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Denial: How We Hide, Ignore, and Explain Away Problems

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Jared Del Rosso discusses the complexities of denial.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 19, 2024

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This video video outlines the motivations behind a book focused on the dynamics of denial, particularly concerning torture in the U.S. and broader social implications. The author reflects on their decade-long research into denial, learning from teaching courses on the sociology of denial that revealed how denial functions in everyday life, organizations, and political contexts.

Key points include:

1. **Denial and Its Impact**: Denial can manifest on micro (interpersonal), meso (organizational), and macro (political/cultural) levels, with varying strategies and implications. While micro-level denial can sometimes facilitate smooth social interaction, organizational and political denial can obstruct accountability and exacerbate social issues.

2. **Teaching and Research Experience**: The author draws from prior research on congressional discourse regarding torture to understand denial's linguistic and rhetorical strategies. They analyze how euphemisms and justifications are employed to downplay serious issues, particularly concerning torture and misconduct.

3. **Identifying Denial**: The book aims to equip readers with the tools to recognize denial, understand its functions, and discuss strategies for addressing it. The concluding chapter emphasizes strategies for intervention, encouraging readers to consider when and how to act against denial in various contexts.

4. **Consequences**: Denial, especially at larger scales, can have profound and harmful social, political, and cultural consequences, allowing serious issues such as climate change and misconduct to persist unchallenged.

Overall, the author promotes awareness of denial as a critical social phenomenon, advocating for informed engagement and potential actions to combat it.

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So there were a couple things that motivated the book.

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The, the first is that

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for about a decade prior trying the book, I was,

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interested in and,

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and researching the dynamics

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of denial surrounding torture in the us.

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So I'd actually written a previous book about the,

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the ways that the US Congress had tried to grapple

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with in some cases, but also deny in other cases, the use

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of torture during the wars on terror and the war in Iraq.

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So I had this background in, in the study of denial,

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violence and, politics.

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And I brought that to my classroom,

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and I was teaching on the topic in, in, in classes,

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on vi state violence, on torture.

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And around 2015,

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I offered a new class just called the Sociology of Denial.

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And I was really helping students see this story of the,

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the uses of denial in our everyday lives,

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our organizational lives, our political and cultural lives.

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And what I was finding with that course was

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introducing students to the denial at these different

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levels, and all the concepts that went at went

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around denial at these different levels really was changing

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how they interpreted the world.

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And I thought there's really a story to, to, to tell here,

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to bring to a broader audience about

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how denial works in our everyday lives.

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And, really, you know, really sharing

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that knowledge in ways

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that would let people see denial as it was happening.

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So with the question of why we deny, it kind of depends.

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So one of the, one of the, the,

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the fun things about teaching at,

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about denial is we start with all these kind

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of everyday ways that people will try to manage the things

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that make them uncomfortable.

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So I'm, I'm talking about small things sometimes,

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like mistakes, accidents, blunders, the things

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that people would rather not have happened.

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And so they look the other way when they do happen.

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And in those cases, the way that, the ways that, you know,

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I, I write about denial and the ways I bring denial

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to my students, it's, it's really all about managing our

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presentation of self, which is what we call in sociology,

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sort of our identities,

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our public performances amid other people.

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So what we're trying to, to really do in those cases is

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to not let the embarrassment kind of stick to us.

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So we're using denial to keep it at an arm's length,

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but as we move up in social scale,

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as we move up into organizations,

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as we move up into politics, you know, really what I do,

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in the book is show that denial begins

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to get much more serious.

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That that really what we're talking about there is,

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is the denial of public problems, organizational problems,

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organizational misconduct,

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and the same for politics, political misconduct, political,

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political scandals.

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And they, it's often less about managing like discomfort,

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although that's certainly going on

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and more about preserving some kind of power,

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economic power, political power, whether of an individual

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actor caught in a scandal

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or of say, a political party, a government structure.

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Um, really what's driving denial in those cases, I think is,

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is that competition for power.

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What I really enjoyed about this book and

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and researching for this book is it's a really broad study

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of the way that this thing

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that we often call denial shows up across

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the social sciences.

