beliefs or narratives, even when we may not consciously endorse or fully believe in them individually. Hence, to return to our theme, going on summer holiday is something that many people find pleasure in but, for some, the pleasure only derived is from going along with social norms rather than reflecting our true values and desires. In these cases some pleasure is to be found through engaging in a shared communal activity (even if the experience itself is not all that enjoyable).

This is an argument for proposing we might not find pleasure in the set-piece ways that have been suggested to us by society (such as summer holidays) but from other sources, such as what might be considered ‘mundane’ activities.

On this, Kathleen Stewart’s work examines how the pleasure of ordinary experiences, what she calls "ordinary affects," are at the heart of the cultural fabric of communities. For example, she describes the pleasure found in routine activities, such as a morning walk, a conversation at a local store, or the comfort of a familiar environment. She highlights the way that pleasure is embedded in daily life and contributes to collective identities. In this way pleasure is not a fleeting emotion but a complex experience that connects individuals to a larger narrative of community and cultural identity. Connected to this is flow theory from psychology, which sets out  how individuals find pleasure and meaning by being fully immersed in activities, living in the moment and finding fulfilment in personal engagement.

Repositioning forbidden fruit?

But to bring us back to where we started – can we find pleasure in something where we feel conflicted about the premise of the pleasure? Given the guilt we feel about experiencing pleasure, (or at least failing to defer it), so often underpins much of our experience of pleasure. Pfaller suggests this can define culture and distinguishes between ‘cultures of belief’, where individuals openly embrace and enjoy shared pleasure, versus ‘cultures of faith’ where pleasure is hidden beneath a veneer of guilt, and self-denial and discipline are fetishized. We can see this in many spheres from alcohol and video games to sex toys and sugar; different cultural narratives shape our understanding of pleasure, where we might find it, what is permissible.

And the places where it is socially permissible to find pleasure is something that will always be a battleground: in the context of sustainability, those concerned about the environment are often seen as inhabiting a ‘culture of faith’, prioritizing responsibility over pleasure. This would be the argument that we should not be enjoying our summer holidays due to climate breakdown. But as MacVeagh points out, some thinkers have started to subvert this binary analysis, and instead rearticulate pleasure as a key element of sustainable activism. She cites Kate Soper’s ‘alternative hedonism’, which emphasises the satisfactions that can come from walking instead of driving and Jiaying Zhao and Elizabeth Dunn’s ‘Happy Climate Project’ that highlights the ways that limiting ones carbon footprint can result in pleasure through a greater sense of ‘time affluence’. So we are not pleasure deniers if we decide to give the traditional summer holiday a miss, we can simply find pleasure in other, less socially agreed ways.

Strategic indulgence

But what about the way it seems we tend to emphasise the importance of deferring pleasure? It is surely symptomatic of current societal norms that the Marshmallow Test, which portrays experiencing pleasure as failure of self-control, gets so much publicity despite there being plenty of other research that supports the idea that ‘giving in’ to desires is beneficial. Rita Coelho do Vale's study, "The Benefits of Behaving Badly on Occasion," found dieters who planned for indulgence days felt more positive and motivated, helping them stick to their diets long-term. Similar findings were noted by Virgina McClurg in a study comparing students with high and low academic performance  at U.S. universities. High-performing students strategically ‘indulged’ in college sports games, taking breaks to enjoy themselves and then compensating with extra study time before and after the events. This approach provided them with greater enjoyment and a better psychological state, enhancing their academic performance. McClurg’s research suggests this ‘strategic indulgence’ increases autonomy and may help prevent procrastination.

In conclusion

Common media narratives about pleasure suggest they are basic, sensory experiences aimed at maximizing enjoyment and minimizing pain. And while there is some truth to this, the reality is much more nuanced – what we agree is pleasurable is not something individually determined but is bound up with social, cultural and political norms and narratives. In some ways we could even see pleasure as one of the most significant battlegrounds we encounter, being used to strategically position some people as ‘party poopers’ or ‘buzz kills’ based on their pleasure preferences.

Many companies have pleasure as part of their core proposition, but perhaps do not always recognise its contingent nature: a deeper understanding is needed to engage different segments of the population who will have very different approaches to pleasure (e.g. cultures of belief versus cultures of faith).  And groups seeking to encourage sustainable behaviour change in the population, could perhaps play with and challenge conventions about what is ‘allowed’ to be pleasurable versus what is not.

Mahatma Gandhi's 1930 Salt March involved Gandhi and his followers marching over 240 miles to the Arabian Sea, where they proceeded to make their own salt, openly protesting against British salt taxation in colonial India. This protest was ultimately successful, shaming the colonial rulers into recognizing their unjust behaviour. A case, surely, where we can argue the emotion of shame had a huge impact on the behaviours of a powerful set of actors.

The extent to which emotion, and shame in particular, might apply to the societal challenges we face today is not always well understood. This is despite a growing recognition that emotions are helpful for us to navigate complex environments; th wealth of academic literature on the properties of emotion and their behavioural consequences are not, it seems, being translated with sufficient nuance and guidance for practitioner use.

