Psychological Resilience
We ask whether mental toughness is all in the mind.
Things mentioned in this podcast:
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and we're also joined by our special guest today, Susie Ballantyne. And today we're discussing Harry and Meghan. Nick, why are we discussing Harry and Meghan?
Speaker B:Well, you don't have to be a royal watcher, I suppose, to have noticed that they were in the news recently because they kind of announced out of the blue that they were stepping back from most of their duties as what are described as senior royals. I don't really know what that means, but I guess if you're, you know, if you're up there in the top ten line in the line to the throne, that probably makes you a senior royal. So the statement that they put out was very matter of fact. But actually, you know, in subsequent interviews and stuff, the rationale seems to be, and it's a completely understandable rationale to me, but the rationale is that, you know, life as a royal is a humongous strain, I think, you know, and I think it seems that neither of them particularly are up for that kind of life. And you might think, well, you know, why should they be? It's not like he's going to ever become king now, is it? So barring some spectacular catastrophe. So yeah, so basically, because they're stepping back because of, you know, because of the fact that they can't really cope with trying to do the things they want to do as a family and live their own lives and, you know, presumably set up their own businesses and, you know, do normal stuff and be a royal at the same time and cope with the pressure from the press and so on. And it's obviously being a royal seems to be up there in the kind of high pressure jobs. We don't normally think of it that way, but it must be right. I mean, I wouldn't want to do it. I wouldn't be king for £100. Right. Might do it for £110. So anyway, this, but this issue of sort of, you know, resilience and being able to, you know, being able to cope with your job. And I think most people have probably had times, whatever they're doing, where they thought, I can't, I can't go on with this. And, you know, I've got to have a break or this is, you know, too stressful. And so I'm kind of interested in that. I, you know, certainly affected me personally. And it just so happens that Susie, who I've known for many years, we were former colleagues at MOD, Susie's a psychologist, has worked in defence and is currently, look, as well as coaching, she's also doing a PhD in more or less this issue. So I thought a perfect person to come on and we said that we can discuss, you know, what resilience is, how you can get more of it if you can, you know, what seems to affect
Speaker A:it and stuff like that. So yeah. Perfect. Good. So Susie, we've had a little bit of an introduction there from Nick. Just fill that out a little bit for us. Tell us a bit more about yourself, your background and maybe sort of the PhD a little bit more. Yeah. Yep. So I started out
Speaker C:in defence and working as a psychologist in behavioural science, which covers all areas of sort of research and support. And one thing that really struck me through my whole career there was what happens to the people after conflict has happened? And nobody really asks that question. The people who are sort of left behind and sort of left to sort of get on with things themselves, communities that have been broken apart. And that led me to a question about what then became resilience. But the question grew out of lots of concerns over post-conflict communities, people trying to forge a sense of what comes next. How do you cope day to day when you have no house, no job? And actually, they weren't really questions necessarily that I think the government was looking at. But I think they were exactly sort of questions that we perhaps should be thinking about. And my work, I've always worked as a social psychologist. So there are many different flavours of psychology. Social psychologists are much more concerned with what makes us human because of the social world we live in. So we don't tend to be too much inside just the minds of the individual, we look much more at the interaction between people and their surroundings, and understand the psychology that happens between people because of relationships, because of our social world. So for me, I've always been interested in sort of taking that resilience question on and saying, well, what can we learn about resilience that goes beyond the idea that either some people have it, some people don't. And my work has always been focused very much on things like social identity, which is our sense of who we are, because of the different social groups we belong to, the different relationships we have, our sort of membership in society. And my research at Sussex University is looking at refugees and their social identity and what that tells us about resilience. So it's been quite an interesting journey. Because as a social psychologist, I tend to work from the outside in, I start with looking at the context and work towards the individual, a lot of psychologists start from inside and work out, they start from the individual and look at all the influences that way.
Speaker A:Okay. So starting out with what might be just a really broad question. How does I mean, a couple of things that you said that the fact that you're a social psychologist, and the second thinking about psychology from the aspect of someone is not a question of whether someone has it or not. Yeah. Can you talk to me a little bit about some, well, what the connection is there between building resilience, let's say, and the society that's around you or the community that you live in?