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So I was drawing first, you know, initially on my,

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my prior research of the denial, the denial of torture.

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And what that was, was this really detailed analysis

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of transcripts of congressional hearings.

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So I was looking at the language, the members of Congress

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and the witnesses they called the,

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the language they were using to talk about torture.

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So I, I had that kind of empirical background,

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but what I did with this book was expand from there.

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And so I read really extensively in sociology, criminology,

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organizational studies, communication studies,

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and social psychology to look at all the ways that things

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that look and feel like denial.

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They're not always called that, but they, they look

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and feel like denial studies of euphemisms, studies

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of white collar crime studies of excuses and justifications.

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Scholars across the social sciences are writing about that.

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So I was, I was basically synthesizing

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empirical studies my own

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and others, as well as kind

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of the theoretical work being generated across these

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disciplines to tell one coherent story

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and offer kind of an overarching vocabulary

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for understanding denial.

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You know, going back to my earlier scholarship,

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what I'm really looking at there is largely

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a language of denial.

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So, in, in my book, I really talk about some forms

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of denial are interaction, kind of

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what we do in public places to ignore things

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that are happening around us.

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Other things that we use are linguistic or rhetorical.

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So when we think about the denial of torture,

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what we're thinking about is kinda the mobilization

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of political actors, whether in politics,

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but also the media to talk about torture in ways

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that downplay, downplay allegations,

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outright deny allegations, even justify acts that many

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of us would call torture.

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So really what we're talking about here is the language

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of euphemisms, the language of justifications, all the kinds

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of things that people would use

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and say so that a,

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a a broader public won't recognize torture as torture,

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because we have to keep in mind

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that torture itself is a war crime.

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It's, it's prohibited at the domesticated domestic level

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and the international level.

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So when we think back to what the debates that occurred

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during the Bush administration,

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during the Obama administration, people

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who are advocating practices like water boarding

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or stress positions, these are practices

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that say the CIA used or the US military used.

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They were rarely, or actually they were never really

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saying I support torture.

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They were using all kind of linguistic strategies

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to keep people from seeing these practices for

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what they were, which is yes, torture a human rights crime,

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a violation of the dignity of the people on whom it,

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on whom it's practiced, and a violation of US

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and international law.

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You know, as I was writing the book,

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I was telling this story about denial

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at these these different levels.

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The what we, what we call in sociology, the micro

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or the interaction, what we can also call the interpersonal

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to what we call the organizational, to

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what we call the macro, which is the political or cultural.

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And that each level denial

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shares some similarities in the strategies used, though they

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Do differ often though it has different functions.

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So when I write about interpersonal

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or this micro level denial, I approach it

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as a sociologist interested in human interaction.

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You know, there is a,

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a really important psychological study of denial.

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You know, when you're, when you're thinking about people

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denying, say there, there their,

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their personal addictions or personal traumas or,

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or things going on maybe between families,

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that's not really the train I was looking at,

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but this interaction level is this level

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of public performances in relation to other people.

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And so an example there that, you know,

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that we can talk about,

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or we can, we can think about are all the kinds

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of small hiccups to social interaction

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that occur while the small speed

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bumps in social interaction.

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It could be something as seemingly simple

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as a person walking down,

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a sidewalk on a cold winter day and slipping on some ice.

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What are they going to do

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to avoid looking embarrassed in the presence of others?

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You know, my students tell me, sometimes they'll turn it

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into a punchline, they'll kind

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of turn it into an act of physical comedy.

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So others are laughing along with them rather than,

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you know, laughing at them,

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or, which is sometimes worse to people rushing over

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and offering help because

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that heightens the attention that's drawn to people.

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But at that interaction level,

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we can also think about stuff.

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Uh, we can also think about phenomena like

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the bystander effect.

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Well-documented in social psychological literature,

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which are the behavioral strategies people use when they're

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in the presence of something

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that they sense is a public emergency,

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but they're not quite sure.

