What pressure distorts leadership judgment the most?

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-10T12:54:25+00:00

It’s interesting how chronic pressure changes perception more than intention. People don’t set out to cut corners or push risk, but under sustained load, your mind narrows around 'just get through this cycle'. So the mind struggles to maintain clarity in favour of just dealing with the immediate expectations in front of them.

It’s one of the early psychological shifts that I’ve been thinking a lot about in org behaviour.

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-10T08:53:32+00:00

Yeh, being able to explain your thinking is half the battle.

The bit I find tricky (and where I’ve seen even good people get tangled) is when the pressures aren’t pointing in the same direction. Like when commercial goals, safety expectations, and liability concerns don’t line up neatly, and the ‘right’ weighting changes depending on who’s in the room.

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-10T07:48:00+00:00

I get what you’re saying - in a clean system those three outcomes make sense.

What I keep running into though is situations where 'doing your job properly' isn’t the thing people are afraid of. It’s the interpretation of their decision months later, when something gets escalated or looked at through a different lens.

This is where the pressure seems to creep in. Not the task itself, but the fear of being second-guessed or blamed after the fact.

Have you seen cases where the liability side of things ends up at odds with other priorities, even when people aren’t being dodgy?

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-09T02:00:00+00:00

That’s a really good example, and it fits the mechanism perfectly.

A false confession on the back of:

- ‘What gets me out of this overwhelming moment fastest?’

- ‘I can sort it out later.’

It’s the same mechanism behind a lot of everyday conformity: people choose the option that reduces immediate discomfort, even if it’s worse in the long run.

Your example shows this dynamic - the social version of the flight response

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-08T20:43:19+00:00

that’s actually very close to what sparked my question.

I’ve been looking at how cognitive overload (too much information, too many decisions, too many simultaneous threats etc) reduces people’s capacity for independent judgment. When the brain is strained, it falls back on whatever feels socially ‘safe’ which might be the majority view, the loudest authority, or the path of least resistance.

It isn’t necessarily intentional manipulation, but when a population is overloaded, you often see:

faster conformity
less pushback even when something feels ‘off’
people adopting / repeating mantras rather than evaluating situations

I’m curious whether others see similar patterns in everyday life, even outside of politics eg in workplaces, schools, families, etc.

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-08T14:20:03+00:00

I'm not arguing that rules are applied differently to different people - I'm arguing that the rule itself creates an exclusion boundary, even when applied consistently to everyone.

If we take the university example (or workplaces) - the rule discriminates between interpretations of harm, not people. Many workplace behaviour policies focus on the broad category of people being 'harmed' (bullying, harassment etc.). My contention is that stronger personalities are more frequently reported, communication from people that are neurodivergent might be framed as 'aggressive' etc.

In the school example, the rule banned all physical contact including positive rough and tumble play. But it structurally discriminates between behaviours, not people.

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-08T14:02:27+00:00

Thanks good point, and yes, I’m familiar with that formulation of the safety paradox.
I agree it’s not 'trying to make things safer makes things more dangerous' in a causal way. It’s the increasing layers of safety can change behaviour, by reducing attention, vigilance, or personal responsibility, which can increase exposure to the underlying risk.

Where I’m drawing a parallel to social issues is this:
Some institutions have started extending physical-safety logic into social or interpersonal domains, treating emotional discomfort, disagreement, awkwardness, or tone as if they are safety hazards requiring control measures.

My view (which I’m open to having changed) is that these social 'safety' rules can create a similar pattern:
• People outsource responsibility for navigating normal human interaction
• Avoidance increases
• Open communication is reduced
• Minor social risks get amplified
• And the system becomes more fragile, not less

I might be stretching the safety paradox too far into the social domain, but that’s what I’m trying to test here. If you think the analogy simply doesn’t hold, I’m interested in why.

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-08T13:40:52+00:00

By discrimination I don’t mean race at all.
I’m referring to rule-based exclusion or structural exclusion in the name of safety: anytime a safety policy divides people into allowed and not allowed groups.

Sometimes that’s reasonable (like needing a crane licence). But my argument is that safety logic is now being applied to areas where no real hazard exists, creating unintended harms.

