Are You Trapped in a Wake? What is Prevalence Inflation?

Issue 170, July 25, 2024

Imagine this hypothetical situation. You are sucked into the slipstream of a fast-moving vehicle, controlled within a narrow bandwidth by its velocity. This may sound improbable, but racecar drivers use this technique to their advantage. It’s called drafting, and the low-pressure wake behind a leading car reduces the aerodynamic resistance on the front of the trailing car, allowing the second car to pull closer. As the second car nears the first, it pushes high-pressure air forward so less fast-moving air hits the lead car’s spoiler. (Wiki) Very risky, but strategic.

In boating, its wake may endanger others. A boat’s wake may rock, swamp, or capsize other boats and passengers may be thrown off balance or overboard, leading to serious injury. (Boat-Ed) Like racecar drivers, some boats ride inside of other boats’ wakes to smooth out the water. Wakes can be hazardous to others on many fronts and like most things in life, require proactive thinking and even a strategy to navigate the risks and consequences.

Prevalence Inflation

But there’s an even more potentially harmful wake phenomenon that we recently read about: prevalence inflation, coined by researchers Lucy Foulkes and Jack Andrews. “This hypothesis holds that our society has become so saturated with discussion of mental health that young people may interpret mild, transient suffering as symptoms of a medical disorder.” (NY Times) Put another way, The Atlantic describes the syndrome as “the way that some people, especially young people, consume so much information about anxiety disorders that they begin to process normal problems of living as signs of a decline in mental health.”

Dr. Lance B. Eliot takes the phenomenon to a higher level: “The growing widespread use of generative AI will cause people to self-diagnose so that they conclude they might have mental health issues even when they do not. This is a looming and disturbing inadvertent adverse consequence of having generative AI available 24/7 that can freely dispense mental health advice and therapy and relates to an overarching trend known as prevalence inflation.” (Forbes)

Prevalence inflation in many ways is nothing new. We are now more than 20 years into the web world where any information we seek is at our fingertips. Most individuals, regardless of age, search “Dr. Google” to assess what they are feeling and determine if they need to see a healthcare professional. This uninformed dive into information, typically without context, may lead an individual to equate his or her symptoms to a type of cancer, serious disease or malady that could result in death. Without context and relevant information, we potentially become and believe what we read.

There is a significant difference, however, in how different age groups search, consume, and interpret what they read.

Older generations called digital immigrants in research circles fall prey to searching, but they still rely on actual human connection and withhold conclusions until an expert weighs in.
Younger generations, dubbed digital natives, are less adept at physical interaction, less trusting of experts and rely heavily on the digital world and its information and opinions. They are also reliant on their friends and digital influencers in drawing conclusions.

We are subject to the human factor in that if we hear something at least three times, our brains record it and believe it as fact. What is heard or read could be completely false, but regardless, it is embedded in our minds as true. It then becomes a basis for “fact” in interpreting information, assessing new experiences or situations, or in terms of today’s topic, becoming prevalent to inflate our present and future thought processes. It is the antithesis of critical thinking.

Much has been reported about the current mental health crisis. Like the wake of a boat, we can be pulled into a movement that we didn’t create ourselves and find hard to disengage. We are suggesting that prevalence inflation (a metaphorical wake) is a concept that can be applied to a host of other conditions and situations like those we find ourselves in today, many of which inform and misinform how we run our organizations and our lives. With a handy GenAI resource, we can self-diagnose work-related issues that can take on a second life as groupthink propaganda for galvanizing support for issues that may not be held 100% in consensus.

Collective Consciousness

Consider for a moment the high volume of public conversation about market disruption, asymmetrical marketplaces, consumer demands, and workforce disengagements, just to name a few. These themes can become victims of prevalence inflation. When we hear refrains over and over about specific trends and ideas, they can become a fact, not a behavior preference. This happens when we make assumptions rather than using critical thinking to analyze and understand the situation at hand.

The risk of making assumptions and their consequences is a continual beat on a drum that we share in our newsletters. Take a few minutes to explore them; they can be viewed collectively as the basis for any new mantra you might adopt.

Here’s a real-life prevalence influence example. A young workforce at a startup shifted almost overnight to a remote model during the pandemic. At first, these employees were delighted to work from home in their flip-flops and PJs. Within two years, the sustained shift became the new workplace model. These working conditions led to a new workforce outcry for life/work balance, which became the badge of courage for Gen Z and their millennial colleagues. The media picked up on the shift and institutionalized it as a cultural fact.

You Heard It More Than Once

This example of prevalence inflation hit critical mass for organizations when younger employees refused to return to the office asserting that it was their personal right to work remotely. The media and society at large picked up on the thread and made life/work balance a new paradigm and then researched the productivity (or not) level of a remote workforce and its overall impact on mental health and happiness. We contend that this prevalence influence became a shapeshifter to the employee-management relationship and kick-started a new cultural reality and historical trend. We are not disputing the need for life/work balance, we use this simply as an example when groupthink can take on massive influence.