Speaker C:Yeah, well, it's probably useful just to sort of say a couple of things about what it's not, because I think there's, it's quite a controversial field still, because resilience is quite zeitgeisty, you know, everyone's after it, everybody wants a bit of it, organisations want it in their organisations, people want it for themselves. And actually, there's a tendency to look at it as something that people have or don't have. You know, are they resilient? Aren't they? And can we measure it? And there's been a lot of research, especially in sort of the US Army looking at all their personality traits, that tell us that people will be resilient in certain situations. And actually, when you, you know, look at that research in a bit more detail, what you find is that it's not a thing, it's not something you either possess or don't have, it's more of a process. And it's something that happens between the person and the context they're in. So what happens when, for example, and we see this a lot, again, sort of drawing on experiences, working defence, you see people who are very, very good in the line of fire, you might have an amazing helicopter pilot who can go in and evacuate casualties and deal with, you know, high stress, high tempo environments. But when they go home, and they're back into being the role as a mother, and suddenly they're looking after their children and dealing with family life, it's really, really difficult, and they and they find they can't cope. So resilience isn't something that people always have, it's something that is dependent on the situations they're in. And I
Speaker B:think as a social psychologist, that makes it much more interesting. So what, what, what aspects of your social environment seem to seem to have the biggest influence? Well, so asking me as somebody
Speaker C:who is an identity theorist, I would say it's your identity. So it's a sense of who you are at any one point in time, that is going to shape how you perceive something happening. So a lot of resilience comes with traditionally it's seen as how did you respond after that car crash, that mugging that job loss, that grief. And actually, what we tend to find is that it's often about how people perceive what's going on that determines how well they cope with it or not. So a lot of it actually happens before the thing itself actually occurs. So, you know, sometimes that's very difficult to say, because if you're suddenly going to be held at knife point in the car park, you can't necessarily prepare yourself for an event like that. But you can prepare yourself for other events and the way in which we see them what we sort of call appraisal, how we actually cognitively appraise the situation, gives us the skills and the resources and the sort of self awareness to deal with it or not. So it's our sense of what's going on. And one of what resources have
Speaker B:I got to deal with it. So so yeah, so it's interesting. So it's not about it's not just it's not like the same situation is gonna it's gonna have a different impact on us because we behave differently. But it's how we understand what that situation is in the first place. Yeah. So is it is it because so is it other other certain approaches or tools that someone is able cognitive tools that people are able to bring to bear in their understanding of a situation? Or is it actually more about other aspects of them? So in other words, like, let's say if you're if you're a high status individual, I'd imagine you'd be less bothered about a mugging than if you're a low status individual. You know, you would it would have less of an impact. But of course, you can't really affect that. But so I'm just wondering to what extent you can affect it.
Speaker C:So it's interesting, because there are sort of two to the two way process going on. One is how you see yourself as it's happening, you know, what and what skills you think you've got, you know, whether you've got the resources to deal with it. So, you know, if you look at the research, if you if something difficult happens in your life, if you can carry on with all the other things, if everything else continues, all the other sort of sense of who you are. So if you lose your job, but you've still got your house and your kids and your family relationships, and your mates at the football club or whatever else, it's easy for you to cope with it. So there are certain things you can do. But it also depends on how other people see you. So if somebody says, well, you know, that woman got attacked, because, you know, she was a woman, she was asking for it, because the way she dressed, suddenly somebody else is framing who you were. And it changes that event from being something that you that just happened to being something that somebody else says was your fault. And the impact the psychological impact of framing somebody's identity because in the in an event happening, can be really, really powerful. And in my research, I look at it in terms of refugees, because refugee is obviously one of those really powerful labels. And it affects people how people see a situation. So you have, I mean,
Speaker B:refugees are almost perfect test cases for you, in that they completely supplanted from presumably what was once probably quite a stable community to a totally new one where all of their social identity has just been scrubbed out. Yeah. And now they've got this, you know, and I so I often wonder I was in fact, yesterday, I was the guy who was, I got a cab and the guy who was was an Algerian mechanical engineer, who was a cabinet, I thought, well, you know, mechanical engineer. Now you're saying you don't get paid very much as a mechanical engineer in Algeria, and he didn't like it there. But, but it did, he did strike me that actually, you know, he's, he's in a totally different place in the social hierarchy. He's not, he's not a mechanical engineer. He's a cabbie.
