The Psychology Of Expectations - Challenging Familiarity

A couple of experiences recently has got me thinking.

First one: On my drive to Cockermouth, I intended to take the second right after the first right, in order to look for a footpath. But absent-mindedly, I took the first right; a road with which I am very familiar. But I thought I had taken the second right; a road with which I am not familiar. I passed by several very familiar landmarks which I failed to recognise, thinking they were ‘new’. Only after a couple of miles did I realise that I was on a road which I have travelled hundreds of times before! The familiar became alien simply because my expectation was that I was travelling along a road which was alien to me. I very convincingly tricked myself into perceiving that which was almost boringly familiar as something which I was looking at for the first time. Really weird.

Second one: Today, I did take the second right and found the footpath I wanted, which I’d previously only walked for about half a mile, just once, before turning back. This time me and the dogs walked further until we came to a village which I’ve never been to before. I walked a bit further along the lane through the village, wondering which road it would come out on to, when suddenly I realised I was on a route which I’ve walked many times before and in fact the ‘new’ village was a place very well known to me! In fact, nearly all of the footpath route I have walked before, several times, but it all looked very different and unfamiliar, simply because I expected it to be!

Now you may argue that I’m suffering from early onset senile dementia, and you may be right! But, there’s a valuable lesson in psychology to be learned from these two experiences. That is, the psychology of expectations and how one’s altered expectations can drastically alter reality, such that one can perceive what should be totally familiar to be totally unfamiliar. I believe that behavioural psychologists are well aware of this trick and I believe that they have employed and are employing this trick, on behalf of the government, to alter the perceptions of the public at large. Two examples:

1. Climate change: In order to scare us into accepting the privations associated with Net Zero, the government, climate scientists, the Met Office and the media are spinning what should be very familiar weather (normal summer weather, unexceptional storms, not unprecedented rainfall etc.) as something alien and threatening, i.e. an extreme weather mediated ‘climate crisis’. They are attempting to alter our perception of what is ‘normal’ as something which is very abnormal, or, as the Met Office State of the Climate 2024 just published says: ‘the new normal’. This has been no more evident than in the recent ridiculous attempts by the media and the Met Office to hype a few hot days as something highly unusual, which we should fear. By plugging us constantly with extreme weather related propaganda (stay at home, stay safe, take water if you’re planning on walking to the news agents, blah, blah, blah) they are pre-programming our expectations such that we will perceive that which is familiar (the British weather) as something which is totally unfamiliar and indeed threatening, in that it is symptomatic of a ‘climate crisis’. Of course, such a tactic works even better on those people whose familiarity with the British weather extends only to a decade or two, versus those who have experienced five or more decades of our notoriously fickle weather. Such a tactic is unlikely to work at all on those veterans who also take the time to study what the British weather was like centuries ago because, more often than not, such study will reveal that what scientists and the media claim is highly unusual or even ‘unprecedented’ is in fact not. I think the current obsession with geoengineering also is a symptom of the public’s altered expectations of ‘extreme’ weather.

2. Covid: The psychology of expectations worked fantastically well with the ‘novel’ SARS-CoV-2 virus, which the WHO assured us initially was far more deadly than the seasonal ‘flu and most definitely was something very new and threatening, requiring us all to be locked up in our homes, isolated from granny, socially distanced from each other, wearing masks and eventually, to release us from such restrictions, vaccinated with a new type of vaccine which would protect us and those around us against a novel deadly virus. 99% of the populace fell for the propaganda, in one form or another. The truth is, SARS-CoV-2 was a novel virus (created in a lab), but it was even less dangerous than seasonal ‘flu for the vast majority of people, amounting to little more than an ‘odd’ cold. We’re told that seasonal ‘flu just ‘disappeared’ mysteriously during the Covid years. The common cold was notably absent too. What is more likely is that seasonal ‘flu and cold infections were perceived to be Covid infections by many people, simply because their expectations had been so altered that the familiar became the unfamiliar. This is not to deny that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating; I just don’t think it was anything particularly special amongst all the other respiratory viruses which afflict us each winter. It was lost in the background, certainly not a ‘deadly pandemic’. I believe government behavioural scientists ruthlessly engineered the Covid pandemic by radically altering our expectations, and thus our perception of reality, particularly during winter 2020, just before the ‘vaccine’ rollout, when the alleged ‘even more deadly’ Alpha variant was ‘deployed’ (to use Hancock’s phrase).

Cunning bastards, behavioural scientists. And Communists too, some of them. Susan Michie now works for the WHO by the way, no doubt where she can put her talents to good use.