Sufferred Stubbornness: Why "I Had To Suffer, So You Should To" Holds Back Change In School

Have you ever taken a really great idea to a colleague, something you just know is going to have a huge impact, only to be shot down “just because?”

Maybe you’ve noticed something isn’t quite working in school and you’ve seen an effective alternative, but you’ve been hit with the party line of “that’s not how we do things here”.

Perhaps you’ve even seen this in your own family when you were younger. Your relatives might have been able to ease some hardship for you, but left you to struggle in the name of “character building”.

If you’ve ever experienced this, you’re not alone. In fact, this is seen in groups from Fraternity members undergoing hazing to prisoners of war enduring the most unimaginable conditions!

This refusal of change is more often than not linked to what I’ve coined as Suffered Stubbornness.

It’s this idea that those around us stand in the way of positive change because they have had to endure a very similar challenge, and something inside them just drops their book bag, stamps their feet, and screams “it’s not fair!” whenever the opportunity for others to have it easier presents itself. This affects us not just on a school level (and especially with wellbeing!) but also at the highest level in education.

Please note, I’m not for a second sitting here and suggesting that I’m immune from this, either. It’s also certainly not only those with the power to create change that struggle with this. As we’ll explore, Suffered Stubbornness affects almost all of us in one way or another. Yet, understanding, exploring and empathetically exposing it could be the difference between a school system where our staff are able to truly thrive and one where they barely survive before burning out completely.

However, the cards are stacked against us. This Suffered Stubbornness is a slippery customer - if it were tangible, I imagine it would look somewhat Dick Dastardly-esque. It slips under the radar, undetectable to those who’re afflicted. They don’t know they’re doing it, but the complex psychology behind the frustrating phenomenon gives us clues as to why it is so insidious.

In the minds of those who are feeling this particular kind of stubbornness, the first thing we see is the activation of The Just-World Hypothesis and Moral Licencing. Coined by Lerner in the 1960s, the former is our belief that the world is, or has to be, fair; it makes life feel ordered, predictable and safe - sadly, it’s just not true. However, we defend this belief (nay, wish!) with everything we’ve got, even inflicting suffering on others because if we went through it, they have to go through it too - otherwise the whole model of a fair world is broken in our brains!

This is then reinforced by Moral Licensing, the concept that having done a previous good, moral or righteous action gives us a “licence” and reduces our obligation to be good, moral or righteous in the future. In the case of Suffered Stubbornness, this previous action is in the fact that we suffered, we sacrificed and so we’ve done our part.

Our hyperawareness of unfairness is not just psychological, though. Inside our brains we literally have a “fairness detector”: The Anterior Insula. When someone who has gone through hardship and then sees someone else being spared it, it’s likely the anterior insula will light up as it clocks on to this discrepancy. Our aversion to unfairness isn’t just psychological, it’s neurochemical too! It also makes a lot of sense that, given our tribal past, our brains would evolve to call out inequity and inequality in our groups when it seems to threaten our own interests.

We’ve already dug fairly deep into the thinking behind this psychological change-blocker, but we’re just getting started. We’re about to delve a lot deeper…

Something we see an awful lot in teaching, something that actually exacerbates the current workload crisis, is Effort Justification: in short, “I suffered, and so it was worth it”.

Based on the research of Aronson & Mills in the late 1950s, Effort Justification is the idea that the more we suffer for something, the more valuable that thing is. The way they went about investigating this though was somewhat humiliating. In a large sample of female American college students, they asked the students to read increasingly embarrassing material aloud to groups of their peers before being allowed to join a new study group.

The researchers found that the more embarrassing the material, the more interesting and valuable the students rated their new peer group - even though each group was deliberately asked to maintain the same level of dullness in their discussions! In fact, the participating students didn’t even hold resentment. They actually viewed their effort (extreme social discomfort) as the price they needed to pay to enter these perceived high-value groups.

They hadn’t just separated the unpleasantness of the experience from their new group; they’d actually inflated the value of the group in their minds! This is Cognitive Dissonance (Festinger, 1957), where we hold two connected but conflicting ideas, and we disregard the latter to make ourselves feel more comfortable. For example, “I just read some highly embarrassing material to my classmates” and “My new study group is useless - it wasn’t even worth it” are two uncomfortable thoughts, so we ignore the latter to justify the former. Festinger even went as far to give us the immortal phrase:

“We come to love the things we suffer for.”