Speaker C:Yeah. And that's hugely difficult, because, well, two things. One, I think we have a perception that a lot of social identities are scrubbed. So it's like, you're not, you're no longer the person you were in Algeria, or in Syria, or, you know, South Sudan, or wherever you've come from. And you're starting again. That's a perception we have in the UK and in other countries. Actually, it's not at all the perception many refugees have, because they still say, well, you know what, I'm still a maths professor, and a dad, and, you know, a French speaker, or whatever it is that they do. But society very rarely recognises those other things that make up that person. And by doing that, it's really disempowering, because what you end up doing is saying, you're a refugee, so you're going to deal with it like a refugee. And if you live your whole life being told you're a refugee, and this is the sort of scope of resources at your disposal, there's not much you can do. And so it's, you lock them down a little bit. Peter?
Speaker D:So you say that there's more of a process than a set of inherent traits. Yeah. But are there things that you can do to generally improve your psychological resilience? Yes. So I was in the army, and a lot of our basic army training is about sort of generally toughening you up, and making you a good team player, etc. Where did it go wrong, Peter? That's why I left. That's why I got kicked out. So is that sort of recognised and well studied?
Speaker A:Sorry, before you answer that, as a part of that, can you tell us what you mean by resilience? What is the definition of being psychologically resilient?
Speaker C:Yeah, well, it's a sort of million dollar question, really. And psychologists are still sort of fighting over what it means. Some people deny it's actually a thing. So a lot of psychologists will say it's not actually a thing. It's just a term.
Speaker B:There's certain behaviours. Yeah. And we call some resilient and some not resilient.
Speaker C:And what I think generally, people say that there's a contribution of lots of things come together to create resilience. So personally, I think the best definition is that it's a process. And it's a sort of dynamic process of what happens between a person or a group of people and a situation. And it is important to look at that group of people, because a lot of what researchers have learned about how people deal in emergency situations after terrorist attacks, about how instantly a group can become resilient, is really interesting. So it's about what's happening in that moment between people being in a situation, perceiving what's going on and making sense of it, thinking, does this relate to me? So am I in that threat here now or in the future? And can I do anything about it? And then the decisions and behaviours that then follow on from that. So what we know is that individuals go through this appraisal process. So you can help people with that in terms of your Peter, your question about, you know, appraisal and can, you know, can we do anything about it? But actually, we can see that quite a lot in groups in that, you know, people often take their cue from other people. So they have what's called common fate, you know, you're in London Underground, smoke starts filling up your carriage. You're not necessarily thinking, do I personally have a resilient personality? What you tend to do is you tend to go to a sort of shared identity and think, what's everyone else like me doing right now? What would be the best thing to do? Because we're all in this together. And we all have to get through it. So you see some really powerful effects of what's called collective resilience happening. So it sort of overrides to your question, Peter about, well, you know, do I have a resilient personality type? And people are still looking for that. There's a big market to be made in designing psychometrics around looking for like, the resilient personality is a very Western construct as well. So it's, you know, lots of people would like to look for it and select for it. But the reality is, you know, a person cannot be consistently resilient through their life.
Speaker D:But you can, but it felt like when a lot of the army training, command training, they present you with artificial but stressful situations where you'll be in charge of a small team and your job is to get over a gap with a limited set of things while doing it quietly, etc, etc. And the doing the task wasn't the informative thing. It was always the debrief afterwards about remind, you know, helping you unpick your thought process of what was going through your head at the time and reminding you that if you come across this sort of thing next time, then there are other things you can do. You can delegate and you can play to people's strengths and you can use the resources that you've got that you may have forgotten about. And then you practice that again and try and implement those things. But it was, it felt much like CBT. It was sort of, when you're in this situation, here's some cognitive tools that you can use to give yourself a prompt to make yourself feel empowered and to remind yourself of your own strengths and the strengths of your team, etc. That gave you a toolbox that felt like it was making you more resilient in that kind of situation. Yeah, and that's actually a much
Speaker C:better approach, which is giving you the sort of skills and the self-awareness to be able to read a situation well, and have that sort of meta thought of, how is my thinking influencing what I'm about to do? You know, and so if you're about to go into an exam, or you're about to go and, you know, command a troop of soldiers, whatever it is, thinking, okay, so what's happening now for me? How am I approaching it? So the approach path is really important, because that whole expectation management at the outset of what's about to come, will really sort of, you know,
Speaker B:people stand or fall by their expectations. So what do you mean by your approach? Like, what does good look like? What does doing it properly look like compared to doing it? What's a resilient way of approaching it compared to a not resilient way? Yeah, well, you see that again is a tricky question. Stop saying it's a debate. Well, it is a debate. You've got to come down one side or the other. Get off that bench. Yeah, this isn't, we're not, this isn't Aviva for your, you know, for your PhD. It's good practice for it though, Nick.