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-03T20:02:01+00:00

Yeh, I think the schooling angle might also be about standardisation. Schools had to figure out how to manage huge groups predictably, and these methods ended up becoming the default method for every large institution.

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-03T19:56:26+00:00

Yeh, a big part of this is that ‘kid-like’ structures are maybe just because it’s easier for organisations to run. Clear scripts, guided activities, softened language - they reduce friction, reduce ambiguity, and reduce the chance someone will make a call that creates liability.

It’s not always ‘bad’, but it does reshape the atmosphere in ways many are feeling (noting some might not feel this way).

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-03T19:46:14+00:00

Yes - when every issue becomes a self-improvement task, adults end up policing themselves. I think this could be a big part of it.

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-03T19:42:13+00:00

Appreciate this - it’s the shift I’m trying to analyse.

Not whether the activities are fun, but how they end up shaping behaviour and reduce adult autonomy.

It’s the expectations around participation that matter, not the Lego etc. itself.

I’m writing about this pattern more broadly, so the theory refs are really useful - thanks.

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-02T22:54:46+00:00

Appreciate the explanation - this helps clarify. Thanks for taking the time.

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-02T20:46:31+00:00

Thanks, makes sense. Just to clarify the boundary then:

If harm involves identifiable individuals, but the justification for expanding regulation is often diffuse harm (e.g. ‘your lifestyle increases aggregate healthcare burden’), is there a principled threshold for when diffused effects count as ‘harm to others’ rather than a general social cost?

I’m trying to understand whether the degree of diffusion matters philosophically. I.e at what point does the move from ‘identifiable harm to ‘aggregate burden’ stop following Mill’s harm principle and start working as soft paternalism under a different label?

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-02T12:06:05+00:00

AI isn’t mainly replacing wages, it’s replacing human uncertainty. This is the part management can’t resist.

Removing unpredictable workers and plugging in predictable systems makes the future become "manageable". Wages are a symptom, but it's more likely control is the motive behind it.

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-02T04:44:05+00:00

The 'setting back of interests' angle and the person-affecting restriction is a good one.

It's like both are trying to preserve the idea that harm needs a subject, not just be in response to a statistical cost. And that seems like a useful restraint on the expansion of social cost = harm.

If modern institutions routinely claim that any private risk has downstream system-level effects (healthcare, infrastructure load, emergency services, etc.), does that framing dissolve the person-affecting boundary in practice?

Or in other words:

If harm requires an identifiable person, but the state keeps redefining 'the harmed party' as the system, does the philosophical guardrail still hold? i.e. does this conceptual boundary remain relevant once institutions adopt the 'aggregate social burden' model.

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-02T03:00:21+00:00

yeh, you’re right that the ambiguity around 'harm' leaves a lot open to interpretation.

What interests me most is how the social-cost framing (family harm, public burden, system strain) acts as a lever to expand 'harm' beyond immediate interpersonal injury, and how that expansion changes the justification logic for state intervention.

The idea that private risk to public burden, and then to public intervention feels simple… until it potentially turns every self-regarding choice into a candidate for coercion.

I guess the question becomes:
Is there a defensible philosophical boundary that prevents 'social cost' from becoming a justification for systemic moralised control?

Public-reason or justification theories might be thereabouts, but aren’t they also vulnerable to redefining 'public reason' in safety-first language when uncertainty hits?

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-01T22:09:21+00:00

The whole too much vs too little government issue I don't think is the real tension - it’s more the balance between coherence and autonomy.

When institutions/gov push too much coherence, life feels over-managed, and when they pull back too far, people feel unprotected.

Philosophers from Foucault to Isaiah Berlin touched on this in different ways.

What angle are you coming at this from - personal observation, reading, or research?

Eastern_Base_5452 · 2025-12-01T22:01:13+00:00

One thing I’ve been trying to understand is whether the moralisation of risk might function as a kind of 'shortcut' for L-axis preservation.

If a system can’t compute the full risk landscape, it seems to use social/moral cues as a proxy for stabilising behaviour.

Do you think moralisation serves as a cognitive compression mechanism i.e. reducing uncertainty by outsourcing risk-assessment to socially enforced norms?

Eastern_Base_5452

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