Clocking-it: The emotional literacy of ordinary people

How we all have intelligent and nuanced ways to navigate complex knowledge environments

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.