Speaker C:And so, well, because again, there's a political angle to this, which is whose yardstick of success are you using? You know, so what counts as a successful outcome? You know, critics would argue quite rightly that, you know, if you want to create self-sufficiency and resilience in societies, it basically says to people, you've got to be self-reliant, you've got to have the skills and so we don't have to worry so much about helping you. It's your fault you're not getting a job and that allows, you know, because of your lack of resilience. So it sort of begs the question, well, what is, what does a resilient outcome look like? And I think that really comes down to a very, the context in which you're operating. You know, it depends whether you are talking to a nine-year-old homeless kid about what resilience looks like for him when he's on the street day in, day out versus talking to a CEO about what resilience looks like when you're juggling, you know, 72 different demands and family and everything else. So there's no
Speaker B:one size fits all. Is it easier to point to what not resilient looks like then? Because it seems like, okay, we know that people are, let's say they're getting on with it and it's getting, things are getting done. They might, they might have all, God knows what's going on inside them. They might be having a hard time a bit, but they are getting on with it versus what the opposite,
Speaker C:like what is not resilient? So I think, I think one, one good way of thinking about resilience, I'll come to the bit about what it's not, because that really does help clarify things, I think, but I do think it is worth mentioning resilience always has to be looked at in, in parallel with wellbeing and wellbeing tends to be one of these words again, where everyone's like, oh, wellbeing, everyone's talking about wellbeing, but fundamentally, if you are not well physically or mentally, you cannot parent well, you cannot lead well, you cannot command well, you cannot do many things in life. So being, being well mentally and physically, not being a superhero, not being exceeding it. Some people talk about resilience is, you know, surviving and thriving. It's not about constant growth and perfectionism. If you are managing and you are well physically and mentally, you know, and you have to use your own baseline for that, really, that you are able to build relationships and manage your day and feel generally in a good place, then you're probably demonstrating resilience, but that will depend on each person. And there'll be criteria, you know, in the British army, they're going to have their own criteria of what they're looking for as being able to, you know, can they still command? Can they still receive, you know, commands? Can they still operate a weapon? Can they still look out for their peers? You know, all these sorts of things. So it comes down, there are nuances, but fundamentally resilience is about maintaining or enhancing wellbeing. It's not, does that help?
Speaker B:I mean, in a way it's sort of, it's, what we're saying is that resilience is actually fundamentally is an internally appraised thing that actually whether you're resilient fundamentally comes down to whether or not you are happy in the situation you're in. Yeah, a lot of it. Yeah, it comes down to that. Rather than different, like expressing itself in certain kinds of behaviour, like it's not that there are certain things. I don't think you can stick behavioural labels on it. Almost like, is this, are you in a miserable situation?
Speaker C:It's more a state of being that enables you to get on with your life, and whatever that is that you're trying to do.
Speaker A:Yeah, doesn't it go back to identity? You're able to continue with who you are and function in the way that you normally would.
Speaker C:Which is why when you look at it in a group context, it's really important because there'll be differences between what you want to do as an individual, you know, how you want to live your life, but it might be very different when you're operating under the kind of collective identity of being in the British army, or, you know, you're coping as a new parent that, you know, you actually have some sort of shared understanding of, you know, what does it mean to be basically doing okay as a parent or an army officer or a soldier. And so often we use that sort of sense of sort of collective sort of objectives, if you like, to measure whether, you know, the group is resilient, the team is resilient. So in an organisation, if I work with an organisation, a lot of it is about, well, okay, so what does things going well look like? You know, how would you express it and get people to talk about, you know, what's a day like when actually things are working well?
