Recap of Prior Posts in This Series:
Why do old ways of thinking and doing persist even after it becomes obvious they are totally wrong-headed, or at least suboptimal? Here are the possibilities I’ve already explored:
Satisficing: a mindset that is satisfied with a good-enough result, rather than the optimal solution.
Bureaucratic inertia: the tendency of bureaucratic organizations to perpetuate the established procedures.
Path dependency: when it’s easier or less costly to continue along an already set path than to create an entirely new one that promises even greater returns.
Lock-In Effect: when early adoption of a technology, policy or practice locks-in specific pathways that are difficult and costly to escape.
Switching Costs: switching to new ways of doing things involves time, money, effort, uncertainty, risk, disruption, feelings of incompetence, and changing roles/relationships. Better to stick to the tried and true.
Habit persistence: habits tend to be sticky, because they achieve good-enough results with relative ease. You know what you’re doing, you know what to expect, and outcomes are okay. Change takes us out of our comfort zone.
Sunk Costs: when people and institutions continue something just because they have already invested unrecoverable resources. The tyranny of sunk costs keeps us throwing good money after bad, whether that bad is a failed policy or toxic relationship.
Special Interest Groups: people and groups with an interest in preserving the status quo resist innovation as a threat to their power and hard-won gains.
Ideological Commitment: what keeps the ideologically committed from changing their minds? Some possibilities: confidence that dogged persistence will eventually prove the doubters wrong; fear of losing one’s ideological bearings; and risk of being ostracized by fellow believers or mocked by adversaries.
Politics of Performance: politicians need to project confidence in their policy prescriptions. To admit error is to commit political suicide.
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This post will explore how the psychology of grievance undermines self-correction.
Grievance involves feelings of deprivation, shame, humiliation, impotent anger, and being the victim of injustice. Grievance demands payback. Deep grievance demands big payback and may not be satisfied until the payback is proportionate to the harm done. Which may take forever. In the meantime, the aggrieved will hold on to their anger and refuse to take constructive steps to improve their lives, because that would be a way of letting the victimizer off the hook. The equation being: get better = less serious harm = less owed. So the aggrieved gets stuck in perpetual victimhood, unwilling to find ways to live with or lessen their pain, waiting for the day of reckoning.
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References:
Eléonore Bayen, Claire Jourdan, Idir Ghout, Pascale Pradat-Diehl, Emmanuelle Darnoux, Gaëlle Nelson, Claire Vallat-Azouvi, James Charenton, Philippe Aegerter, Alexis Ruet & Philippe Azouvi (2018) Negative impact of litigation procedures on patient outcomes four years after severe traumatic brain injury: results from the PariS-traumatic brain injury study, Disability and Rehabilitation, 40:17, 2040-2047, DOI: 10.1080/09638288.2017.1325522
Sullivan, Michael J. L. PhD; Scott, Whitney BA; Trost, Zina PhD. Perceived Injustice: A Risk Factor for Problematic Pain Outcomes. The Clinical Journal of Pain 28(6):p 484-488, July/August 2012. | DOI: 10.1097/AJP.0b013e3182527d13
Tereza Capelos & Mikko Salmela & Gabija Krisciunaite, 2022. "Grievance Politics: An Empirical Analysis of Anger Through the Emotional Mechanism of Ressentiment," Politics and Governance, Cogitatio Press, vol. 10(4), pages 384-395. https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:poango:v:10:y:2022:i:4:p:384-395
Young, Linda, and Elizabeth Gibb. "Trauma and grievance." In Understanding Trauma, pp. 81-95. Routledge, 2018. eBook ISBN: 9780429484575