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So these can be things like trying to look disengaged

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or unengaged so that you're not kind of called out

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to intervene in a public emergency looking to others,

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you know, to see if they will act first.

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So these are some of the behavioral strategies

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at the interpersonal level.

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When I think of, I'm gonna kind

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of scale up to the political level.

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When I think of the political level it involves,

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it involves strategies like, agenda setting,

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so making sure that some things are talked about,

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but other things aren't.

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It involves some rhetorical strategy.

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So the use of language to reframe an accusation.

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So it seems less severe than what people making

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that accusation are, you know, are accusing you of.

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So an example of that comes from, the,

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the 2016 presidential campaign when video of,

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the Access Hollywood video of president

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or then candidate Trump, talking

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to a journalist was released.

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And that, that the language he used in that video was,

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really atrocious.

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It, it seemed to describe acts of sexual abuse,

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harassment, and even assault.

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And yet what he did to try to manage that scandal was,

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was kinda a pretty classic expression of denial.

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We see those strategies used in other political scandals,

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and in, in his case, what that involved was

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what we call in sociology

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and criminology condemning the condemners.

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So in his public statement, he said,

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bill Clinton has done worse,

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and Hillary Clinton has supported him in doing worse.

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Then referring to, you know, to the, to his opposition,

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in the 2016 presidential election, he also used euphemisms.

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He described it in another context as locker room talk.

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So trying to transform what people were claiming he did,

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which was described, acts he took of sexual harassment

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and assault and reframing them as something

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that was unserious

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and of lesser kind of lesser kind of importance.

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So those are some of the examples at the individual level,

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at the political level, you know, why do we find it so hard

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to acknowledge the truth?

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I'll acknowledge, like, I'll, I'll address that at the level

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of, of the rest of us, you know, while we're trying

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to consume the stories that are coming in through the media,

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the, the news about the most recent political problem

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or political or, collective problem

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that concern us, concerns us.

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Like for me, it's climate change.

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Like I, I get a lot of news about climate change in my,

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my email inbox, social media,

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and just on the front page of almost everything I read.

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And there's really compelling research in,

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so in the social sciences

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that we have really strong emotional responses.

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Essentially, it's to bad news, but,

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but it, you know, it's, it's, it's more complex than that

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to news that renders us fearful of the future.

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Re puts us in, puts us in states

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of helplessness or hopelessness.

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If we can't see an avenue for making change

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or affecting change

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or doing something that,

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that makes the world a little bit better around the problems

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that concern us, we're likely to tune out.

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We're likely to keep information at an arm's length.

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Doesn't mean we're outright denying it,

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but we're, we're trying not to pay attention to it.

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You know, things are a little bit different when we think

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about, when we deny, say the behavior of someone

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who we're allied with.

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So I was talking previously about climate change,

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these problems that concern us.

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You know, when you think of a political party rallying

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around someone caught in a scandal, whether that be person,

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be a Democrat or Republican, politically left

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or politically right, we often see these dynamics of

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defending a politician caught in a scandal using these

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rhetorical forms of denial.

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There. What I think is really going on is that protection

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of political power, denial is really powerful.

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Denial is really strong.

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Denial is really convincing,

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particularly these linguistic strategies.

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Uh, if we can get people thinking through a lens of denial,

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problems don't seem as serious.

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Scandals don't seem as serious, accusations don't seem

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as serious, and we can preserve the political power of those

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around whom people are around.

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When we talk about denial at scale,

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the consequences can really differ.

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So when I write about interpersonal denial,

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and here, you know, I'm talking again about these, these,

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these denials of like little accidents, little mistakes,

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little blunders, I actually argue

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that denial can have some beneficial social effects.

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You know, we can't stop social interaction every time

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someone makes a mistake,

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and draw attention to, we wouldn't want to do that.

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So denial allows us to smooth over those interpersonal,

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interpersonal mistakes, accents

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and blunders, particularly, particularly ones

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that are inevitable because of the, the, the consequences

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of living life in real time in this kind

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of very much like embodied sense, vulnerable,

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not vulnerable, but exposed to others in social interaction.

