About [blindspot]
We inhabit a moment often described as ‘polycrisis’: a convergence of multiple, temporally overlapping systemic disruptions, whose cumulative weight can feel overwhelming. This sense of overload extends into our social fabrics: rising polarisation, social fragmentation, emotional escalation, and failures of collective action are defining features of this period.
At their core, however, most of these coinciding crises are inherently human: produced by our behavioural patterns and experienced through our mental frameworks. They are therefore inseparable from our psychological processes. Yet the frameworks used to interpret these crises remain narrow: lawyers, economists, and policymakers seeking to address them often struggle to account for their inherently psychological roots. As behavioural scientists have long noted, policy design that disregards how individuals actually think and feel often fails to achieve its goals, regardless of its technical merit (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008).
The consequence of this is a widening gap between policy and lived experience; between what is expected from policies, and how citizens actually perceive, internalise, and react to them. This gap is not merely technical; it rather poses an active threat to institutional trust and perceptions of procedural fairness, both of which psychology scholars acknowledge as preconditions for effective governance (Tyler, 2006). Leaving lived realities unaddressed carries grave consequences as disengagement and resistance are likely to follow, thus weakening our collective capacities to respond to today’s manifold challenges.
This is the blind spot at the heart of contemporary policymaking, and too often we lose sight of it, focusing on yet another crisis. [blindspot] is born out of this realisation. Policies can only succeed when citizens view them as legitimate, when organisations can adapt to them, and when human behaviour aligns with their aims. All three conditions are fundamentally psychological in nature. [blindspot] aims to bridge the gap between policy and lived realities by drawing on psychological insights, offering analyses of the political landscape, the ‘polycrisis,’ and the minds that shape it.