How Far Are You Willing to Place Someone or Yourself Under a Bus?

People sometimes protect a position, reputation, relationship, sense of belonging or idea of themselves by allowing a cost to fall somewhere else. Sometimes they direct that cost toward another person. Sometimes they turn it inward and pay the cost themselves.

This developing book and research project examines those two directions. The question is what someone believes they are protecting, which choices they perceive, how consequences are anticipated, and whose needs become negotiable.

Looking beyond the label

A pattern of avoidance, self-silencing or harmful behaviour can have many possible explanations. The project investigates conduct and context without making personality diagnoses from an isolated example or assuming identical motives in different people.

It also asks what happens when a person recognises the pattern, questions the demand and begins to make a different choice.

Why it belongs here

The School of Abnormal is interested in how people learn what they believe they must do to remain acceptable. This project examines the moments when that expectation carries a cost for oneself or somebody else.

How far are you willing to place someone or yourself under a bus, and what made that cost seem necessary?