Clocking It: The emotional literacy of ordinary people

How ordinary people have intelligent and nuanced ways to navigate complex knowledge environments

Governments (and many institutions) tend to frame the crisis of trust in terms of epistemic accuracy, a concern with true vs false information. This is understandable: democratic systems rely on a baseline of shared facts to function. The policy response has thus focused 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 something critical: what makes people believe, reject, or ignore information often has less to do with whether it's factually correct, and more to do with how it feels: its tone, its source, its alignment with lived experience or group identity.

Moreover, much of the information circulating in public discourse resists binary classification as true or false. It operates in epistemic grey zones of partial truths, selective framings, strategic ambiguity, emotionally loaded narratives, which render it both more potent and more difficult to regulate.

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 behind it often lies family wealth, elite schooling, and, importantly, a safety net of knowing failure won’t mean ruin.

Indeed, 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.

And good for them we might say, they made the most of what they had, and a founder story is simply part of the marketing of a company. But of course, this relies on people not spotting the real story in this grey zone of reality, when in fact they might ‘clock’ what is going on.

By this we mean the way we can discern (or ‘clock’) the real stories underpinning these sorts of popular cultural narratives. The activity of clocking it is typically done by the less powerful, whose lives are shaped by the decisions of others. We set out the case for it being a necessary form of ‘practical wisdom’, a type of ‘epistemic vigilance’.

This is quite an under-researched topic, perhaps because it is often something that can be hard to see, not least as it is often done discreetly. And yet, when people clock that something is ‘off’ then they are less likely to listen, reflect on what has been said, adjust their behaviour. This can lead to marketers, policy makers and others that are in the business of encouraging behaviour change finding their messages ignored and remain baffled why.

How messages can fall flat

Some campaigns can simply fail to register. The message may be clear and the intentions sound, yet nothing shifts. Engagement remains low, behaviour does not change. Which leads to a lot of forensic investigation as to what was it that failed to deliver. But the area that is under researched and theorised is if people have ‘clocked’ that there is a subtle misalignment in the tone, message, style that patronises, hectors, or simply appropriates the cues and culture of the target audience.

Perhaps the concept of psychological reactance is helpful, a motivational state triggered when individuals perceive a threat to their sense of agency or interpretive freedom.

For example, when corporate wellbeing programmes may offer mindfulness apps while maintaining punishing workloads, or when diversity campaigns surface only in marketing materials without structural reform, employees may recognise the performance and quietly opt out. Similarly, public health campaigns that frame behavioural change as a moral obligation, without acknowledging structural constraints, can trigger disengagement rather than mobilisation.

People are not passive recipients of messaging but sense when something is performative and notice when a message asks for trust and cooperation it hasn’t earned. And when this is clocked, people may not argue but they will also not play along. It is all too easy to read silence as consent when in fact it can easily mean the opposite.

When people 'clock' strategic tone, concealed privilege, or affective mismatch, they are exercising what Dan Sperber calls epistemic vigilance: an capacity to detect deception, irrelevance, or incompetence in what others communicate. Clocking it can be seen as a culturally embedded and emotionally attuned version of this vigilance, developed not just in response to interpersonal deception, but to institutional rhetoric and symbolic power.

Pretentiousness as camouflage for privilege

This dissonance can play in the way that those in positions of cultural, political, or professional authority design policy, brand campaigns, or behaviour change programmes with a presumed understanding of the lived experiences of the those they seek to influence.

Yet, these narratives are all too often designed from experiences that remain far removed from the realities they invoke. Audiences can be quick to clock this gap (although not always of course) and see through the borrowed aesthetics and codes that were reliant upon for engagement and encouraging change.

This is what Jarvis Cocker and the band Pulp famously sing about in ‘Common People’ where a person from privilege wants to live like ‘common people’. He skewers the way that people from affluent backgrounds often learn to stylise their effort, dress down their advantages, and rehearse humility. The goal isn’t to look impressive, but keeping with the notion of meritocracy, to look earned.

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 assuming they’ve simply failed to work hard enough. This misperception can of course result in real damage: fostering shame, eroding confidence, and distorting people’s sense of what success requires.

Olivier Morin and others argue that individuals tend to underuse social information in settings where the trustworthiness of that information cannot be easily verified. While at first glance this may appear as a bias or failure in reasoning, what some have called “egocentric discounting” or “advice discounting”, it may instead reflect an adaptive epistemic strategy. When the social environment is saturated with strategically curated messaging, commercially motivated persuasion, or ambiguous institutional signals, individuals learn to treat social information with suspicion.

Rather than an irrational aversion to outside input, this selective disengagement may be a form of practical epistemic vigilance. Especially in conditions where the costs of misplaced trust are high—whether emotional, social, or material—people may prioritise their own judgements or seek out alternative, affectively aligned sources. Crucially, the underuse of social information in such contexts is not a rejection of learning per se, but a rejection of sources perceived as performative, instrumental, or insufficiently aligned with the individual’s moral or experiential frameworks.

Discernment as practical wisdom

So what is the mechanism for ‘clocking it’? One route through is Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe who describe practical wisdom as the capacity to make judicious decisions under conditions of complexity and ambiguity. Unlike technical expertise, which depends on rule-following, practical wisdom involves reading the room, weighing competing values, and perceiving what is not said as much as what is.

A clear example of this is seen in healthcare: consider a nurse managing an end-of-life care conversation with a patient’s family. No rulebook can dictate exactly how to navigate such a moment. The nurse must sense when to offer clarity, when to hold silence, when to make space for grief, and how to balance institutional protocols with compassion.

On this basis we can see clocking it is a form of this sort of practical wisdom. It involves the ability to perceive when displays of humility mask structural advantage. This capability often tends to be most developed among those who have had to navigate systems which requires them to constantly assess not just what is said, but what is meant, withheld, or performed.

For people who occupy marginalised or precarious positions whether economically, racially, culturally, or institutionally, then misreading a situation can carry 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 exclusion, punishment, or harm. This fosters a kind of attunement where you learn to “read the room” not as a soft skill, but as a survival strategy.

This creates a tacit, collective knowledge base, an emotionally intelligent navigation system that allows people to function within structures never designed for their needs.

The intelligence in clocking it

Historian Jonathan Rose explored this in his book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, which documents a rich tradition of self-teaching in which ordinary people turned to literature, philosophy, and political thought not to mimic 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”, a shared sensibility capable of detecting misrecognition, resisting moral theatre, and naming hypocrisy.

This tradition of perceptual resistance arguably persists in contemporary digital culture, manifesting through memes, group chats and stand-up performance. In these settings, particularly within marginalised communities, people engage in affective signalling rather than overt confrontation. This might be a screenshot accompanied by a nonverbal emoji, a quote tweet marked only by “lol,” or a meme that exposes discursive contradiction functions not as explicit dissent, but as subtle alignment. These gestures signal shared recognition of dissonance between surface narrative and perceived intent.

Quiet resistance

These are 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 subaltern does not speak into a neutral space but instead speak into systems 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 type of resistance is something that we can see 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 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), indirect 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’ was a form of vigilance that enabled people to preserve mental clarity and moral autonomy in an environment structured to erode both.

This sensibility persists in contemporary forms albeit of course in a very different environment. One good example is the public discourse around Generation 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, between brand campaigns and boardroom decisions. Their refusals to engage, use of memes, strategic silence, or digital withdrawal are not signs of disengagement but instead 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, 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 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.

In this light, clocking it is not just a defensive posture. It is a diagnostic response to asymmetrical communications that 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.