Thread by @drjanaway

Let's take a moment to address some of the conspiracies around #covid19 using psychology and sociology. Thread/

First off, some basic ground theory to put this into context. Human beings work on a very primal level when emotions are high, using a number of cognitive shortcuts

Our emotions serve a primary purpose in survival, and as such they work fast in influencing our behaviour. These are very old, existing before the more clever aspects of our brains, and can be referred to as 'survival mechanisms.'

They evolved during a different time, where major threats were more simple. Aggression, starvation, predators. As such they needed to move quickly, creating fear, alliances based on protection, formation of groups (tribes.)

Later, with the advent of farming and larger society, we developed a penchant for social thinking, subtext, nuance and delayed gratification. We placed a layer of appraisal on emotion, which allowed us to make sense of our wild emotions.

But on a primal level, threat makes us regress. We begin to see the world as good or bad in totality, shutting off the negative aspects of ourselves and pushing them outwards onto events, essentially turning the world into an extension of our emotion.

In this sense, we are spurred to act, and protected not just from the 'external threat,' but also our insecurity and anxiety around our own limitations, we practice internal ignorance for the expediency of survival. But this doesn't work for complex issues.

Back to COVID 19. This is a threat, and as such our emotional mechanisms are used. Some will therefore use the more complex mechanisms to make sense of them, but find that a 'bad' thing like a conspiracy makes more sense to their fear than the reality.

A conspiracy, and being part of a group believing in it, allows one to exercise the idea of control over the external threat, just like me thinking a vaccine and masks will do. The difference is the coherence with reality. Remember, the emotional brain doesn't care for reality.

Our social brains will look for patterns, like constellations, but we need to be sure these are not unduely influenced by emotion. Media and charlatans prey on emotion to short-circuit your appraisal, manipulating you to emotional decisions and impulse.

This is why newspapers show horrible images, and politicians use trigger words. It is to unlock the tribesman in you, to change reality from a complex social dilemma to once of an ancient tiger stalking the homestead.

The nature of a conspiracy relies on our pattern spotting, as within every conspiratorial narrative there are elements of truth, except the link between them is false. Correlation is confused with causation, linearity is falsely created. x = y is created where x = ?y

Our splitting mechanisms push us to see relationships that are not there to help us make sense of the strong emotions forcing us to act, and as such we take a stance. I.e COVID is a grand effort to kill us all by the government vs its a natural inevitability.

This is where social dynamics then take hold. Inclusion in a group of like-minded people is very powerful in settling our primal drives, so it is natural for society to split along similiar ideological lines. And group thinking reinforces this.

When you are in the 'in-group', your access to information becomes biased to your view, those who speak against the narrative-status-quo are ostricised, and the most extreme views become held in respect. I.e, leaders are formed.

These leaders are held to an ideological grandiosity because they represent the dependency and security we all need, but attuned with the emotional interpretation of the unclear situation. The primal brain is soothed.

The difficulty is, naturally, knowing how to spot when one has been

1) misled by their emotion
2) begun to believe in a false narrative
3) trapped by a group dynamic.

The way forward is to discuss, contrast ideas, and come to understandings, but this is where the group dynamic wreaks havoc. We cannot commune if we see each other as evil. In a sense, the other group becomes part of the 'all bad.'

This is not a new phenomenon. It is a survival tool and was useful when we worked in small tribes with easily delineated threats, but the complexity of our world, including the data-heavy decisions around covid 19, means this approach can fail easily.

'experts', like Chris Whitty, who are trained to rely on data and self-appraisal to make informed decisions in the face of ambiguity, are seen as 'the all bad' because the primal brain NEEDS it to feel secure. And charlatans know this and exploit it.

So how do I address this simply, with three equations, (a and b,) influencing (1)

1) Covid (threat) + ((a) emotion + effect of environment, information mediated by critical apprasial ) = behaviour

where

a) emotion is predominant, manipulated by splitting cognition, reinforced by survival techniques and prone to erroneous conspiracy

or

b) emotion is listened to, but environmental data is appraised and split thinking is managed and treated as misleading

depending on path (a) or (b) we see a difference in behaviour, that is (a) mainfests in strong conspiracy as discussed above, and then shamed for trying to move out of it. The threat of changing ones mind is a threat to survival.

(b) leads us along the path of doubt in any strict model, and works on data. There is no marked certainty in (b,) and as such can present a great fear. Remember, the primal brain craves certainty.

Both groups will act, but differently. Here it is masks/vaccines/etc, the behaviour and beliefs tied into the narrative believed. The difference here is that the narrative of conspiracy is safer for those choosing a, thus its hard to shake.

What we have to remember is that belief in a conspiracy is not a reason to harm someone, or judge them, it is simply evidence that they are trying to survive and protect others, and need encouragement to raise questions safely.

If we want to help people protect themselves, i.e wearing masks/getting vaccines, we need to treat them like human beings, not pariahs. Yes, we need to spot the real abusers and manipulators who may knowingly mislead them, but most are simply trying to survive.

The core issue here is the splitting mechanism that prompts this divide is unknown to the person, but very powerful. The way to address it is acceptance of the persons emotion, and creation of safe dialogue. This means engaging kindly.

Encourage people to speak outside the dichotomised groups that err us, do not blame them. The environment has been exactly what they have needed, and many have been lied to over and over, entrenching them further. Once again, no blame.

Yes we will encounter resistance, as the emotional brain does not see this as kindness to start with, but a threat to life. I would be the same if someone suddenly told me my entire survival mechanism was wrong. That is the crux of it.

Hopefully this makes sense, but to summarise

1) our emotions mislead us
2) we fix patterns to support the anxiety behind the emotion
3) we form groups to allay this anxiety
4) the groups trap us and paint questions as threats, restarting the cycle

5) the path out is creating a safe, judgement-free and environment to discuss things and enable people to express their concerns, finding our common goals and empowering them to release their fear, which we all do in different ways

6) address the manipulators and charlatans dispassionately, using facts, logic and asking them questions to explore the limits of their reasoning. Essentially tear down the edifice of fear with reason.

//notes

- social theory, attitudinal dynamics
- Darwinian social psychology
- limbic thinking vs frontal executive function
- psychodynamic / Kleinian infantile mechanisms
- motivational interviewing
- neurotic/psychotic perceptions

I stress that all of the above is written in kindness, all of us being susceptible to the very mechanisms played out as described. We should not feel special for avoiding it, just lucky. Let's be honest, we are all fooled by our emotions. Keep it even, keep it kind, keep it human

The dynamics of this are much more complicated than in the equations offered, as the route is not linear and subject to multiple diversions and outcomes, but the simplicity here is to demonstrate that the early influence of emotion and management results in opposing outcomes

And without resorting to decision trees utilising Kleinian defence, paranoid/schizoid/depressive pathways, an almost infinite variety of nodal junctures in outcome matrices, we can only rely on relative simplicity. Ergo, talk to each other.

Further caveats - these are not simple principles, and any confusion is down to a failure to me to explain them.

I need a coffee :)

I have noticed an error in the baseline equation (1), where (a) is referenced, replace with (a OR b) as these are basic dichotomised pathways

Put that down to managing character limits (on many levels)