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But when we scale up, when we're talking about workplaces,

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when we're talking about the things

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that can happen in a workplace, say here, what I mean is,

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what, what chronologists might call white collar crime.

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But we might just think of, you know,

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misconduct more generally.

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Um, when we think of the things

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that we read about in the news, like say a scandal at Wells

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Fargo about defrauding customers, you know,

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denial in those cases involves practices like

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silencing whistleblowers or ignoring uncomfortable and,

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and unwanted information.

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And the consequences of

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that is organizations often miss when things are going wrong

12:45.985 --> 12:48.405
and when things are going wrong, they have a tendency

12:48.565 --> 12:50.125
to amplify, kind of snowball

12:50.705 --> 12:54.125
unless people with diverse opinions,

12:54.355 --> 12:57.245
potential whistleblowers are actually listened to.

12:57.505 --> 13:01.365
So that's where I see, like most of us living, most

13:01.365 --> 13:04.165
of our lives have the most power when it comes to denial,

13:04.395 --> 13:06.805
because chances are there's something going on.

13:06.805 --> 13:08.685
Like, and it doesn't have to be the extreme forms

13:08.685 --> 13:11.045
of misconduct, it can be things like group think,

13:11.345 --> 13:14.005
not seeing the complexities of a social problem

13:14.105 --> 13:15.565
or an organizational issue,

13:15.855 --> 13:17.565
where sometimes just drawing attention

13:17.585 --> 13:18.805
to it can be really powerful.

13:19.035 --> 13:20.325
When we think about that political

13:20.345 --> 13:22.805
or broader cultural level, the denial

13:22.805 --> 13:24.845
of problems is incredibly harmful.

13:25.025 --> 13:26.325
You know, it, it contributes

13:26.345 --> 13:31.045
to letting social problems endure, cause increased harm,

13:31.665 --> 13:34.045
you know, harm more and more people.

13:34.415 --> 13:36.045
Again, I'll go back to climate change,

13:36.045 --> 13:38.205
which has been well documented now for decades,

13:38.785 --> 13:41.725
and the, the information around it is increasingly dire,

13:42.265 --> 13:45.405
and yet sometimes it seems like the political will is just

13:45.405 --> 13:47.285
not there in part because of denial.

13:47.865 --> 13:49.725
So, and with those dynamics,

13:49.725 --> 13:51.885
denial really does have some profound

13:51.945 --> 13:55.405
and often harmful social, political, cultural consequences

13:56.195 --> 13:57.805
when we think of what a person can do.

13:58.185 --> 14:00.125
You know, one of the reasons I wrote the book was I think

14:00.125 --> 14:03.565
the first step is getting informed, you know, being able

14:03.565 --> 14:07.085
to perceive when denial is happening so that it doesn't seem

14:07.915 --> 14:11.205
necessarily like this natural inevitable thing.

14:11.205 --> 14:12.365
It's something that we can perceive.

14:12.515 --> 14:14.445
It's something that we can think about, reflect on,

14:14.675 --> 14:16.365
talk about, bring to other people's attention,

14:16.745 --> 14:20.205
and maybe maybe through engagement with, with politics,

14:20.205 --> 14:23.765
engagement, with, social movements or, or,

14:23.785 --> 14:26.365
or nonprofit organizations actually, you know,

14:26.365 --> 14:28.485
collectively work at disrupting.

14:29.105 --> 14:31.845
But I think again, you know, where's the space where most

14:31.845 --> 14:34.525
of us in our everyday lives encounter things like, again,

14:34.525 --> 14:36.565
like group think, you know, discomforts

14:36.565 --> 14:38.245
that people don't wanna draw attention to.

14:38.785 --> 14:41.605
And that's often in the workplaces that we work at,

14:41.945 --> 14:43.765
and there's really powerful evidence

14:43.835 --> 14:46.045
that just one person dissenting,

14:46.045 --> 14:48.405
and I don't even mean here, like a, like a necessarily

14:49.125 --> 14:51.245
profoundly strong reaction just speaking out

14:51.245 --> 14:53.605
and saying, Hey, I think we need to consider X, Y, and Z.