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, I had to be honest, I hadn't really thought about how complex is I'm going to let you off a little bit for saying that you that you're already because I now I'm starting to think like, yeah, because because, you know, there's a lot of environments that people would describe as toxic. Yeah, but which nevertheless, where things get done, and you might think, well, you know, it might be it might be that actually, you know, you wouldn't be able to get those outcomes were it not for the things that, you know, in an ideal world, we wouldn't necessarily. Yeah. And, and there's a kind of trade off there. But it's hard. It's not easy to say, well, this is like straight up bad. Now, it might be really stressful people, and they might be miserable. Yeah. But on the flip side, things are getting done. And they might not be getting
Speaker C:done if they're so. Yeah, absolutely. It's not it's not so straightforward. I think what is an important distinction to make is between resilience, recovery, and resistance people sometimes, and you see this, you see this in organizations that sort of a leader might be thought of as being resilient, because they get stuff done, and they and nothing seems to touch them, you know, they're like Teflon, they just they just get through a situation. Because they're resisting the stress, you'll probably find that their well being mentally and physically is taking a hit. And probably collectively, the team is probably taking a hit, they might still be keeping their profits high, they might still be impressing the board sustainable, but it's not sustainable. And so, you know, this is a problem we have in the West, when we think that people are successful, and are coping, these are things that are not resilient. Because if you're coping through gritted teeth, just to get through the day, and you're hitting, you know, a bottle of wine a night just to sort of make it all the pain go away, or whatever it is, that that might have got you through the difficult day. But that's not going to set you up very well in the long term or dealing with the next issue. There's nothing there that that's not good for your well being mentally or physically. And it's not good for the well being of the people around you, family, colleagues,
Speaker D:everybody else. So coping, resistance, the system is sort of critical. It's the point of breaking.
Speaker C:Exactly. And, but I mean, a lot of people do function at that level. And they think that they are still succeeding. But I think increasingly, we would argue that our measure of success should actually be a lot more around people's mental and physical well being.
Speaker B:I'm going to push on this a little bit, not because I mean, I hate bloody hate toxic work environments. And I and I one of the reasons that I'm so happy having left the MOD is because I control it and create his own toxic environment. But, but I sort of wonder, unless you can prove that it's worse, like for for you as an outcome. Yeah. Who are you to say that, you know, the person who they want to, they just want to get ahead in life, they working 18 hour days, at the weekend, they go out and drink a bottle of vodka. And then on Monday, they're back in work. Now, I wouldn't want to have to live like that. But is that bad? Is that bad for that person? I would argue. What in what sense is it bad? It's achieving the goals that they or are you saying that they probably mistaken about what their goals are? Or? Yeah, well, I would ask. Sounds a bit paternalist. That's all.
Speaker A:Yeah. Once you've answered this, I want us to come back to Peter. And sure. Yeah. So yeah, go ahead.
Speaker C:Yeah. I mean, it can be a little bit because it can be a bit like, you know, are you taking care of yourself? Are you looking after yourself? And you know, a person has a right to live their life as they want to. But we have a tendency to assume that people who live their life like that do so in isolation from everyone else. And what we know is that sort of behavior, even if they think, well, this isn't causing any ripples anywhere else will be because fundamentally, if somebody is living their life like that, they're going to miss the decimal point on the sales transaction, they're going to snap at a colleague, they're not going to get the sleep. So they're not making the best decisions that they can possibly make.
Speaker A:They've got a terrible home life. Yeah. As you were describing that person, you know, I just imagine sort of working around that person, it'd be horrible. It'd be awful for everyone. Peter?
Speaker D:It just struck me when I was doing a bit of reading and I was reading about the factors that sort of help develop and sustain resilience and things like making realistic plans and being able to take steps necessary to complete them. Confidence in one's own strengths and well, there's an awareness of one's own strengths and abilities, sort of communication and problem solving skills. And the fourth was sort of ability to manage sort of impulses and emotions and feelings, not like suppress them, but manage them. They seem really analogous to the things that bring it back to analysis and decision making qualities that we would expect to see in good analysts. It's about sort of rational, methodical thought. It's about a good linear understanding of the world and an ability to sort of update your understanding based on new information. They feel like they're two sides of the same brain.
