Fake limits and reactionary psychology

Defying loud but low expectations

Last week in a Guardian article a health professor was asked what could be done about the surge in covid cases and was quoted as saying: “I doubt whether we'll see much of a return to mask wearing and hand washing, but those things can reduce spread as well.”

This got me thinking about expectations of public behaviour, those set by our leaders, those set by society and those set by us as individuals.

After the initial few months, when higher expectations were set around our collective ability to switch to more cautious behaviours, the idea that people just “couldn’t be expected” to do certain things became pervasive.

And unsurprisingly, expectations suitably lowered, public behaviours followed suit.

If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you know I’ve spent a good deal of time looking at systemic influences, social psychology and the cognitive biases underlying the reactions to covid and climate change.

And that’s led me to another psychological theory, this one from the 1960s related to teacher expectations and student achievement.

I think it’s another part of the covid puzzle.

In 1965 Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson conducted an experiment in an elementary school. They took a group of kids into a room and randomly assigned some of them as having “unusual potential for academic growth.” But they lied to the kids’ teachers. They told them that the selection was not random at all, and that the children had taken the non-existent ‘Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition.’ Those with the highest scores on this non-existent test, they told the teachers, were the ones with the potential to outperform the others. The only difference between any of these children, according to Rosenthal, “was in the mind of the teacher.”

Eight months later, the children sat real tests.

The children randomly selected to have higher “potential” scored much higher than those who were not selected.

This research has been replicated time and again, with the so-called Pygmalion, or experimenter effect, being shown to take place at all education levels.

In 1999, another study even showed that teacher expectations of a child’s potential in preschool could carry all the way through to their outcomes at high school.

The behaviour of students became a self-fulfilling prophecy. When expectations were set high, students over-achieved. When they were set low, students under-achieved.

The fact that we are on some level primed to respond to the expectations of authority figures was evident at the beginning of the pandemic. When asked to adjust behaviours for the good of the collective, most people did.

But, through a series of deliberate and sometimes subtle steps, elites lowered what they expected of people in order to get back to profit-making business as usual. We were told we needed to live with the virus. We were told to stop testing, stop masking. We were told that there was no longer any need to change our behaviour at all.

What we saw was the psychology of low expectations and self-fulfilling prophesies being weaponised by those in positions of power whose profit is dependent on lax behaviour in a pandemic.

Telling people they can’t really be expected to do the things they once did to contain covid has become a key component of the psychology helping maintain business-as-usual.

And this idea that there is a limit to what people can withstand in their social-political environment is a rhetorical tool you often seen used by the right, especially in relation to majoritarian politics and identities.

You know the type of thing.

We can’t allow any more refugees because people are at the limits of their goodness and can’t be expected to deal with more brown people.

We can’t allow any more trans people because society has been very accommodating so far and we’ve done enough.

Like we reached some divinely ordained limit to a society’s levels of acceptance and care.

As if a norm has been violated for too long and it’s time to get back to the good old ways.

It’s the lie that societal configurations must be strictly delineated or they’ll breach an invisible boundary that spirals society into degeneracy and breakdown.

It is deeply reactionary thought, and, taken to its logical conclusion, is the psychology of fascism.

And this is what I find so frightening about the current moment.

Whenever I think it through, I always end up in the same place: the impulses that have been unleashed and the behaviours that have been encouraged are putting us on the path to a politics that swings ever-further to the right.

And many otherwise good people have been co-opted into this behaviour by a series of often imperceptible psychological nudges, cues and tricks.

But there’s also something else I think about.

I think what the pandemic revealed about a small number of others.

Those who didn’t lower their standards to the expectations set for us by elites.

Those who consciously resisted the peer pressure to pretend everything had suddenly returned to normal, even when this was, at times, an intensely difficult thing to do.

Those who continued to speak up, not in hope or expectation, but in courage and truth.

Those of us who acted in a spirit of defiance, not conformity.

I think we should be incredibly proud.

Because ultimately, all we are is what we do.

And what we did, and continue to do, is resist a system that pushed us as hard as it could to become a node in a network of disease.

It wasn’t always possible.

We live in a society where we can’t control every interaction. But we tried.

We tried when others gave up at the first sign of discomfort.

We recognised the nature of the moment. We knew what it meant to be alive in a pandemic.

We defied the low expectations.

We tried.

And that’s something we can take to the grave.