The power of silence: a qualitative inquiry into silent consent and its psychosocial foundations

The aim of this study is to understand why individuals remain silent in the face of social deviance phenomena such as injustice, discrimination, violence, corruption, and lawlessness in everyday life, and how repeated and normalized silence may contribute to the social production of consent. Using a qualitative focus group design, semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted with 30 participants from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds. The data were analysed through a codebook-oriented thematic analysis informed by Braun and Clarke's six-phase approach. The analysis generated three main themes: Learned Silence, Learned Helplessness, and Avoidance. The findings show that silence should not be interpreted automatically as approval. In participants' accounts, silence was often associated with fear, shame, emotional exhaustion, avoidance of harm, distrust of institutions, social exclusion, and self-protection. However, when individual silences are repeatedly observed, socially normalized, and institutionally ignored or exploited, they may contribute to the normalization and reproduction of the very deviance that individuals do not explicitly approve. The study therefore develops the concept of societal silent consent as a collective process through which repeated individual silences in the face of perceived social deviance contribute to the normalization, legitimation, or reproduction of that deviance. By distinguishing silence as behaviour from silent consent as a possible social effect, the study extends discussions of silence beyond organizational behaviour and situates them within everyday social relations, cultural expectations, and structural power.