We need external organizations to monitor for safety without any conflicts of interest! And we need to stop throwing people into dangerous situations as if human beings are expendable, expecting more and more to be available to fill their spot like it's flippin' D-Day!!
Social psychologist, Dr. J. Offir, wrote a great thread on how hard it would be for Olympic competitors to not jump in the Seine despite how sick it was obviously making them:
This was obviously a policy failure that we watched unfold in real time. ("Wait! Stop! Come back!" says Willie Wonka.) But it also demonstrates how people selectively trust authority figures when those leaders are saying what we want to hear. (This pattern of behavior has also been on clear display during the pandemic: people were suspicious of leaders whom they perceived as restricting freedoms, due to psychological reactance, but once those experts said to unmask and go to the mall, the same folks who had been disbelieving suddenly found faith in authorities' messages again. Ask people why they aren’t masking, and many will give you some variation on "the CDC said I don't need to.")
Fundamentally, this tendency is an example of confirmation bias, but it's not only confirmation bias at play, here. The article above notes: "The athletes had largely put their trust in organizers to ensure that the water quality was safe for them. Women’s silver medal winner Julie Derron of Switzerland said the athletes believed that the race was safe based on the word of authorities....'The swimming was fine during the race. We know...they took samples this morning. They take a lot of time to analyze, so we don’t know the results obviously. We all trust the authorities and the organizers that they keep us safe. And so we had a safe race today,' she said."
That's some heavy-duty "diffusion of responsibility," right there. But when people abdicate responsibility for their own outcomes to others who don't really care about those outcomes, they're setting themselves up. This is also an example of two other phenomena that Latané and Darley (the "bystander intervention" guys) wrote about: one is "evaluation apprehension," which is a fear of being judged harshly for doing something socially inappropriate (which certainly affects athletes in the public eye); the other is "pluralistic ignorance," whereby all the members of a group of people come to believe that everyone except them feels one way - say, that its A-OK to put your face in the poopy Seine - even though the opposite may be true, and everyone may be secretly concerned. (This is a similar to the phenomenon that Asch's famous conformity studies explored, whereby social pressure caused people to affirm other people's perceptions even when they knew they were wrong.)
No doubt, the Olympic organizers encouraged both pluralistic ignorance and conformity. So what can...be done? We all know that organizations and corporations are notoriously bad at policing themselves, in terms of outcomes to members and the public. And athletes are going to continue obeying their handlers, because those who don't won't get to the Olympics in the first place. They're going to tell themselves whatever they need to, and believe whatever they're told, in order to compete. So what might be useful is development of a wholly independent organization to monitor and report on international competition health and safety.
This concept isn't new. For example, in the US, OSHA monitors workplace safety. And after the NFL blew off TBIs among players, the Concussion Legacy Foundation was formed to advocate for the safety of football players and other athletes exposed to practices that cause the injuries leading to CTE. Currently, AFAIK, the health/safety of Olympic athletes is the responsibility of the IOC, NOCs, and coaches, who all have conflicts of interest because they need star athletes to show up. Individuals generally only behave as well as other folks make them, and that's true of NGOs, too.
And on a very similar note, neuroscientist Dr. Claire Taylor wrote about the current situation in hospitals in the UK:
NHS staff with long Covid are now losing their jobs in droves. Beware: on applying for industrial illness benefits, if asked if you filled your car with fuel, the application goes no further as you might have caught Covid from touching the fuel pump handle. Even if you worked on a Covid ward and only went to work and back and used ‘pay at the pump.’ This is how they are getting out of industrial illness benefits.
Is there anyone trustworthy and honest left? Tricking staff with questions about filling their car up to come to Covid wards -- it’s well known NHS staff caught Covid from work. Then when they got so disabled they are house bound or bed bound, for their years of hard work and occupational acquired disability, they are locked out of benefits because they put fuel in their car?
Research study after research study shows Covid is airborne, how FFP3 masks in Cambridge massively reduced the chances of staff contracting Covid. Now staff don’t have to test. They can even treat patients with Covid. All fun and games until you get long Covid. No one is looking out for staff. It’s not for your convenience that you don’t ‘have’ to test anymore. It means you cannot claim against your work for your health being destroyed overnight. I’ve seen it over and over and over. Healthy staff now a shadow of themselves. If you are in the army and get injured on the front line and can’t work again you are compensated. Healthcare? Nada. I hope the hundreds of healthcare workers taking their case to the high court win. I suspect the NHS will employ barristers charging hundreds of thousands of pounds to say that the staff got it every other way EXCEPT from the wards full of Covid. From the fuel pump.
I am fast losing hope in humanity. Healthcare workers - you are just a number. Your health is so much more important than any institution. If people don’t start standing up soon, I don’t know what percent will be fit to work in a few years. We are in the next wave of Covid. There are now consistently 5-6 waves a year. It’s not seasonal. Unless you mean every season. Just because we are doing what Trump suggested and not testing, doesn’t mean it is not there. Future generations are going to look back at this as madness. Many of these are people were infected March/April 2020 and the ONLY place they went was work. To get round that little problem, asking people if they put fuel in their car means they have been ‘somewhere else.’ This is the industrial injuries disablement benefit. Just pay it @RishiSunak. These people risked their lives and are now dependent on your cruel benefits system. At least give them their due. Many of these are women who were working as nurses in March 2020 risked their lives and now can't do the jobs they loved. I can just imagine the training for such a job:
1- ask about how they think they caught it
2- ask if they had to fill their car with fuel to get to said job
3- tell them they caught it from the fuel pump so ‘sadly’ they are not eligible.
4- move onto the next person.
Rinse and repeat.
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