14:53.605 --> 14:55.845
When we think about this issue, an issue

14:55.845 --> 14:57.445
that people are maybe skirting

14:57.445 --> 14:58.925
around uncomfortable talking about,

14:59.515 --> 15:00.765
there's compelling evidence

15:00.765 --> 15:03.325
that just one person drawing attention to can kind of

15:04.225 --> 15:06.605
breach the silence and get other people seeing

15:07.195 --> 15:08.205
what you are seeing

15:08.425 --> 15:09.925
and get other people thinking about

15:09.925 --> 15:11.285
talking about what you're seeing.

15:11.705 --> 15:13.765
That's partially because a lot of people do see it,

15:13.765 --> 15:15.165
but they feel uncomfortable talking about it.

15:15.195 --> 15:17.045
Each chapter is organized around these levels,

15:17.145 --> 15:18.725
but also these types of denial.

15:19.105 --> 15:21.645
So partly reading it, you know, I wanna help people see

15:22.275 --> 15:23.525
when is denial going on?

15:23.595 --> 15:26.565
What kind of denial is being used, why is it being used?

15:27.505 --> 15:30.765
But ultimately the book is really about trying to see,

15:30.905 --> 15:33.925
you know, what are the strategies, what are the ways

15:33.955 --> 15:37.045
that we could potentially, we could potentially intervene,

15:37.385 --> 15:38.925
we could potentially take action.

15:39.065 --> 15:40.125
You know, it's not enough

15:40.125 --> 15:42.685
to just see social reality in all of its complexity.

15:42.905 --> 15:44.805
The question is what do you do with what you now see

15:45.265 --> 15:47.685
or experience or feel or hear?

15:48.425 --> 15:49.805
And so the, the kind of ebb

15:49.805 --> 15:52.245
and flow of the book is, is written in a way that

15:52.835 --> 15:54.605
each chapter might tell you something about denial.

15:54.625 --> 15:56.485
But the closing chapter, the concluding chapter,

15:56.545 --> 15:59.765
is really about listing some of the strategies that,

15:59.795 --> 16:01.765
that we can use if we want to intervene.

16:01.765 --> 16:03.245
The book isn't telling you that you have

16:03.245 --> 16:05.565
to intervene when you should intervene.

16:05.565 --> 16:07.485
Those are really kind of personal decisions.

16:07.485 --> 16:09.005
They're really political decisions.

16:09.385 --> 16:11.285
Um, but what, what are some of the strategies

16:11.285 --> 16:13.205
that people have used, you know,

16:13.205 --> 16:15.205
in the everyday context when they're,

16:15.205 --> 16:18.365
when they're perceiving some sort of public situation

16:18.365 --> 16:21.085
that requires action in the organizational context,

16:21.185 --> 16:24.685
the workplace context in which it takes someone speaking up,

16:25.225 --> 16:27.885
and also, in the political context as well.

16:27.945 --> 16:30.685
So really showing people what denial is,

16:30.745 --> 16:33.165
but what can we do about it once we've perceived it.

00:00 - So there were a couple things that motivated the book. The, the first is that for about a decade prior trying the book, I was, interested in and, and researching the dynamics of denial surrounding torture in the us.

00:12 - So I'd actually written a previous book about the, the ways that the US Congress had tried to grapple with in some cases, but also deny in other cases, the use of torture during the wars on terror and the war in Iraq. So I had this background in, in the study of denial, violence and, politics. And I brought that to my classroom, and I was teaching on the topic in, in, in classes, on vi state violence, on torture. And around 2015,

00:40 - I offered a new class just called the Sociology of Denial. And I was really helping students see this story of the, the uses of denial in our everyday lives, our organizational lives, our political and cultural lives. And what I was finding with that course was introducing students to the denial at these different levels, and all the concepts that went at went around denial at these different levels really was changing how they interpreted the world. And I thought there's really a story to, to, to tell here,

