Ideas teased out over two series, here in this blog, ‘Aye, I’ and ‘Decolonising a Scots Mind’ are, as almost everything is, interconnected. Mostly, it’s because of quantum.
Honest guv, I will come back to why, possibly it will take a whole other superposition of a post, but, as the Cailleach is my witness, I will. For now, it will take a little more priming. Let’s circle back, to perma-crisis, negativity bias and toxic positivity.
So, setting off on the journey begun in ‘Aye, I pt.’, there were two thoughts, concepts, to which a return was promised. This is that return, by way of a few other stops along the way. Maybe even dropping in, to see what condition the Scots condition is in.
Where we find ourselves, our individual and collective consciousness, is by its very nature existential. This is as true for Scots and Scotland as it is for any peoples anywhere.
It is easy to see how, faced with prevailing headwinds, there has been a tendency toward convergent thinking, both in a wider, worrying sense and right here, right now, in an equally worrying sense. In some ways, the independence movement, or at least how factions of it appear, are perceived by others not of it, fit that bill too. And we should be concerned.
Convergent thinking, where a single option, or very few options, is/are the established or seemingly only answer to a question, a problem posed or prompt to action, has understandable appeal for many independence supporters. We have arrived at a place in our thinking where independence can be seen as the single, optimal answer to a myriad of questions. For many, even most by some assessments, repeatedly arriving at that answer crosses the threshold into becoming a foundational belief system.
For those yet to be convinced, simply repeating the same answer and showing it to be rooted in faith or belief can trigger what psychologists call ‘command defiance’. The standard psychological definition of ‘obedience’ is as a form of social influence elicited in response to a direct order or command. More recent research (Gibson, 2020), accounting for changes in accumulative social behaviours, suggests that this definition is too narrow, in that it specifies a particular social act – the order or command – is necessary for obedience to occur.
The same applies to the converse. Where an order or command engenders defiance rather than obedience, as a form of social influence, does not require a reaction to a particular social act for it to occur.
It is testimony to dark influence over our lives, both in digital and analogue forms, as well where the two inform each other, of game theory and ‘the nudge’ (a prominent, almost ubiquitous, feature of the hyperreal news and comment cycle as the Cambridge Analytica data scandal broke c.2018 and subsequent political influence based news features – see also Dominic Cummings and other related, non-conspiracy theory based, covid pandemic and social behavioural change focussed stories) that they continue to be utilised and exert control over them, with our tacit and sometimes explicit, yet almost always manufactured, consent.
But we are just not talking about it anymore. At least not in newsfeeds; the cycle has moved on from reflecting on itself and so, conveniently, have the majority of ‘the public’.
In many ways, this has become a societal pathological demand avoidance. I will enumerate them and elucidate further on just what that is and looks like in a later post. Not least to save the tangential references multiplying exponentially in the scope of this one and the two series of which it forms a constituent part.
It is worth noting, in passing currently, of course, this has a lot to do with ubiquity (in the sense relating to technology, media and social trends associated with them, outlined by Zuboff) and ‘oh-dearism’. For the Yes movement, it also has just as much to do with compound convergent thinking.
Working from the convergent and/or belief-based assumption that the answer is obvious results in ever more convergent and reductive reasoning. Somewhere, for some, this arrives at an almost inevitable destination – how to achieve it by the quickest, mostly expedient means becomes the most pressing issue.
Emphasising this to, for or on behalf of those yet to be convinced compounds any tendency toward command defiance. The more an idea seems like a command, an instruction, a directive, however often repeated, the less likely it is to be agreed upon. It is far more likely it would be resisted in compound ways, especially where any command defiance has been ‘triggered’.
There is also a converse to this, of course, for mind’s subject to inner colonisation. When language, culture and systems of education become heterogenous, become societally normalising over hundreds of years, of colonisation, of empire and empirical thinking, ideas promulgated, inculcated by them become self-replicating and reinforcing.
Subsequently, there becomes less likelihood of ‘defying’ commands which emerge from them. Such is the insidious nature of colonisation, inner or otherwise.
So, what of issuing an alternative ‘command’, based on telling the yet to be convinced, those with minds more susceptible to the accrued metaphysics of empire, they are thinking ‘wrong’ and there is a different ‘right’ answer, to the one they previously thought singular? Without first preparing grounds for any ‘nudge’ toward acceptance, it would only ‘trigger’ neuronal and psychological responses which make that acceptance even less likely.
The medium through which any such ‘nudges’ or messaging is to be received is an integral aspect of thinking resistant to it. Digital technology and social media are the mediums through which majority percentages of people gather their information.
They are also integral to surveillance capitalism, with their owners the new feudal overlords of it. They depend on patterned cognitive function, strained cognitive loads, reinforced by anxious existential precarity, for the everywhere, ‘is-ness’ and reliance on them their capturing operations require.
