Canadian lawyer Collin May — speaking from experience — offers an account at C2C Journal of how Cancel Culture generally works.

May got a closeup look when he was canceled as a human rights commissioner in 2022 because a passage in a book review he had written thirteen years earlier offended a Muslim group in the province of Alberta. It’s a common enough event; earlier this year, we wrote about evolutionary biologists getting cancelled for insisting that the sex binary is a fact about humans.

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In his analysis of the event, May notes that a cancellation typically follows a predictable pattern, a point also made by Evan Nierman and Mark Sachs in The Cancel Culture Curse (Skyhorse 2023) and Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott in The Canceling of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster 2023). But while the pattern is predictable, it is usually not understood or foreseen by the victim.

There are three groups in a cancellation: The cancellers themselves, the victim, and the witnesses, who usually end up being complicit with the cancellers.

Who are the cancellers?

The cancellers’ psychology is important because they drive the event. A study published earlier this year in Acta Psychologica, found, in May’s words, that

…most cancellers demonstrate what the authors call a high “political centrality identity”. Such people understand themselves through the lens of their political commitments; politics means everything to them. As the study notes, it is this political zeal – rather than any altruistic concern for righting a wrong or protecting some allegedly marginalized community – that motivates them… Political affiliation generally leads the cancellers to act on their ideological beliefs to the exclusion of other relevant concerns such as the truth of their allegations or the impact their behaviour will have on the target or the marginalized communities the cancellers claim to represent.

“Erased: The Psychology of Cancel Culture,” October 18, 2024

We’ve all seen, heard, or read about that but it’s interesting to hear a sociological analysis. What’s sobering is that the victim, stunned, usually makes things worse. May, again:

In almost every instance the target of an attack responds by issuing a statement that ranges from expressing their commitment to work with their attackers to learn more about their alleged misdeeds to an outright apology. This apology can often be grovelling, with the target pleading for forgiveness and/or begging that their punishment be minimized. “Erased”

Unfortunately, the accused often believes that mercy will be shown as a result. But such co-operation signals weakness and strengthens the attack.

Analyzing his own reaction to cancellation, May comments,

… I mistakenly believed in the efficacy of truth, thinking that my conciliatory statement would contribute to disarming the attack. As it turned out, the statement did nothing to extract me from the cancellation event; instead, it was used against me. On the one hand, I was unaware of the cancellation dynamic described in the previous section, in which my attackers were engaged in virtue-signalling and social vigilantism that could not be appeased by any apology or statement. Again, I failed to appreciate that my cancellers were involved essentially in an in-group action to bolster their own status which, perhaps paradoxically, made the target’s response almost irrelevant. On the other hand, I also believed that third parties would not be complicit in my cancellation. That too was a mistake, but one consistent with how third-party witnesses often respond to cancellation events. “Erased”

And what about the third-party witnesses?

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Generally, according to researchers, the witnesses go along with the cancellation. May draws on the work of University of Oregon professors Jennifer Freyd and Carly Smith, who have studied this part of the typical story — institutional betrayal theory — in detail. The institutions “typically allow themselves to be coopted by the cancellers’ agenda. This involves betraying the target and perpetuating the initial harm of the cancellation attempt; and, at times, implementing the actual cancellation.”

In this scenario, the target has generally been harmed by a separate perpetrator, but when the target seeks help or protection from the trusted institution, the institution betrays the target by alleging that the target is responsible for the harm. Usually, the perpetrator claims to be the victim, resulting in a turning of the tables on the target through what Freyd and Smith call the “DARVO” technique: Deny, Accuse, and Reverse Victim & Offender. The perpetrator uses victimhood culture to cover their own nefarious actions against the target and, rather than defending the target, the institution perpetuates the damage by acquiescing to the perpetrator’s false claims. I’ve dubbed these false claims by the perpetrator “harm imaginary”.

Institutional betrayal theory is highly applicable in the cancellation context where a third-party witness, often an employer or trusted institution, accepts the canceller’s contrived claims of victimhood and colludes with the canceller to further harm the target by terminating his employment, deplatforming him, refusing to represent/aid him or otherwise blaming or abandoning the target. “Erased”

In short, Cancel Culture enables institutional actors to betray members without a sense of guilt.

May does not offer detailed advice as to how victims should respond. But his description makes clear that cancel mobs must be confronted head-on. Nothing appeases them except a victim and nothing helps except refusing to be that victim in any way.

There is some comfort in knowing that researchers have begun to study the social pathology seriously.