01:07 - to bring to a broader audience about how denial works in our everyday lives. And, really, you know, really sharing that knowledge in ways that would let people see denial as it was happening. So with the question of why we deny, it kind of depends. So one of the, one of the, the, the fun things about teaching at, about denial is we start with all these kind of everyday ways that people will try to manage the things

01:30 - that make them uncomfortable. So I'm, I'm talking about small things sometimes, like mistakes, accidents, blunders, the things that people would rather not have happened. And so they look the other way when they do happen. And in those cases, the way that, the ways that, you know, I, I write about denial and the ways I bring denial to my students, it's, it's really all about managing our presentation of self, which is what we call in sociology, sort of our identities,

01:54 - our public performances amid other people. So what we're trying to, to really do in those cases is to not let the embarrassment kind of stick to us. So we're using denial to keep it at an arm's length, but as we move up in social scale, as we move up into organizations, as we move up into politics, you know, really what I do, in the book is show that denial begins to get much more serious. That that really what we're talking about there is,

02:19 - is the denial of public problems, organizational problems, organizational misconduct, and the same for politics, political misconduct, political, political scandals. And they, it's often less about managing like discomfort, although that's certainly going on and more about preserving some kind of power, economic power, political power, whether of an individual actor caught in a scandal or of say, a political party, a government structure.

02:46 - really what's driving denial in those cases, I think is, is that competition for power. What I really enjoyed about this book and and researching for this book is it's a really broad study of the way that this thing that we often call denial shows up across the social sciences. So I was drawing first, you know, initially on my, my prior research of the denial, the denial of torture. And what that was, was this really detailed analysis

03:10 - of transcripts of congressional hearings. So I was looking at the language, the members of Congress and the witnesses they called the, the language they were using to talk about torture. So I, I had that kind of empirical background, but what I did with this book was expand from there. And so I read really extensively in sociology, criminology, organizational studies, communication studies, and social psychology to look at all the ways that things that look and feel like denial.

03:36 - They're not always called that, but they, they look and feel like denial studies of euphemisms, studies of white collar crime studies of excuses and justifications. Scholars across the social sciences are writing about that. So I was, I was basically synthesizing empirical studies my own and others, as well as kind of the theoretical work being generated across these disciplines to tell one coherent story and offer kind of an overarching vocabulary

04:00 - for understanding denial. You know, going back to my earlier scholarship, what I'm really looking at there is largely a language of denial. So, in, in my book, I really talk about some forms of denial are interaction, kind of what we do in public places to ignore things that are happening around us. Other things that we use are linguistic or rhetorical. So when we think about the denial of torture,

04:21 - what we're thinking about is kinda the mobilization of political actors, whether in politics, but also the media to talk about torture in ways that downplay, downplay allegations, outright deny allegations, even justify acts that many of us would call torture. So really what we're talking about here is the language of euphemisms, the language of justifications, all the kinds of things that people would use and say so that a,

04:46 - a a broader public won't recognize torture as torture, because we have to keep in mind that torture itself is a war crime. It's, it's prohibited at the domesticated domestic level and the international level. So when we think back to what the debates that occurred during the Bush administration, during the Obama administration, people who are advocating practices like water boarding or stress positions, these are practices

05:11 - that say the CIA used or the US military used. They were rarely, or actually they were never really saying I support torture. They were using all kind of linguistic strategies to keep people from seeing these practices for what they were, which is yes, torture a human rights crime, a violation of the dignity of the people on whom it, on whom it's practiced, and a violation of US and international law. You know, as I was writing the book,

05:36 - I was telling this story about denial at these these different levels. The what we, what we call in sociology, the micro or the interaction, what we can also call the interpersonal to what we call the organizational, to what we call the macro, which is the political or cultural. And that each level denial shares some similarities in the strategies used, though they Do differ often though it has different functions. So when I write about interpersonal

06:01 - or this micro level denial, I approach it as a sociologist interested in human interaction. You know, there is a, a really important psychological study of denial. You know, when you're, when you're thinking about people denying, say there, there their, their personal addictions or personal traumas or, or things going on maybe between families, that's not really the train I was looking at, but this interaction level is this level

06:24 - of public performances in relation to other people. And so an example there that, you know, that we can talk about, or we can, we can think about are all the kinds of small hiccups to social interaction that occur while the small speed bumps in social interaction. It could be something as seemingly simple as a person walking down, a sidewalk on a cold winter day and slipping on some ice.