Speaker C:Well, it's a very cognitive and emotional process, resilience, because you're appraising a situation and, you know, certainly, you know, as we now know, it's our emotional response to something that happens first, and then we think about it. We used to think it was the other way around, that we take in information, we have an emotional response to it. We don't. So increasingly, we've realized that our emotional response to situations and emotional intelligence is fundamental. And you would, I haven't seen the research, I can quote it, but there's probably a correlation between emotional intelligence and resilience, however you want to measure it, because I think if you can manage them, because the moment you feel something, you start to think something. So going back to your thing about CBT, you know, so in a situation, you know, I lived in South America for a number of years, and I kept preparing myself for that moment where someone puts a gun up against the window of your car with your kids in the backseat and thinking, I've got to really think about how I'm going to feel about that. So the thoughts that then come off the back of it are ones that get us out of that situation. And so you're right, a lot of that sort of preparing yourself mentally, thinking through what your options are, thinking through what's available to you. So you know, I have to think of myself as, do I think of myself as a woman and a mother in that situation? Well, yes, because my instincts are about protecting my children. But I don't think about myself as a woman in the sense of like, poor me, I'm not going to be able to cope because this man's pointing a gun at me. I have to think about it in a different
Speaker D:way. So your mental preparation for that scenario wasn't just like, right, this is what I will do, I'll accelerate and turn left and get to safety. It also includes like, in that moment when that happens, what are the sorts of things that are going to go through my head, what are the conflicting requirements and desires, and kind of pre, you know, ahead of time, choosing how to react
Speaker C:emotionally. Yeah, you are priming yourself for those events. And I think if you can prime yourself in that way, you introduce a set of scripts and beliefs about who you are and what you can do, which accelerates your ability to make better decisions in the event. Because human brain is
Speaker D:brilliant at sort of simulating the world, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. But you could argue our whole world is a simulation anyway. So then that's what we're doing there, is you're kind of rehearsing it ahead of time, but not just the actions, but preparing emotionally and
Speaker B:psychologically. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's interesting when you, because I just think, you know, one of the ways that I feel like I'm getting wiser as I get older, is that I don't think I'm any less good at anticipating how I'm going to respond to situations. I'm always way too optimistic about my, you know, my ability to kind of stand up to, you know, stressful situations and stuff. But I've learned that I'm way too optimistic, you know, and I think that that is helpful. So like, you know, and I, so for example, I have very weird sleep patterns. And, you know, and I always think, well, you know, I got a workshop to run tomorrow, I can, I carry on working, I'll get this thing done, and then I'll feel better. And tomorrow, everything will be fine. And then of course, tomorrow, everything seems horrifically stressful, because I haven't had any sleep. And that's just a huge, well, I think now I sort of understand that. Now, I know, I sort of think I can cope, some bit of my brain says you'll be able to cope. But the more rational bit says, no, actually, it's probably a good idea if you get some sleep. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, so I think I'm probably bad intuitively, but I've had to aim off for that. Well, yeah, I think, well,
Speaker C:two things you bring up there. One is reflecting on what happened last time. So, you know, point Peter made that, you know, going back and doing the lessons learned is really important. Like, could you know, did it work out? Well, yes, it did. That's probably the biggest driver of your behaviour that you probably are, you have, despite the odds of your lack of sleep, probably successful. Pulled it off. Pulled it off. As usual. And so until it goes badly wrong for you one day, you probably will find that you will just keep creating it because we're, you know, creatures of habit, we do the same thing. But you know, and I do this in my coaching is partly to go back to say to people like, okay, so let's reflect on the lead up to this event. You know, who were you? What were you thinking? How did you anticipate the outcomes? Because that sort of approach, even if you don't have time to do the approach stuff beforehand, because it happens out of the blue. If you go back and do a reapproach, okay, so let's look at this again. Let's reappraise what happened. Let's look at all the different things. You can learn a lot from that. But you have to take the time to do it. And if you're moving at 100 miles an hour, and you're doing lots of different things, people often don't have the time to stop and actually look at it. I do. I have a sorry,
Speaker A:Fraser. I was gonna say also, isn't it the as you sort of get older. And you might have many, many times where you have your one, two hours sleep and you pull it off. But actually something you start to notice is you start to get run a bit ragged in life. And it's that sort of so it's not just about the experience in itself. It's the sort of the wider sense of it. And that yeah,
Speaker B:that wider sense of experience. Yeah. On the other hand, as you get older, I feel like you have more and you've got more, more experience in the bank to bring to bear new situations. You know, if you think of something, I guess, something that a lot of people find really stressful, which is public speaking. And I've done it so much now that even though I still get stressed about it, it's really not it's completely manageable stress. Yeah. It's like, I notice it, I sort of think I'm really stressed. Oh, it's because I've got that thing tomorrow. But it doesn't it doesn't sit there bothering me. Yeah, because I've done it so many times. Well, I would
