2026-04-15
When Empty Space Is a Threat
Kaisa Vaittinen
One of the best known experiments in social psychology is Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson's Pygmalion experiment from 1968. In the experiment, teachers were told that certain pupils were, based on testing, so-called intellectual bloomers, meaning their cognitive development was just about to move forward. In reality these pupils had been selected at random. By the end of the school year, the named pupils had nevertheless improved their performance significantly more than the others. The teachers' expectation had produced the result it claimed only to be predicting.
This finding, known as the Rosenthal effect or the Pygmalion effect, has since been studied extensively in both education and other social environments, although the strength and generality of the effects vary depending on the research design (Jussim & Harber, 2005). It is not only a phenomenon related to education, but a structure of social interaction that appears everywhere people are involved with one another: in workplaces, in families, in various care and treatment relationships, in leadership teams, in friendships and in other personal relationships. We expect certain behaviour from one another and often unconsciously create the conditions in which precisely that behaviour is realised. We then use the outcome as evidence that our expectation was right all along, that our preconception was the one that matches reality.
Implicit power structures
Expectations do not arise from nowhere. They are built on those implicit power structures and hierarchical assumptions that are present in most social situations. In many encounters there is implicit negotiation about positions, about acceptability, and about who gets to define the terms of the situation. For the most part this negotiation happens non-verbally, drawing on such things as the duration of eye contact, the length of a turn to speak, physical posture, the timing of a smile, and the delay before answering. Goffman (1959) described this social performance decades ago, and his observations still hold.
Underlying this kind of negotiation are assumptions about how each person ought to behave, taking into account their position, gender, age, appearance, manner of speaking, or social background. These assumptions too are largely unconscious, and their existence is usually noticed only when someone breaks them.
And when that happens, when these assumptions begin to be broken, the environment begins to correct the situation. In social interaction, this kind of deviation can activate subtle feedback mechanisms that can be interpreted as forms of power maintenance and norm enforcement. These include being ignored, being interrupted, being made the object of ridicule, exaggerated friendliness that is in fact a display of position, being bypassed in decision-making, feedback being framed in a way that returns the person to the "right" position, and in extreme cases isolation or exclusion. Keltner, Gruenfeld and Anderson (2003) have described how a position of power changes the behaviour of both the person exercising power and the person subject to it, and Sidanius and Pratto (1999) have shown how structures of social dominance are maintained precisely through these everyday, unnoticeable mechanisms.
These kinds of mechanisms do not look like the exercise of power, because they happen within the social agreement and because they are interpreted as a natural reaction to deviant behaviour. It is also a group phenomenon, but this very interpretation is in fact part of the mechanism.
What happens when the agreement is not followed?
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this phenomenon is what happens when someone does not follow the implicit agreement. This can happen for many reasons. A person may do it intentionally, for example when wanting to challenge authority. They may do it out of inability, because they are not able to read social signals in the same way as others. Or they may do it simply without knowing, because they may come from an environment where the same signals mean different things.
In these different cases the environment's reaction is often surprisingly similar. The environment experiences the deviant behaviour as a threat and begins to restore order. But the intensity of the reaction is often entirely out of proportion to what the person actually did. This is because the reaction is not in fact directed at the act, but at what the absence of the act reveals about the environment's own structure. When someone does not bend to a hierarchical expectation, they make that expectation visible. And this making visible may be experienced as a threat, because the expectation was meant to stay invisible. The system is protecting itself.
At this point the Rosenthal effect turns in an interesting direction. The environment expects certain behaviour and creates the conditions that would ideally produce it. And when the person does not produce the expected behaviour, the environment begins to interpret them as a problem, as difficult, as unsuitable. The prediction becomes a negative self-fulfilling cycle: the expectation that the person is difficult produces conditions in which it is hard for the person to be anything other than difficult, and this is used as evidence that the original interpretation was correct.
The state of non-reactivity
Beyond these situations there is one further case in which this dynamic becomes especially visible. It arises when a person does not react to social signals at all, or reacts to them considerably more slowly and less than the environment expects.
This kind of state of non-reactivity arises, for example, as a consequence of long-term meditation practice, because it produces a change in the practitioner that is not attitudinal but structural. In some studies meditation practice has been found to be associated with changes in emotional reactivity and in the regulation of attention. In everyday language this can be described as something like a space, a kind of buffer, that arises between stimulus and reaction, where the automatic response does not start or its onset is slowed enough that the practitioner can choose whether to react or not. Desbordes and colleagues (2012) showed that meditation practice changes the amygdala's response to emotional stimuli even when the person is not meditating. It is therefore not a technique that is applied in a situation, but a change in baseline reactivity that is present in the person all the time. Hölzel and colleagues (2011) have described the mechanisms of this change in more detail: the regulation of attention, body awareness, emotional regulation, and a change in the perspective one has on oneself.
In practice, for social interaction this means that a person who has this kind of buffer does not produce the automatic reactions that the environment expects. They do not smile when a hierarchical hook expects a smile. They do not make themselves smaller when a status assumption expects diminishment. They do not react to provocation when the purpose of the provocation is to return them to the "right" position. And they do not begin to fill the space that social interaction opens, but leave it empty.