As we shared, the more you hear and read about something, the more it becomes a fact and relevant to your own life, and then you unwittingly (or intentionally) become the messenger or evangelist for the movement. We wrote recently about how a pervasive national trend or sentiment can trickle down and influence our local communities. On the negative side, many Americans on every side of the political spectrum may be feeling lost. Each side cannot recognize how the other side can believe its truth. This disconnection seeps into polarization in our communities, organizations –and even families. As we said, the more we read and hear about it, the more real and factual it becomes in our minds.

Call it confirmation bias or lemming-like behavior, it still feels real. Eliot states that proponents of prevalence influence want to be part of a like-minded in-club, use the issue to self-justify other non-related difficulties, are trying to get sympathy, or believe they will be viewed as brave and heroic.

Systems at Risk

We believe that many of the foundational pillars of our society, including our organizations and institutions are at risk. Actively staying in the wake of political, social, or workplace disagreements may be a case of glamorizing the differences. We’ve all seen the glamorization of violence and constitutional attacks on our political stage. We see Bud Light’s fall from the #1 position to #3, simply because they were deemed “woke” and supportive of some members in our diverse society. Backlash became a boycott that two years later remains in place. Without critical thinking, the glamorization of bias could continue to lead to adopting beliefs as truths. They are then ingrained and only by sheer luck or a lot of hard work can they be overcome.

If we feel confused, propelled by prevalence inflation, we are hard-pressed to find workable solutions, trapped by entropy. Workers face off with their employers. Younger workers disengage and quit, believing they can find better opportunities elsewhere … until the same syndrome presents itself. But more challenging, leadership needs to be unbiased and impartial in working through massive surges in so-called paradigm changes, acerbated by prevalence influence.

We would advocate that individuals and leaders across our society, organizations and institutions (government, religious, cause-oriented) adopt impartiality, manage biases, and objectively step back to see the true impact of their communication, actions and decisions. We support stepping back and considering the consequences.

Taking a pause and not heading straight into a wake is to consider how the actions we take that are right in front of us may serve the short term, often without seeing the longer view. In short, if we take action based on only a belief (think prevalence inflation), we may find ourselves going over the proverbial cliff.

Our example of the move to hybrid, remote work, although readily adopted by the workforce, may have been triggered by a previously unarticulated cry for renewed focus on work/life balance. The prevalence influence part of the equation is that the call for rebalancing work and life was a broadly accepted truth and revised the perception of self-worth and the definition of one’s value and contributions to an organization.

Awareness and Prevalence Influence

Awareness can help counteract prevalence influence. “Mental health (substitute your own issue) awareness campaigns often encourage individuals to recognize and seek help for negative psychological experiences. While these efforts aim to reduce stigma and encourage disclosure, they may unintentionally contribute to the overinterpretation of everyday suffering and distress. Additionally, the glamorization and romanticization of mental health (substitute your own issue) problems in popular culture, particularly on social media, can further influence individuals’ perceptions and self-interpretation of their experiences.” (JumpMind)

It’s easy to see how repetition and lack of complete understanding of the root cause can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. People who label their issues as distress may inadvertently intensify their symptoms. For example, anecdotal evidence indicates that unhappy people seek out other unhappy people for reinforcement. The result is the conviction that being and staying unhappy is better than the alternative.

Full disclosure, this newsletter is a perfect example of how repetition can prompt the understanding of prevalence inflation for self-diagnosis as it applies to situations outside of mental health.

Counterbalance

Leaders in organizations face a management challenge that most have been unprepared and uneducated to handle. Whether it’s mental health issues or lesser disagreements about workplace attire, a collective mentality can sweep even neutral or ambivalent employees into the wake. It’s important to reveal the gap between rhetoric and reality. Eliot suggests that one solution is to determine whether the situation is caused by “inevitable adverse consequences, and if inevitable, what is the likelihood or frequency that this occurs? Can we typify when this is most likely to arise so we can perhaps do something proactively about it? Plus are there preventative means or actions that can be taken to materially reduce the chances of the movement?”

To halt individual and group over-interpretation of a perceived problem requires finding credible role models for the alternative side. Open, nonjudgmental communications encourage workers to share their opinions and deconstruct any possible self-diagnosed unhappiness as possible false assumptions. Task forces to objectively gather data and analyze it to determine if the problem is real and problematic is a key tactic to determine if the collective workforce is going down a pathway under false information or sentiment.

The goal is to prevent or arrest a vicious cycle and transform it into a virtuous cycle that is representative and fair. Behavior change can happen quickly (think Arab Spring) or more gradually when the roots are based on false assumptions. What’s important is to separate the advocates who have legitimate causes from the potentially loud voices that want to stir up trouble and make changes for the sake of change.

Get “The Truth about Transformation”

The 2040 construct to change and transformation. What’s the biggest reason organizations fail? They don’t honor, respect, and acknowledge the human factor. We have compiled a playbook for organizations of all sizes to consider all the elements that comprise change and we have included some provocative case studies that illustrate how transformation can quickly derail.