Unpicking The Psychology Of Woke

There’s a perfect evolutionary storm killing intelligent conversation. It goes something like this…

First things first. Your brain is not your friend. It’s an organ. A fallible squishy mess of neurons wrapped in a calcium shell. You, as you experience it, is more complex than you can imagine. You are not your brain… and at the same time, you absolutely are.

You need to understand some of the issues your brain has as it goes about its daily life. You’re going to need to understand how it fails, why it fails and what you can do about it. This article will explore two underlying psychological pre-dispositions all human beings have.

Negativity Bias

Your brain views the world with negativity. It has to do that. Evolutionary pressure left it with no other choice. Your distant ancestors from the plains of Africa are the hominids that survived. They’re the hominids that didn’t wait around to see whether that rustling grass was a harmless mouse or a hungry lion.

They were straight up the nearest tree, no questions asked. Your great-great-great-great-great-great to the power fifty grandparents were skittish as hell. They were also the survivors. Negativity pays dividends.

Humans are threat focussed. We want to identify and eliminate threats as fast as we can. You’re not likely to encounter a lion on your way to get a coffee at Starbucks these days. You’re very safe. But the hardware of your brain doesn’t know that, it was built long before lattés were a thing.

Your brain does the next best thing it can. It invents threats on your behalf and presents problems for you to solve. Neat huh.

That sideways glance. That was someone judging your choice of clothes. That little look between two people, that was a conspiracy. Those people laughing at something, must be you. Your mind fixates on negativity because positive eventualities are no threat to your well-being. Evolution writ large.

Wondering why we’re finding racism, transphobia and sexism everywhere we look? The reality is, we both are and we aren’t. These are all objective real problems in the world. They’re also subjectively overhyped by our individual brains too.

Given enough endorsement, negativity bias runs the show. Everything and everyone is a threat. With wokeism, subjective experience becomes all the explanation required. Society moves away from an objective stance of what is ‘real’ and what is ‘felt to be real’.

That commenter on your stories that didn’t agree. Threat. Someone questioning whether giving puberty blockers to children should be reconsidered. Threat. Having your world view questioned in any way. Threat. Someone ignored you. Threat. Someone looked at you funny. Threat.

Nothing else is valid. You are oppressed. Society (ie everyone that doesn’t agree with you) is against you.

Start seeing subjective threats everywhere and you’ll end up with crippling anxiety and depression. Once your ancestors were up that tree, they returned to an emotional baseline.

You don’t have a tree. You have a global online infrastructure. You’re a primate out of your depth seeing threats everywhere.

And now you know why most woke people are anxious. You also know why they attribute their anxiety to all their perceived ills of the world. Yes, there are systemic problems with race, sex and the inclusion of trans people in society. No, that doesn’t mean everyone is out to get you. Your brain make it difficult to spot the difference.

Problem number one. You see threats where there aren’t any. You always focus on the negative. You have to, you can’t help it.

The Availability Heuristic

The second trick your brain plays on you was first coined by the Nobel-prize winning psychologists Tversky and Kahneman in 1973. Your brain still out-performs even the smartest computers when it comes to processing thoughts.

The availability heuristic is a big part of this. It helps you think faster.

If I ask you whether there are more words in the English language that begin with T or begin with J. Your likely answer is T. You’ll draw that conclusion very fast.

You don’t need to run off and count both halves of the dictionary. You could’ve looked it up, but you don’t need to. You had a ‘gut feeling’. You knew the answer without knowing the answer.

This is the power and speed of your unconscious mind.

Your brain vomited words that are easily recalled and drew an inference. Words like ‘the’, ‘there’ and ‘them’ are more readily available. You had an intuitive moment so you believe they are more common.

In this instance you are correct. You little genius. It doesn’t work all the time. See the infamous bat and ball question to see how the brain fails here.

The things that circulate most in our minds are what we consider most probable. We have intuitive (fast) thinking and analytical (slow) thinking. Often our intuitive thinking underpins our belief structures.

You watch Sully and believe that travelling by plane is as dangerous or more dangerous than travelling by car. You’d be wrong. Your intuition is out of whack. If you watch Air Crash Investigation (like I do) you might think planes drop out of the sky with alarming regularity.

The more something looms in your memory, the more likely it is to factor in your intutive decision making. The more you consider it a frequent or probable occurrence.

You can see where this is going. Spend enough time in an echo chamber and all you’ll do is read stories that confirm your world view. You reinforce the idea that rare occurences are the norm.

You might start to believe that all police officers are dangerous bigots(they’re not). That all men are rapists (they’re not) and that all white folks are racist ( they are, but that’s a semantic issue). Most also happen to be nice people who try their best.

The Perfect Storm

These two processes are perfect bedfellows and they provide society with a huge problem. Not only do we get the worst possible interpretation of any given situation via Negativity bias

It is then shared with everyone on social media.

We feed an increasing amount of ‘everything is awful’ stories into the collective narrative. The belief perpetuates itself and occupies a huge amount of societal thought process. This in turn feeds the Availability Heuristic and people more readily invoke further examples of everything being awful.

The whole thing goes both nuclear and circular. Meanwhile we sit back and wonder why the hell everyone is so stressed out.

The first way to combat these psychological failures

Good old fashioned rationalism. Getting outside your head to consider whether feeling oppressed is the same as being oppressed. Spoiler: It isn’t.

An example from real life. I once worked with a young boy who told his parents he was being bullied in the playground. The school ran an investigation and concluded he’d made this up. Someone was lying and neither side backed down.

I acted as a mediator and facilitator for the boy.

In reality, he’d interpreted the fun and loud playing of other children as bullying. He wasn’t malicious, he found it chaotic and overwhelming. Objectively not bullied but subjectively tortured by other children. Neither was wrong, there’s no need for binary thinking.

The problem with wokeism is that it makes the instant assumption that subjective experience outweighs all other factors.

It doesn’t.

If you’re going to persist in fighting sexism, racism and transphobia… and those are worthwhile things to do. Focus on positivity. Provide rational solutions that work, not clickbait that draws mindless support.

Replication and sharing of successful strategies is more useful than constantly drawing attention to the problem without offering a solution.

Here’s the rub though. It won’t be as profitable for your earnings on social media. So I’ll ask a pertinent question. Are you looking to solve the problem you hate, or amp it up for individual financial gain?

And the second way…

Reading and listening to things we disagree with. Try and read both sides of the argument. For every ‘this is an awful country’ article you read, go and find another that counteracts it.

The argumentative part of my name isn’t just a loose adjective. I find people I disagree with and I challenge them to back up their world view. All articles should be challenged in the crucible of discussion, not nodded through on the wave of public opinion.

Be very wary of those set to broadcast.

Knowing your mind and understanding how your brain lets you down in your day-to-day life is necessary. It leads you on a path to greater self-awareness and helps carry modern society to a better and more equitable place.

There’s nothing woke about a person who doesn’t understand the fallible nature of the human thought process

Want a sequel? Want it to be about pluralistic ignorance? Got you covered.