06:45 - What are they going to do to avoid looking embarrassed in the presence of others? You know, my students tell me, sometimes they'll turn it into a punchline, they'll kind of turn it into an act of physical comedy. So others are laughing along with them rather than, you know, laughing at them, or, which is sometimes worse to people rushing over and offering help because that heightens the attention that's drawn to people.

07:07 - But at that interaction level, we can also think about stuff. we can also think about phenomena like the bystander effect. Well-documented in social psychological literature, which are the behavioral strategies people use when they're in the presence of something that they sense is a public emergency, but they're not quite sure. So these can be things like trying to look disengaged

07:30 - or unengaged so that you're not kind of called out to intervene in a public emergency looking to others, you know, to see if they will act first. So these are some of the behavioral strategies at the interpersonal level. When I think of, I'm gonna kind of scale up to the political level. When I think of the political level it involves, it involves strategies like, agenda setting, so making sure that some things are talked about,

07:54 - but other things aren't. It involves some rhetorical strategy. So the use of language to reframe an accusation. So it seems less severe than what people making that accusation are, you know, are accusing you of. So an example of that comes from, the, the 2016 presidential campaign when video of, the Access Hollywood video of president or then candidate Trump, talking to a journalist was released.

08:23 - And that, that the language he used in that video was, really atrocious. It, it seemed to describe acts of sexual abuse, harassment, and even assault. And yet what he did to try to manage that scandal was, was kinda a pretty classic expression of denial. We see those strategies used in other political scandals, and in, in his case, what that involved was what we call in sociology and criminology condemning the condemners.

08:50 - So in his public statement, he said, bill Clinton has done worse, and Hillary Clinton has supported him in doing worse. Then referring to, you know, to the, to his opposition, in the 2016 presidential election, he also used euphemisms. He described it in another context as locker room talk. So trying to transform what people were claiming he did, which was described, acts he took of sexual harassment and assault and reframing them as something that was unserious

09:19 - and of lesser kind of lesser kind of importance. So those are some of the examples at the individual level, at the political level, you know, why do we find it so hard to acknowledge the truth? I'll acknowledge, like, I'll, I'll address that at the level of, of the rest of us, you know, while we're trying to consume the stories that are coming in through the media, the, the news about the most recent political problem or political or, collective problem that concern us, concerns us.

09:45 - Like for me, it's climate change. Like I, I get a lot of news about climate change in my, my email inbox, social media, and just on the front page of almost everything I read. And there's really compelling research in, so in the social sciences that we have really strong emotional responses. Essentially, it's to bad news, but, but it, you know, it's, it's, it's more complex than that to news that renders us fearful of the future.

10:09 - Re puts us in, puts us in states of helplessness or hopelessness. If we can't see an avenue for making change or affecting change or doing something that, that makes the world a little bit better around the problems that concern us, we're likely to tune out. We're likely to keep information at an arm's length. Doesn't mean we're outright denying it, but we're, we're trying not to pay attention to it.

10:32 - You know, things are a little bit different when we think about, when we deny, say the behavior of someone who we're allied with. So I was talking previously about climate change, these problems that concern us. You know, when you think of a political party rallying around someone caught in a scandal, whether that be person, be a Democrat or Republican, politically left or politically right, we often see these dynamics of defending a politician caught in a scandal using these

10:58 - rhetorical forms of denial. There. What I think is really going on is that protection of political power, denial is really powerful. Denial is really strong. Denial is really convincing, particularly these linguistic strategies. if we can get people thinking through a lens of denial, problems don't seem as serious. Scandals don't seem as serious, accusations don't seem as serious, and we can preserve the political power of those