To help address this, we draw on the work of philosopher Alexis Shotwell whose work on shame highlights its role in tackling societal challenges relating to ethnicity and gender.  Surely there is much that can be learnt here for practitioners, so we set out to explore the topic of shame this powerful and complex emotion and its role in changing behaviour.

DEFINING SHAME

We look first at the different components of shame before considering the way it has been used (purposefully or not) in behaviour change campaigns.

1.The political nature of pain

Shame is a ‘self-conscious’ emotion that, along with pride, humiliation and embarrassment, depends on a significant cognitive component.  This is because someone enacting them needs some awareness of the self on the one hand and group norms on the other to evaluate one’s self in the light of others. It is perhaps this interface between the ‘me and the we’ that means while these standards are often personal, they will result from the internalisation of social ones.

An example of how this is outlined by Cathy O’Neil in her book ‘The Shame Machine’ in which she talks about the way the US First Lady Nancy Regan campaigned through the 1980’s for people to ‘Just say no’ in relation to drug taking.  While this sounds like simple advice, for people suffering from addiction it was shaming, framing addiction as a choice and as such inferring they were guilty of making poor decisions. 

While marginalised groups can easily feel shame for failing to meet ‘standards’ set by society, much social justice work refutes the validity of these standards and the emotional responses they create. For example, the LGBTQ+ rights movement challenges cisnormativity and heteronormative societal standards and directly shapes the emotional responses within these groups using ‘Pride’ in a way that challenges notions that shame is legitimate. The #MeToo movement also encourages survivors of sexual harassment and assault to share their experiences, thereby breaking the standards around silence and directly challenging the shame that often surrounds such experiences.

As such, it is important to recognise that shame is an emotion that has political implications – which is why many social justice activists emphasise that individuals should not feel shame for their own alleged shortcomings as they are the result of larger societal structures. For example, poverty is often reframed not as a personal failing but as a result of broader economic and political systems.

To help here, some have made a distinction between toxic shame (where people feel condemned for reasons relating to their personal characteristics such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity and appearance) and productive shame.  The former is clearly problematic and social justice has both achieved much but also has much left to do.

Productive shame perhaps offers a way to change individual or collective behaviour in a positive way, challenging problematic attitudes we may hold and behaviours we enact. This is an important point - shame tells us something important about the way our attitudes and behaviour is out of kilter with a set of standards that at least part of our identity is aligned with. So, for example, I may be dismissive of the views of an older person, but the subsequent feelings of shame I feel may remind me of the the way I consider myself as someone who has respect for other people’s views, even if they reflect a set of generationally located values that I may disagree with.

Of course, what is classed as toxic or productive is frequently contested ground.  On this basis, if shame is used as part of a campaign to tackle global warming (e.g., if it is used encourage reduce use of private cars) some will see this as productive while others may view it as toxic (e.g., blaming groups of people that have little choice but to use cars to get to work). 

O’Neil suggests that productive, (or what she calls ‘healthy’) shame can work its magic but can only does so when the oppressed have been able to establish themselves as defenders of common values - so bed rock values that are agreed upon, where any indiscretion from these is clear and impossible to deny.

So why and how might we want to consider shame as a means to change behavior? We will of course focus on ‘healthy’ shame and to help us we reference the way Shotwell explored shame in her book ‘Knowing Otherwise’.

2.Bringing the tacit to the surface

Shotwell argues that much of our behaviour operates in a way that is often ‘unspoken’ or tacit: we are guided by values and attitudes that are frequently unstated and unexamined.  This can mean that we choose not to look too closely, so that things we are uncomfortable with can be ignored and essentially become invisible, a kind of moral blindness.

Shame, however, is one of the ways these unspoken points can come to the surface by the discomfort it creates – it never feels good. As Shotwell puts it:

“Shame seems to stick to our skin, seep in through our pores, run along our veins. It feels as though it is part of our body and our being.”

The visceral nature of it means it is something that we cannot avoid – it consumes our attention and explains why so often people are motivated to avoid the feeling of shame. We can see then that a key role of shame in changing our behaviour is to motivate us to relieve the discomfort of this feeling.

3.The disfluency of shame

Shotwell also suggests we do not automatically know what to do with the feeling of shame that come up, which means we have a gap open up for something new and different to happen. As she puts it:

“Shame can provide a gap in practice; it can stop the conceptual habits we comfortably use to navigate the world. It has a disruptive function.”

Shame can therefore move things from an implicit to a more explicit knowledge, a reflective state. This feels very close to the way we discuss the importance of ‘disfluency’ where we seek to introduce friction into intuitive decision-making process to encourage people to consider their decision making in a more reflective way, creating space for change to happen

4.The interpersonal nature of shame

Shotwell suggests that not only does shame surface things that we have failed to properly examine but it always relates to others. This is because if the view of others does not matter, their perspective can be simply dismissed or ignored - we would not feel shame.