Speaker C:argue in that situation, that's because you've got a pretty strong identity as a good public speaker, like in that role when they're the audience listening to you. But you know, the audience, you know, there's a relationship set up there. You're the speaker, they're the audience as a social identity, I'm the speaker. And if you enjoy that, and you do well, and you perform well in that role, with that identity, that can carry you through. So I do want to sort of draw things
Speaker A:to a conclusion. I don't have a question that will. Absolutely, you are allowed to have your question. But let us be mindful of that as soon as I want to wrap this up. Okay. But I want to hear from
Speaker D:Peter first. Yeah, very briefly, you mentioned that it's an important factor is the framing and how you see yourself and how others perhaps impose an image on you. So are there practical guidelines that are given to, for example, the police and ambulance service for when they are the first responders on a particularly stressful situation? Like, I can imagine if you're dealing, you're presented with a potential rape victim, how you go about conducting yourself with that person will put them in a particular mindset, which will either help or hinder their psychological
Speaker C:recovery. Yeah. Are there such guidelines? So I would hope so. I certainly know that there's work going on with the emergency services, some really good research at Sussex that looks at helping the emergency services understand how some of these group dynamics unfold and what the police, what the, you know, ambulance paramedics can do to get the best out of those dynamics, whether they're given that sort of training as they're going through, I'm not sure. But it's, you know, that's exactly what they should be doing. Yeah. And I think in the context, I look at it in terms of working with refugees, part of the recommendations I'll be making is, you know, how when people are working with refugees, as volunteers, as humanitarians, as members of UNHCR, how does their positioning of themselves to the refugee create these different scripts, these different expectations? You know, if they refer to them as, you know, there's that Muslim refugee, instantly that person is framed and that changes their feelings and thoughts. I can imagine referring somebody as a victim. Absolutely. Yeah, it introduces all this perception. And then that perception changes how people appraise a situation they're in or have been in. And then that makes, that has an impact on their wellbeing. So it's not just about how we think about ourselves and those around us. But if we're dealing with people, how are we positioning them and their identity? Because we are influencing the way that they see the world in the way that we interact with them. And that's incredibly powerful and can be incredibly damaging on both sides. Yeah. So while we're on the,
Speaker B:we're sort of zooming in a bit on, you know, practical advice. Yeah. I suppose it'd be one thing that I think I'm probably not very good at noticing at the time, but which I don't know if there is any kind of research about it, but are there things that you or other people can reliably look for when you can say actually, you know, indicators of fragility, where your resilience might be at breaking point? Sort of flags and things you mean? Like, are there things that you, are there sort of red lights, which we should look for, which we might not be otherwise aware of? I mean, I suppose what I'm saying is if you look at people where it has gone, who, you know, in some way, you know, whose resilience has broken, what is it? What are the first things to go? At what point should they have started doing something about it? Yeah. Well, I think when you see it,
Speaker C:you tend to see it in their wellbeing. So you tend to see it in their mental and physical health. And I think, you know, bringing this right back to how you introduced it with Harry and Meghan, the reason that they were talking a lot about their mental health is because the events that they were coming up against time and time again, and the way in which the press and the sort of public discourse was positioning them was having an impact on their, on their wellbeing. And they took the decision to claim that ground back in order to be able, presumably to live a life where they could function physically and mentally with their kids and everything else. So I think, you know, being really aware of what's going on in people's lives that, you know, if they're constantly getting ill, and if they're snapping at their staff, and if they're, you know, if they're just not communicating, or they're making poor decisions, you know, there's somebody who is slightly unravelling if they're, you know, people become isolated from the people that they normally, you know, interact with. So which is why, you know, sort of loneliness and isolation is a big societal question, because we really rely on those people around us to be part of our resilience. You know, those groups provide us with resource, with information, with social support, which is really important. And normalisation as well. Absolutely. We get our social norms from those groups, they tell us how, you know, they're the handrails that tell us what to do and how to think in different situations. So if we're not using those groups, or those handrails aren't available to us, people become very vulnerable very quickly. So in the case of refugees, as you said, if you've upsticked from Aleppo and moved to, you know, South East England, there aren't many familiar handrails there, you know, to help you anchor yourself back down and think, okay, I get what's going on here. And now I can think about getting a job and learn a language. And yet we still kind of think, God, I haven't learned a language yet. You know, why aren't they integrating? It's like, okay, you go and park yourself in Aleppo with none of your social identification cues and see how you get on. You know, our resilience relies on us being able to interact
Speaker A:with that environment. So before we wrap up, is there anything anyone, any of you would like to
Speaker B:say? Yeah, just I mean, we might look at Harry and Meghan and think that's sort of very much first, top tier of first world problems, right? But I mean, I guess, you know, is it harder? Is it harder to be Harry and Meghan or a refugee? Or is it, you know, everyone is fighting the same sorts of battles deep down and actually, it's a meaningful comparison? Like, should we have as much sympathy for Harry and Meghan? Or is that, am I already approaching it from the wrong?