11:23 - around whom people are around. When we talk about denial at scale, the consequences can really differ. So when I write about interpersonal denial, and here, you know, I'm talking again about these, these, these denials of like little accidents, little mistakes, little blunders, I actually argue that denial can have some beneficial social effects. You know, we can't stop social interaction every time someone makes a mistake,

11:46 - and draw attention to, we wouldn't want to do that. So denial allows us to smooth over those interpersonal, interpersonal mistakes, accents and blunders, particularly, particularly ones that are inevitable because of the, the, the consequences of living life in real time in this kind of very much like embodied sense, vulnerable, not vulnerable, but exposed to others in social interaction. But when we scale up, when we're talking about workplaces, when we're talking about the things

12:12 - that can happen in a workplace, say here, what I mean is, what, what chronologists might call white collar crime. But we might just think of, you know, misconduct more generally. when we think of the things that we read about in the news, like say a scandal at Wells Fargo about defrauding customers, you know, denial in those cases involves practices like silencing whistleblowers or ignoring uncomfortable and, and unwanted information.

12:40 - And the consequences of that is organizations often miss when things are going wrong and when things are going wrong, they have a tendency to amplify, kind of snowball unless people with diverse opinions, potential whistleblowers are actually listened to. So that's where I see, like most of us living, most of our lives have the most power when it comes to denial, because chances are there's something going on. Like, and it doesn't have to be the extreme forms

13:08 - of misconduct, it can be things like group think, not seeing the complexities of a social problem or an organizational issue, where sometimes just drawing attention to it can be really powerful. When we think about that political or broader cultural level, the denial of problems is incredibly harmful. You know, it, it contributes to letting social problems endure, cause increased harm,

13:31 - you know, harm more and more people. Again, I'll go back to climate change, which has been well documented now for decades, and the, the information around it is increasingly dire, and yet sometimes it seems like the political will is just not there in part because of denial. So, and with those dynamics, denial really does have some profound and often harmful social, political, cultural consequences when we think of what a person can do.

13:58 - You know, one of the reasons I wrote the book was I think the first step is getting informed, you know, being able to perceive when denial is happening so that it doesn't seem necessarily like this natural inevitable thing. It's something that we can perceive. It's something that we can think about, reflect on, talk about, bring to other people's attention, and maybe maybe through engagement with, with politics, engagement, with, social movements or, or, or nonprofit organizations actually, you know,

14:26 - collectively work at disrupting. But I think again, you know, where's the space where most of us in our everyday lives encounter things like, again, like group think, you know, discomforts that people don't wanna draw attention to. And that's often in the workplaces that we work at, and there's really powerful evidence that just one person dissenting, and I don't even mean here, like a, like a necessarily profoundly strong reaction just speaking out

14:51 - and saying, Hey, I think we need to consider X, Y, and Z. When we think about this issue, an issue that people are maybe skirting around uncomfortable talking about, there's compelling evidence that just one person drawing attention to can kind of breach the silence and get other people seeing what you are seeing and get other people thinking about talking about what you're seeing.

15:11 - That's partially because a lot of people do see it, but they feel uncomfortable talking about it. Each chapter is organized around these levels, but also these types of denial. So partly reading it, you know, I wanna help people see when is denial going on? What kind of denial is being used, why is it being used? But ultimately the book is really about trying to see, you know, what are the strategies, what are the ways that we could potentially, we could potentially intervene,

15:37 - we could potentially take action. You know, it's not enough to just see social reality in all of its complexity. The question is what do you do with what you now see or experience or feel or hear? And so the, the kind of ebb and flow of the book is, is written in a way that each chapter might tell you something about denial. But the closing chapter, the concluding chapter, is really about listing some of the strategies that,

15:59 - that we can use if we want to intervene. The book isn't telling you that you have to intervene when you should intervene. Those are really kind of personal decisions. They're really political decisions. but what, what are some of the strategies that people have used, you know, in the everyday context when they're, when they're perceiving some sort of public situation that requires action in the organizational context,

16:21 - the workplace context in which it takes someone speaking up, and also, in the political context as well. So really showing people what denial is, but what can we do about it once we've perceived it.

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