Rethinking Survivorship

Attribution Bias: A Compounding Effect

In our previous post, we spoke about our Survivorship Bias hypothesis - that is, when a highly visible majority are mistakenly perceived to represent the entire group. In boarding school terms, it means that because a few former boarders rise to high profile positions and many others achieve positions of power or are visibly wealthy, society makes a cognitive leap and assumes all boarders are successful - so boarding is framed as a good thing.

But what happens when we’re faced with evidence to the contrary? Well, another complexity caused by humans’ limited powers of cognition is the influence of attribution bias. This is our tendency to automatically explain others' outcomes in terms of their personal characteristics (e.g., their motivation, their drive, their intelligence) rather than situational or systemic factors (e.g., the environment, the economy, or adverse life experiences). This bias is problematic in multiple settings - education, sports, health, poverty and wealth inequality, even in dietetics. Time and again, as humans we tendency to automatically credit positive outcomes to an individual’s own resilience, dedication and commitment - even when the factors for success are entirely beyond that person’s control. Conversely, negative outcomes are automatically attributed to their lack of effort, will power or poor choices - even when other factors are work against their success. This is the attribution bias.

We hypothesis this happens when we see a former boarder succeeding - we credit their individual resilience, intelligence or personality - and overlook the many factors such as teaching ratios, wealth or risk resilience that enable them to thrive. Conversely, when we see another struggling, or failing to maximise their life chances, despite the perceived privilege, we are more likely to assume this is down to some personal failing - a character defect, lack of effort, ingratitude. This attribution bias becomes especially entrenched where there is an embedded cultural belief (the Survivorship bias) that tells us that boarding school produces high flying leaders, coupled with institutional settings that discourage vulnerability and prioritise stoicism. Even former boarders may internalise these beliefs, leading to patterns of self-blame and denial, rather than evaluating any role their institutionalised childhood and separation from their families may have played.

Rethinking "Success"

Within this landscape, we find the concept of ‘success’ to be under-scrutinised and ill-defined. Common indicators of success used by the schools themselves - such as sporting and academic achievement - tend to be short term, despite the impact of a boarding education lasting a life time. The metrics used by the economies in which boarding schools thrive - income levels, professional rank, status and wealth accumulation - have historically excluded the human dimensions such as emotional wellbeing, social connection, the ability to relate to others, and positive mental health. As society moves forward, these dimensions are increasingly valued in leaders, who today are deemed to need EQ as much as IQ.

Our research will seek to define what we mean by ‘boarding school survivor’ - a term which carries multiple and often conflicting meanings. We will also explore how society ought to measure success in respect of boarding school outcomes, and what we mean by ‘successful’ in the broadest sense of the term. We will explore emerging theories that suggest some former boarders who are perceived to be successful by standard metrics (status, power, wealth) may be masking high-functioning distress, perhaps by adopting laudable traits such as workaholism, or using maladaptive coping strategies such as substance abuse.

We will aim to quantify the prevalence of the ‘boarding school survivor personality’ - well documented by Nick Duffell, Joy Schaverien and other academics in this field, who have documented the lifelong challenges of former boarders - and fill evidence gaps around the prevalence and impact of this syndrome on the individuals, their families, and wider society.

To avoid confusion around the many meanings attributed to the term ‘survivor’, we aim to step away from ‘boarding school survivorship’ as a concept and instead frame our hypothesis around what we call the Double Thrivership Bias:

1. Survivorship Bias: Challenging society’s tendency to overestimate the positive impacts of boarding school by focusing on visible success cases and failing to quantify and understand the experiences of those who may have been harmed by it.

2. Thrivership Bias: Questioning whether those visible ‘success’ cases are actually thriving in the truest sense - ie with the skills to lead a rich, connected life - rather than living maladaptive coping strategies and masking long-term harms, as some research suggests.

In the next section, we examine how we might use these insights to create a new Theory of Change for Boarding School Research, that will help guide the Boarding School Hub’s community of practice.