It is unsettling to witness just how systemic and ubiquitously encroaching their tendrils have become. Of course, it is anecdotal (in absence of any definitive study other than that by, as well as context given for necessity of any others, Zuboff) but for any of us, looking around our lives, our family and friends and theirs too, we should shudder to see just how many minds have been captured, colonised, digitally. And to see just how systemic that capture has become. As well as how far the scaffolding required for reverse engineering capture of brains, from which their properties are emergent, is pre-assembled by it.
Recognising this, it should also become clear, it is simply not possible to fight for Scottish independence whilst ceding agency to extensions or iterations of the same empires from which we seek to remove ourselves. The systemic nature of capturing the digital commons has followed the same trajectory as that of land and earlier forms of capital. This time around, though, it is not just those or our minds but the very brains of which they are an emergent property being captured.
Our brains on social media, our neurological responses to the ubiquity of digital technology, owned and controlled by just a very few individuals and corporations, operating in spheres beyond law and nations, have almost given up the fight for agency. Mostly, it’s because of negativity bias.
Negativity bias is the human psychological tendency, rooted in deep patterned neurological responses, to not only register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell longer on it. It is also known as positive-negative asymmetry.
On personal/inter-personal levels, it explains why the sting of a rebuke is experienced and remembered more keenly than the joy of praise. It is why negative first impressions can be so difficult to overcome. And why past traumas have such lasting effects.
Negativity bias, because it leads the human mind to pay much more attention to ‘bad things’, also makes them seem much more important than they necessarily are. When they have captured our cognition, our attention, they stick in our memories and continue to influence our decision making long after they have happened.
Neurological roots of these deeply patterned behaviours are evolutionary. Early in human history, paying attention to bad, dangerous, negative threats was a literal matter of life and death. Being more attuned to danger, paying more attention to the negatives, increased chances of survival. And those who survived handed down the genes making subsequent humans more attentive to danger. It became hard-wired.
Now, according to well-established neurological research, negative bias emerges early in human infancy. Initially, very young children have a tendency to pay greater attention to positive facial expression and tone of voice, as they establish where the nurture and love will come from.
However, from as early as three months old and more generally in the second half of a child’s first year of growth, seemingly now innate neurological responses foreground the emergent properties of negativity bias in developing awareness of and reactions to stimuli in the world around it.
Other neurological research (Cacciopi, 2004) has also found much more of the brain’s processing power is utilised in responding to negative stimuli. It activates more sensory, motor and fight/flight/ freeze/flock cognitive response centres and enervates most of the cerebral cortex, in a state of hyper aware readiness, than it does in response to positive stimuli.
We may no longer need to be in as directly a high alert state as our distant ancestors did, in order to survive, but a constant, always on, in our pockets, live feed of perma-crisis and existential threat, means negativity bias retains, has been given a return to the foreground, a dominant position in how our brains operate. Subsequently, it also plays a starring role in how we think, respond to and feel about the world around us.
We carry its influence, it bias, into our personal, social and political relationships. It is there in how we perceive people and the immediate, as well as wider, environment around us. It is there in how we make decisions on, in and around them.
It’s influence on our decision-making processes are key to Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) Nobel prize, awarded in 2002, long after publication, winning research. A key finding of it is that, when making decisions, humans consistently place greater weight on negative influences than on positive ones.
When forming impressions, perceptions, of ourselves and others, humans, as a result, tend to focus more on negative information. A therapist or psychologist, counselling us individually, would tell us to try stopping ‘negative self-talk’, instead of fixating on accumulated negative focus, past and present, projecting it into potential futures.
If they were good at their job and realised how difficult we might find this, in our day to day lives, they may tell us to ‘reframe the situation’. How we talk to ourselves, as well as how conscious we are of it, about events, experiences, people and our perceptions of them, plays a significant role, psychologically and neurologically, in patterned ‘feedback loops’ of how we interpret past, present and future events and our perceptions of them, they’d explain.
They might even psycho-dynamically or behaviourally guide us toward establishing new, more positive patterns, both in how we talk to ourselves and how we respond to it, how we act. This wouldn’t mean ignoring potential dangers, applying rose tinted lenses, it would just mean refocusing, to give fair and equal weighting to negative and positive events, influence and perceptions.
These are and will all be key factors in achieving any kind of balance for individually and collectively decolonised Scots minds. What we carry forward, as we attempt to redress past imbalances of power, of influence, and we must also take account of them in our present and for any potential future.
Negativity bias, rooted as it is in evolutionary neurological responses to threat, crisis or trauma, has been drawn upon, made ‘live’, ‘triggered’, brought to the constant attention of our front brains, deliberately, wilfully and with politically motivated intent. Politics has mirrored the trajectory of digital, technological and networked social trends.