And this is where things become interesting. One possible interpretation is that unexpected non-reactivity creates a gap in the interaction that others begin to fill with their own interpretations. It often seems as though empty space is not well tolerated in social interaction. When person A sends a signal to which person B does not react in the expected way, a vacuum forms that is experienced as disturbing. The environment begins to fill this vacuum with its own material: with interpretations, projections, assumptions about what is "really" going on. And the material the environment uses to fill the vacuum tells more about the environment than about the person who did not react.
The Rosenthal effect connects to this again in a new way. The environment projects its own expectations and interpretations onto the non-reactive person, and when the person neither confirms nor denies them, because they are not reacting, the environment begins to treat them in accordance with these interpretations. The interpretations begin to produce conditions that confirm the interpretations, and the cycle closes. But the person inside the cycle is not there because they are difficult or wrong. They are there because they did not produce the reaction that the social system needed in order to remain stable. And in fact the environment assumes this person is inside the cycle, but because of the meditation practice the person is outside it, and is not at all participating in the cycle of social interaction in the way the environment expects.
Different forms of non-reactivity
At this point it is interesting to notice that non-reactivity can arise from very different causes but produce an outwardly similar-looking phenomenon. A person who has meditated for a long time perceives the social signal but does not react to it automatically. A neurodivergent person may not perceive the signal at all, or perceives and interprets it differently. A person with a trauma background may freeze in front of the signal. A person who has moved from one cultural context to another may read the signal in an entirely different way from how it was intended.
In many of these cases the environment's reaction appears surprisingly similar. The person is interpreted as deviant, difficult, or threatening, and control mechanisms are activated. In autism research this has been described using the concept of the double empathy problem (Milton, 2012). The point is not that the neurodivergent person does not understand others, but that both parties interpret each other incorrectly and the mainstream interpretation prevails because it has institutional support. Although the original context of the concept relates to autism, its logic offers a useful analogy for other situations as well, where the parties interpret each other from different frames of reference.
This observation therefore extends far beyond the autism spectrum or neurodivergence. It concerns every situation in which someone does not produce the expected reaction, regardless of why. The environment's reaction is not really directed at why the person does not react, but at the fact that they do not react. The absence of a reaction can be interpreted as a disturbance, which often activates control mechanisms regardless of whether the absence is due to practice, neurology, trauma history, or cultural difference.
What does this mean in organisations, communities, and relationships?
At the organisational level this dynamic produces recognisable patterns. People who do not bend to implicit hierarchical assumptions are described as not fitting the culture (poor culture fit). Research suggests that in at least some organisations, cultural fit functions in practice also as a vehicle for reproducing sameness and norms. Rivera (2012) has documented in elite professional service firms how, in recruitment decisions, cultural fit often works as a code word for the candidate resembling the recruiter themselves.
Recognising this dynamic is difficult precisely because it operates implicitly. Nobody says out loud that this person does not follow our hierarchical assumption and therefore they are a problem. Instead the problem is articulated as relating to the person's characteristics: they are difficult, they do not adapt, they do not understand the culture, they are too direct, they are not a team player. All of these are descriptions that tell more about the describer's expectations than about the person being described.
Conventional training or intervention does not reach this layer, because the layer is not a lack of knowledge but a shared social structure. Structural changes, such as anonymised processes, structured interviews, or various metrics, reach part of it, but not the deepest layer where the collective schemas about what is normal live. Making this layer visible requires a different approach: that someone or something brings to light what no one inside the organisation is able to name. On the one hand because naming it would break those rules whose existence is not acknowledged, and on the other because from inside the cycle it is very difficult to see things as they are.
To close
The Rosenthal effect tells us that expectations produce reality. Implicit power structures tell us that expectations are not innocent but serve the maintenance of the existing hierarchy. And non-reactivity, whatever its cause, may reveal these structures in a way that is difficult to achieve by other means.
Probably this is precisely why non-reactive people are often experienced as threatening. They do not really do anything wrong. They simply leave undone what the system expects, and then the system has to look in the mirror.
Sources and background reading
The Rosenthal effect and self-fulfilling expectations
- Rosenthal, R. & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils' Intellectual Development.
- Jussim, L. & Harber, K. D. (2005). Teacher expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies: Knowns and unknowns, resolved and unresolved controversies. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9(2), 131–155.
Power structures and social interaction
- Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
- Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H. & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284.
- Sidanius, J. & Pratto, F. (1999). Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression.
Meditation and changes in reactivity
- Desbordes, G., Negi, L. T., Pace, T. W. W., Wallace, B. A., Raison, C. L. & Schwartz, E. L. (2012). Effects of mindful-attention and compassion meditation training on amygdala response to emotional stimuli in an ordinary, non-meditative state. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 292.
- Hölzel, B. K., Lazar, S. W., Gard, T., Schuman-Olivier, Z., Vago, D. R. & Ott, U. (2011). How does mindfulness meditation work? Proposing mechanisms of action from a conceptual and neural perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(6), 537–559.
- Lutz, A., Slagter, H. A., Dunne, J. D. & Davidson, R. J. (2008). Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(4), 163–169.
Neurodivergence and social interpretation
- Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The 'double empathy problem'. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887.
Recruitment and cultural fit
- Rivera, L. A. (2012). Hiring as cultural matching: The case of elite professional service firms. American Sociological Review, 77(6), 999–1022.