This takes us nicely into our fifth and final piece of psychological trickery that supports Suffered Stubbornness: System Justification Theory. One of the more “out-there” and, frankly, outright ridiculous concepts for why we might see colleagues refuse positive change, research suggests System Justification affects roughly 1 in 4 of us.

System Justification Theory does exactly what it says on the tin; we justify the systems that harmed us as a way to justify our suffering. According to Jost & Banaji (1994), there are three main reasons we do this: our desire for predictability, our desire to feel safe and manage threats and our desire to feel connected and validated by our group.

In defense of the known, research shows that we often exaggerate the negative qualities of any change that threatens the status quo. Even more bizarrely, in a recent study across four European countries, it was found that those who are most disadvantaged by a system often justify and protect it even more strongly than those who benefit from it! The uncertainty of a new, unknown system triggers more anxiety than the predictability of a familiar, albeit flawed, one. This fear of change is first detected by our amygdala, our “brain’s threat radar”. We’re literally wired to watch out for uncertainty and it registers as a real danger to our survival! Again, another way in which Suffered Stubbornness is neurochemical and not just psychological.

So, we’ve explored some (and these genuinely are just some of them) of the main mechanisms behind this phenomenon. What do we do about it? How do we overcome Suffered Stubbornness in our schools?

Firstly, as I alluded to earlier, understanding this, exploring it and empathetically exposing it where we can is going to be fundamental to calling it out and supporting (not challenging) those experiencing it. But considering why it is perpetuated, even protected, is also critical.

To finish, I want to touch on some of the wider reasons this happens.

The truth is, Suffered Stubbornness doesn’t work on only an individual level. When lots of people in the system have experienced the same hardship the psychologically outlined here manifests in a cultural norm, through social biases like Groupthink - exactly what it sounds like. When we’re all suffering, the warning light goes out. If it’s normal, it’s no longer alarming to our brains. In fact, if we’re all suffering and one individual isn’t, then that actually raises our alarm system more!

This threatens our Meritocracy of Sacrifice: the notion that merit, validation or achievement comes from sacrifice of the self. If everyone else upholds the belief that we must suffer to see success, and one person doesn’t? Well, that individual is deemed lazy, uncommitted or “not like us” - even in spite of the fact that they may be achieving the same as, or even sometimes more, than those around them. When that’s the case, boy oh boy, this really rubs us up the wrong way!

Finally, a quick call-back to System Justification Theory. We come to love what harms us and the predictability, certainty and perceived safety that familiarity gives. We defend the status quo to protect what we know. Again, this is hard to overcome, but not impossible. Being honest about this and sharing openly the shortcomings of our current systems in school from a place of forward-thinking, not needless negativity, is going to be critical.

The solutions for Suffered Stubbornness can again be found in the 6Cs. In Care, an environment that encourages discussion around wellbeing and works to normalise boundaries is going to be key. Within Capacity lies the opportunity for the discussion we need around Effort Justification. Clarity always comes back to strong communication, which is going to be key here in exploring this as a staff team; new expectations must be communicated. The understanding and awareness around these roadblocks to change in school falls under Competency; this C isn’t just about teaching & learning, SEND or support student behaviour. Within this as well comes psychological safety and our willingness to make mistakes. Contribution is of course a running theme throughout a community approach. Staff need both autonomy and responsibility if we want to see successful change. And finally, Connection: trust, belonging, kindness.

Once again, it is our inherent, human need for Connection that can keep us stuck, or it can be the key that unlocks innovative, imaginative new approaches to what life looks like in our schools.

References

Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2), 177–181.

Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Row, Peterson and Company. (Reissued 1962, Stanford University Press.)

Lerner, M. J. (1965). Evaluation of performance as a function of performer's reward and attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1(4), 355–360.

Lerner, M. J. (1980). The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. Plenum Press.

Jost, J. T., & Banaji, M. R. (1994). The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology, 33(1), 1–27.

Merritt, A. C., Effron, D. A., & Monin, B. (2010). Moral self-licensing: When being good frees us to be bad. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4(5), 344–357.

Monin, B., & Miller, D. T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 33–43.

Sanfey, A. G., Rilling, J. K., Aronson, J. A., Nystrom, L. E., & Cohen, J. D. (2003). The neural basis of economic decision-making in the Ultimatum Game. Science, 300(5626), 1755–1758.