Amidst this pandemic, the relevance and application of Johari’s Window are more crucial than ever, providing a unique framework for understanding the dynamics of public knowledge and decision-making.
We know that everyone knows there’s a pandemic and the number of people who are in hospital or have died as a result of the virus. We know we don’t know how many are infected, given that you can be asymptomatic, and countries are now testing and tracing people. We know we don’t yet know how to get a vaccine, so there are over 170 different attempts to create one. You could argue that other countries that have experienced other pandemics in the near past, like several countries in Southeast Asia, knew what strategies other countries started using wouldn’t work. In contrast, we didn’t know in the UK as we hadn’t experienced one recently. However, many people claim they know about COVID-19, whether they know what they know or don’t know, but hardly anyone thinks they don’t know what they don’t know!
The same could be applied to Brexit, not just what will happen with a No Deal Brexit. We know we don’t know precisely the economic impacts, but evidence suggests it will be mainly negative. If we look outside the UK, there’s relative consensus from other countries about the effects for us. States within the EU are more likely to know than the UK about the potential impact of Brexit on the UK and the EU as they need to talk to each other about how they negotiate with the UK, whereas the UK will be left in the dark.
But how about how people voted in the referendum initially? We know what people voted for. We know we don’t understand why other people voted, even if we might imagine what that might be. I might think I know why I voted the way I did, but what if I couldn’t perfectly articulate and disaggregate the different reasons why I voted, what things I was very strongly in favour of staying in without conditionality, what things I was in favour for staying in but with conditions, what things I was ambiguous about and even what things that I thought we should do without the EU. Because values bind our relationship with the EU, how can you change someone’s mind based on rational arguments?