As contemporary socio-political phenomena, they have been underpinned by negativity bias, drawing deep on patterned neurologically encoded responses, moving our discourse rightward. What were once fringe positions are now what Tariq Ali called ‘The Extreme Centre’.
Deeply entrenched and foregrounded in our individual and collective responses to it is and has been negativity bias. It is what has emphasised precarity and uncertainty. It has led to widespread perception of apparent ineffectiveness of traditional political processes in addressing any of it, or even to determine where cause and effect begin and end.
It is what has underpinned dissatisfaction with and dissociation from politics or politicians as means to address social issues or to make effective change. And, almost conversely, it has also ensured their manipulations of power and influence have continued.
A growing field of socio-political research acknowledges predominant and manipulated negativity bias as an influential factor in acceptance of or identification with what once would have been considered right-wing ideology. It has, of course, in almost integral aspects of these processes, become increasingly difficult to distinguish between demarcations or illustrate where any definitive axes of right-centre-left politics lie.
There is a cracked mirror we also hold up to negativity bias, amid escalating culture wars which pass for political debate in vacuums created by it. It too has a widening research basis and acknowledgement of its corrosive influence. Social psychologists (and just plain old psychologists) call the horse it rode in on toxic positivity.
To be clear from the outset of any discussion on it, positivity is not correlative to toxicity any more than negativity bias is to right wing ideology. They do hang around in the same darkened recesses of our minds and brains though.
Surely positivity could be a welcome antidote to negativity bias, right? It is, according to much research, neurologically and psychologically, as well as socially, culturally and politically, more likely to inculcate creativity and divergent thinking, in turn generating more ideas, in a problem-solving way.
Doesn’t that seem like just the ticket, what people, Scots, society, politics, even the planet are in dire need of? So how have we allowed it to become the evil twin of negativity bias?
Well, they have a mutually assured destructive and co-dependent relationship when it comes to toxicity. It might prove instructive to zoom in a little on the research, to look a little closer at what toxic positivity is and what we might be able to do about it.
Toxic positivity has been defined as ‘the act of rejecting or denying stress, negativity or other negative experiences that exist (Sokal, Trudel & Babb, 2020). It can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from your common or garden positivity. Whats wrong with silver linings, right?
Well, some research shows its only beneficial to look for them in uncontrollable contexts. Trying to use positive reappraisal in controllable situations, which can be changed, leads to being worse off (Troy, Shallcross & Mauss, 2011).
Other research suggests it is inappropriate and equally detrimental to use positivity or positive reappraisal when identity is threatened. When we experience oppression, individually our collectively, looking for silver linings leads to worse well-being, compounds the impact of it (Perez & Solo, 2013).
For many people positivity can be difficult to develop and implement. Being encouraged to apply any specific emotion regulation we’re not used to or necessarily good at, even familiar with, can also leave us worse off. Ergo, if you’re not genuinely good at being positive, optimistic, or reflecting on any given situation to find its silver lining, being told to do it anyway, even trying, is equally detrimental to overall well-being (Ford & Troy, 2019).
In fact, too much positive emotion has not only been shown to be ‘a bad thing’, it’s also a risk factor in developing and promoting manias (Gruber, Johnson, Oveis & Keltner, 2008).
Excessive focus on getting happy isn’t just a bad for you now thing either. It creates a psychological and neurological re-uptake or expectation gap. It leaves a discrepancy between how we feel now and how we want to feel in the future. Our brains just cant mind that gap.
Like most things, learning any means of genuinely applying positive reappraisal, also means acknowledging positive thinking does not, cannot, exist in a vacuum. Positive thinking becomes toxic when it is perceived convergent, as the only solution, imposed individually, in groups, socially or culturally.
Social support and self-efficacy are crucial to its application, maintenance and sustainability.
Self-efficacy, which can equally be applied to individuals or social groups, is the ability to cope or interact with positivity to improve overall well-being. It does not, in and of itself, avoid negative thinking or expressing negative thoughts and emotions.
Well-regulated positivity validates all cognitive and emotional responses. It recognises negative affect as a norm, an important integral aspect of human experience. So, rock and hard place, right?
Faced with compound existential crises, neurologies overheating with negative biases, becoming exponentially toxic, adding to their drag, to the weight they place on us, making it ever more difficult to accentuate the positives.
What then, keep a collective gratitude journal, for Scotland, for society, for humanity, for the planet? Don’t give in to pessimism by looking for small answers, by talking it out?
Well, if the hypothetical psychologist, social or personal, conjured into the collective room, was sufficiently versed in existential therapies, or more specifically logotherapy, they may just have a handy vial of actual antidote…
…coming next, in pt.3, Viktor Frankl introduces the Yes movement to tragic optimism and we do the post-robot divergent head-nod to the song, right? See you in the mosh-pit!