Shocked but not surprised

In recent years Joy and I have used a phrase “shocking but not surprising” more frequently than we could have predicted. It’s not a phrase we coined and we don’t use it so much in political contexts as you might expect. But what do we mean?

Fundamentally the phrase passes judgement on the character of people we apply it to. This isn’t a post calling those people out explicitly, so let me give an example with the details changed to protect the guilty. Suppose you are working for a company that recently replaced its CEO. Initially the new CEO gets off to a good start and seems to know his business.[1] But after a few months he makes a perplexing decision. Maybe he fires a particularly effective manager for no discernible reason.

This would be a “shocking and surprising” action. It seems out of character from what we know, so we assume that he had some reason that could not be disclosed. Perhaps the fired manager had been quietly cheating the company or engaged in other unethical behavior. We put that data point in our memory and move on with life.

Not long after firing the manager, the CEO announces a new initiative. It’s not something the company has done in the past and it seems like something the CEO would pursue based on his experience at other companies. This is “neither shocking nor surprising” in the moment. Again we give the CEO the benefit of the doubt. It’s his job to guide the company after all!

As the initiative gets rolling, the CEO starts making strange decisions. He might tell someone to stop doing something and, when that decision causes problems, he gets angry with the person who only followed his direction. When he suggests another potentially risky decision later on, he gets irate with the pushback. It’s disloyal and just a sign that the company is stuck in it’s ways. When an underling succeeds, the CEO takes credit away.

There are two ways to respond to this sort of behavior:

1. Fall into line.
2. Find a way out of this pending disaster.

At this point you might wonder how we have not used “shocked but not surprised” in a political context.[2] It’s a useful phrase that indicates “this behavior fits with what we know about this person’s character, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a shock to people of integrity.” People who take the “fall into line” response must learn to stop being either shocked or surprised by bad behavior. Whatever the justification, it’s the cost of doing business.

“Shocking but not surprising” is a reminder to people who don’t fall in line that this is not the way the world should be. It’s not buying into the lies and it’s not glossing over the wrongs. It is, in a sense, an act of resistance.

I’m reminded of work I did a few years ago to model the impact of unwelcome comments on Stack Overflow. A society can endure a level of antisocial behavior for a long time if there are people around who push back. But as those people give up or leave, bad behavior becomes normal and accepted.

1. I’m using “he/him”, but we’ve applied the phrase to people who use other pronouns. ↩︎

2. I mean we have. Just not as often as in situations much closer to home. ↩︎