Speaker C:Well, I think I mean, the moment that we start looking for sort of universal measures of everyone should feel happy when they are feeling X, or when they are demonstrating why we're in dangerous territory, because you can't do it unless you look at the unique circumstances for each person. So you cannot compare, you know, a homeless woman on the streets of London with Meghan. I mean, we'd look at, oh, but Meghan's so privileged and has so many opportunities. But within the context of what is it that enables her to live her life, her yardsticks, her metrics are really different. And you can only really look at someone's resilience within that context, it doesn't make sense to try and apply one set of measurements onto somebody else, especially across different cultures. And certainly, that's what I found in doing my research at Sussex that you, you have to really understand the social world in which these people live to get a handle on what resilience looks like. And you can't, I couldn't then take that and tell you, you know, on a scale of zero to 10, how well Harry and Meghan are doing, my scale just would not make sense, you would have to. A typical social psychologist can't make a generalist model of everything. I know, exactly.
Speaker B:Turns out we're all quite different and influenced by our social environment. A special model, special studies have been done on people who are like second in line to the throne. And we've discovered all the indicators of stress if you're a prince who's never going to be king.
Speaker C:The other thing is the situation changes constantly. I mean, you know, the world that Harry grew up in, and the world we're in now, and the relationships he's formed, and the fact he's become a dad, his social world is totally different. It will be totally different again when he's got teenage kids. You know, when he's living in Canada, you know, the context has changed. The moment the context changes, as a very famous researcher called Rutter once said, resilience changes.
Speaker A:So just before we wrap up, there is one thing I often ask our guests who come to us. So Susie, you're a social psychologist. If you weren't a social psychologist, what would you be?
Speaker C:Oh, that's a good question. Do you know, I was thinking about this the other day, having a conversation with my children about futures and things. I would like to be hang on, I have to get the title of this right, a theoretical particle physicist.
Speaker B:What?
Speaker C:Yeah. Do you know, I would because one thing I find... Very similar to social psychology. Really similar. A little crossover there. Do you know, I think what I've discovered is I really find how things are constructed really interesting. And I think the more I read into it, and I realise that actually, when you start looking at what makes things up, it's not quite the reality you think it is. That actually, there aren't as many measurable truths in this world as you think there are.
Speaker D:There is a fundamental similarity between those two disciplines, though. And that's a lot of it is untestable. Yeah. Very unfalsifiable.
Speaker C:If you were to do a Myers-Briggs on me, I'm very intuitive. I like thinking in that bigger picture, which is why I'd be a theoretical particle physicist, not an experimental particle physicist.
Speaker D:I mean, there's a promise that theoretical physics becomes testable with bigger colliders and all sorts of other things. You've massively veered into a different podcast.
Speaker B:We've just crashed through some kind of wormhole. From neurons to neutrons.
Speaker A:Well, that's a really interesting answer. Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, look, on that note, we'll wrap up. So thank you, as always, to listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. But a special thanks to our special guest this week, to Susie Ballentyne. Thank you very much for joining us. But thanks to one and all. And until next time, goodbye.
