Thread by @dontwantadothis

🧵 Psych thoughts re: the Seine:

This was obviously a policy failure that we watched unfold in real time. ("Wait! Stop! Come back!" says Willie Wonka.) But it also demonstrates how people selectively trust authority figures when those leaders are...

1/14 cnn.com/2024/08/04/spo…

saying what we want to hear. (This pattern of behavior has also been on clear display during the pandemic: people were suspicious of leaders whom they perceived as restricting freedoms, due to psychological reactance, but once those experts said to unmask & go to the mall,

2/14

the same folks who had been disbelieving suddenly found faith in authorities' messenges again. Ask people why they aren’t masking, & many will give you some variation on "the CDC said I don't need to.")

Fundamentally, this tendency is an example of confirmation bias, but

3/14

it's not *only* confirmation bias at play, here.

The article above notes (as an article I posted previously about the Seine did):

4/14

"The athletes had largely put their trust in organizers to ensure that the water quality was safe for them. Women’s silver medal winner Julie Derron of Switzerland said the athletes believed that the race was safe based on the word of authorities....

5/14

'The swimming was fine during the race. We know...they took samples this morning. They take a lot of time to analyze, so we don’t know the results obviously. We all trust the authorities and the organizers that they keep us safe. And so we had a safe race today,' she said."

6/14

That's some heavy-duty "diffusion of responsibility," right there. But when people abdicate responsibility for their own outcomes to others who don't really care about those outcomes, they're setting themselves up.

This is also an example of two other phenomena that

7/14

Latané & Darley (the "bystander intervention" guys) wrote about: one is "evaluation apprehension," which is a fear of being judged harshly for doing something socially inappropriate (which certainly affects athletes in the public eye); the other is "pluralistic ignorance,"

8/14

whereby all the members of a group of people come to believe that everyone except them feels one way - say, that its A-OK to put your face in the poopy Seine - even though the opposite may be true, & everyone may be secretly concerned.

(This is a similar to the...

9/14

phenomen that Asch's famous conformity studies explored, whereby social pressure caused people to affirm other people's perceptions even when they knew they were wrong.)

No doubt, the Olympic organizers encouraged both pluralistic ignorance & conformity.

So what can...

10/14

be done?

We all know that organizations & corporations are notoriously bad at policing themselves, in terms of outcomes to members & the public. And athletes are going to continue obeying their handlers, b/c those who don't won't get to the Olympics in the first place.

11/14

They're going to tell themselves whatever they need to, & believe whatever they're told, in order to compete.

So what might be useful is development of a wholly independent org. to monitor & report on international competition health & safety.

This concept isn't new.

12/14

For ex., in the US, OSHA monitors workplace safety. And after the NFL blew off TBIs among players, the Concussion Legacy Foundation was formed to advocate for the safety of football players and other athletes exposed to practices that cause the injuries leading to CTE.

13/14

Currently, AFAIK, the health/safety of Olympic athletes is the responsibility of the IOC, NOCs & coaches, who all have conflicts of interest b/c they need star athletes to show up.

Individuals gen. only behave as well as other folks make them, & that's true of NGOs, too.

14/14