Hence, shame highlights something about the relationship - that we care. This is backed up by psychology research of ‘vignette experiments’ in the United States, India, and Israel that demonstrate beliefs about what actions are shameful closely track how negatively someone would feel if others found out they engaged in the action.

Behavioural economic game experiments find that it is precisely this devaluation from others, rather than the wrongdoing itself, which evokes shame; shame avoidance is calibrated to avoid social judgment. This offers us information about the importance of sympathy and solidarity with other groups and gives us pathways to challenge the social norms that created the behaviours we feel shameful of.

5.Shame & Identity

Shotwell suggests that shame can be thought of as a moment of contradiction in the multiple selves that we comprise, a confrontation between the self we have been and various selves we want to have been. In other words, we challenge the identity we have that has led to the feeling of shame. Shotwell highlights this dissonance in competing identities in relation to racism:

“The experience of shame implies a repudiation of who one was then, and carries the sense that one also was not, inherently, that shamed self. In other words, the experience of shame in the face of racism—one’s own or other people’s—discloses both present racism and also potential for antiracist praxis, embedded in the desire to deny the racist self.”

Interestingly this links through to a huge literature on identity which, as we have explored previously, has significant implications for how we behave in a variety of contexts. If shame is a way in which we can encourage people to enact certain identities and stop others then there is clearly potential for driving change. 

6.The action tendencies of shame

Does shame actually create change?  This is a hard one to be definitive about – as Stearns points out, some groups may be resistant to shame.  He suggests that efforts to use shaming publicly to curb bloated executive salaries have failed to date and people even used information about other executive’s salaries to demand more for themselves.  Not exactly a resounding success.

Nevertheless, psychological work has shown that shame is associated with a range of actions including inhibition of wrongdoings, prosocial behaviour, and motivation for self-change. Ilona de Hooge and colleagues found that shame activated both a motivation to restore one’s threatened self-image, and a protect motive to avoid further damage to one’s self-image. Both motives, when acting together, encouraged positive behaviours such as developing new skills or redoing one’s performance.

All of these add up to a powerful argument, in Shotwell’s words, for “shame’s potential capacity to hold open, to not freeze, affective space.”

By unpacking shame in this why, we can understand the ‘why’ of the relation between emotion and behaviour allowing us to think of ways we can consider this for behaviour change activation. This helps, at the very least, to create hypotheses for design and investigation of behaviour change activities - to which we now turn.

SHAME AND BEHAVIOUR CHANGE

A campaign that has explicitly used shame as a means for encouraging pro-social behaviour is Drought Shaming where neighbours see another person or business using water when water restrictions are in place, and report them to the authorities. Unfortunately we could see this as being set up in an antagonistic way so it could easily be seen as ‘punching down’ resulting in conflict and anger rather than identifying and agreeing a common set of values that, as we saw above, is critical. 

A more helpful approach might be to crystalise the way that water stress is impacting other people in the community, reinforcing the interpersonal nature of shame.  And then helping people to locate and activate more socially responsible identities – this is exactly what the Target 140 campaign did very successful in Queensland Australia, reinforcing that a good Queenslander saves water, and is ‘Water-Wise’.  Across the different activations used, there was a targeting of people’s identification as ‘Queenslanders’. In this way it redefined what it meant to be a good Queenslander: one who saves water and is ‘Water-Wise’. Instilling a sense of common civic values, beach cities ordered the public sand-washing shower stations turned off and fountains were quiet. To not participate and fail to follow the social norms would arguably incur a sense of shame, given the social identities were so strong.

This might also offer a backdrop for the recent  ‘Say maaate to a mate’ campaign launched by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, aiming to take on sexism.  The campaign was developed by Ogilvy’s Behavioral Science Practice division. There has been a lot of debate over the semantics of ‘mate’; and whilst there are a lot of complex issues at play here, but we could see that this as signalling the common values at play and offering a means by which behaviour change can be encouraged by friendship groups, effectively shaming one of them for misogyny. This emotion is not cited as the premise behind the campaign but nevertheless we can certainly read it with this in mind.

In conclusion

Emotions, particularly self-conscious ones such as shame, do not sit outside of a social, cultural and political context – and as such psychologists need to cast their nets wide if they are to properly understand the way in which they might be deployed to encourage change. 

The deployment of the shame emotion is not something to be considered lightly given the toxic backdrop and the potential for failure and indeed even making the situation worse.  Nevertheless, with the challenges facing the world increasing, there is a need to call on change strategies that can operate at scale. The highly motivating and visceral nature of this emotion alongside its social characteristics that challenge the norms we live by mean that, with caution, we might consider shame is an area that practitioners could examine more closely.

Of course shame is a negative and destructive emotion for many, which requires a huge effort to confront and overcome. But at the same time, as Shotwell and O’Neil have pointed out, in the right hands, shame has the potential to be a force for positive outcomes and as such deserves consideration to tackle the many societal challenges we face.

Subscribe now