Pattern Recognition Is Not Oversensitivity. It Is Survival.

Social psychology calls this pattern recognition. Everyday life calls it survival. My colleague and GORM Senior Consultant, Professor Anca Minescu, often describes this process using the metaphor of a fizzy drink. Each moment, comment, remark, or act of harm is like shaking the can. One shake rarely causes an explosion. But repeated shaking builds pressure. Eventually, the can pops. When it does, people focus on the spill, not the shaking that caused it.

The truth is that what often gets framed as “oversensitivity” is, in fact, a highly adaptive cognitive process. Humans are social animals. Our brains are tuned to notice who belongs, who is safe, who has power, and who does not. When you consistently occupy a lower-status position in a group, whether because of race, migration status, accent, gender, class, or any other social marker (in which you typically do not have control of), your brain is doing additional labour. It is scanning for threat, for exclusion, for cues that tell you how much of yourself you are allowed to bring into the room. That labour is invisible to those who do not have to do it (and this is what we call privilege).

Which is precisely why intention becomes such a comfortable place to hide.

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Intention Is Private. Impact Is Social.

The problem with centering intention is that intention is private. Impact is social. You know what you meant because you live inside your own head. Other people only have access to what landed, how it landed, and what it joins up with in their lived experience. In group settings, especially workplaces, this distinction matters enormously. Because the cumulative impact of small interactions determines who speaks up, who self-edits, who is seen as competent, who gets the promotion, and who quietly disengages. Exclusion rarely announces itself loudly. It settles in slowly, through repeated moments that signal, subtly but consistently, that some people are more at home than others.

From an intergroup relations lens, power fundamentally shapes how behaviour is interpreted. The same comment does not carry the same weight when it comes from someone with status versus someone without it. This is not about individual morality. It is about social structure. People with more power are afforded the benefit of the doubt. People with less power are expected to absorb discomfort gracefully. When someone says, “That wasn’t my intention,” what they are often really saying is, “Please evaluate me based on who I believe myself to be, rather than on how this system positions you.” And that is a request that ignores the very dynamics that made the interaction unequal in the first place.

When Discomfort Is Treated as Data

The tendency to treat moments of discomfort as failures, rather than as information, is something I often see when working with our clients. In psychology, when we see the same response emerging across different individuals from the same group, we do not dismiss it as coincidence. We treat it as data. If multiple people react defensively, withdraw, or challenge the same kinds of comments, jokes, or practices, that tells us something about the environment. About the norms that have been established. About what is being rewarded and what is being tolerated. Yet in many organisations, we individualise these responses instead. We label people as difficult, sensitive, or not a “culture fit,” rather than interrogating the culture itself.

This is where defensiveness becomes a barrier to learning. Defensiveness narrows attention. Curiosity expands it. “That wasn’t my intention” closes a conversation because it recentres the speaker’s self-image. “Can you tell me how that landed?” keeps the focus on the relationship and the system within which it exists. One preserves comfort. The other creates the possibility of change. And yes, the second is harder. It requires tolerating discomfort without immediately neutralising it. But social growth has never happened in comfort alone.

Belonging is not built, not just felt.

Belonging is not built by asking marginalised people to continuously translate their pain into palatable feedback. It is built when those with power are willing to adjust behaviour, norms, and expectations, even when their self-concept feels challenged. This is not about walking on eggshells or policing language for sport. It is about taking social responsibility seriously. Because if intention were enough, apologies would be unnecessary. And if impact did not matter, relationships would not rupture. But they do. Repeatedly. Predictably. Along group lines we pretend not to see.

So at its core, this conversation is not about being nice. It is about being accountable. Social systems do not change because people mean well. They change because people are willing to examine how their behaviour functions within structures of power and to act differently as a result. That is the work. Everything else is performance.

And if we are serious about building environments where people genuinely belong, then we have to stop treating these dynamics as personal misunderstandings and start treating them as what they are. Social patterns. Behavioural cues. Systems that can be learned, unlearned, and redesigned. Not through intention alone, but through sustained, conscious change.

And if you are serious about building systems of belonging and need support, contact us on www.gormmedia.com/contact

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