Why do layoffs like Oracle’s feel so jarring?
One potential answer is the sheer magnitude. Tens of thousands of people losing their jobs in one sweep should rightfully shock anyone, yet Paul Slovic’s work on psychic numbing suggests the opposite (Slovic, 2007). As the numbers swell, our emotional response shrinks to the point where one identifiable victim moves us more than 30,000 faceless ones. If anything, the scale should blunt the reaction, not sharpen it.
Another answer might be timing.
Layoffs feel especially off when they come from a company that is doing well. Oracle recorded a 22 percent increase in revenue last quarter. While there is something intuitively unsettling about growth paired with cuts, I suspect most people understand by now that company performance and employee security are only loosely connected. We all know that corporate profits and the stability of our career trajectories have long since parted ways.
What seems to be driving the reaction is something more psychological than either scale or timing. A cognitive dissonance between how we have come to think about work and what work actually is.
You see, for years, companies have leaned heavily on a simple idea.
“We are a family.”
The concept shows up in job descriptions, onboarding decks, CEO speeches, and elevator pitches to the point where we have all heard it, to the point we have started to internalize it, even when we know, somewhere in the background, that it cannot be fully true.
Then something like a 6 a.m. layoff email arrives, and the gap between the story and reality becomes impossible to ignore.
Why we are suckers for fictive kinship
Work, as we experience it today, is a relatively recent invention. For most of human history, labor did not look like this. Anthropologists like Colin Turnbull and James Suzman have described societies where work was varied, directly tied to outcomes, and embedded in close social groups.
Two features stand out.
First, effort and reward were tightly linked. You hunted and ate just like you gathered and shared. The connection between what you did and what you got was immediate and visible. Second, work was done with and for people you knew well. Kin, or something very close to it, tightly knit in small groups with repeated interactions and high visibility of contribution.
Second, we evolved in that environment, and our brains are still tuned to it. The modern workplace, in contrast, is built on large-scale coordination among non-kin and in many ways it is one of humanity’s most impressive achievements. Thousands of people, often strangers, working together toward shared outcomes that are often as invisible as they are impersonal. To make this possible, organizations rely on psychological shortcuts that pull on our evolved levers.
One of the most powerful is fictive kinship. Sociologists like Ebaugh and Curry have written about how organizations borrow the language and structure of family to create cohesion (Ebaugh, Curry, 2000). Leaders become parental figures and teams become families where loyalty and commitment is framed as care.
It works because it taps into something ancient within us. We know how to behave in families and the roles feel familiar, even when the context is not. Which brings us to why layoffs like this feel so unsettling.
They break the script that brought us to the workplace to begin with.
Institutional betrayal
Psychologist Jennifer Freyd introduced the concept of institutional betrayal to describe what happens when institutions violate the trust of those who depend on them (e.g., Freyd, 2013). It is most often discussed in contexts like healthcare or education, but the logic applies here as well.
When an organization invites you to see it as a family, it is not making a neutral statement. It is activating a schema with deep expectations. Families are supposed to protect and support us, even when the family itself is going through hardship. Families do not send you a mass email at dawn telling you that you are no longer part of the group.
When the behavior of the institution contradicts that schema, the reaction is not just one born out of disappointment or shock, it is a form of institutional betrayal.
That helps explain the intensity of the response and how it signals the collapse of a psychological contract that was never fully written down but was repeatedly implied.
The sharper the theatrical language of belonging, the sharper the sense of violation when it disappears.
And yet, rejecting the entire idea outright may not be the most useful response.
The families we build
In moments like these, it is tempting to dismiss the “work as family” concept entirely.
For those directly affected, that reaction is more than understandable. When you are suddenly dealing with lost income, uncertainty, and the practical realities of finding your footing again, the last thing you want is a lecture about metaphors.
Still, there is a reason the family idea took hold in the first place. It enables cooperation among people who are not related, on a scale that would otherwise be difficult to sustain. At its best, the modern workplace can align individual effort with shared goals in ways that feel meaningful and productive.
The problem is not the instinct as much as it is the gap between the myth and our behavior. So instead of abandoning the metaphor entirely, may I suggest another option?
Let’s make the myth just a smidge harder to dismiss.
If you are in a position of leadership, perhaps you can fight harder to give those who have to be let go some grace and time to put their affairs in order, and treat them with the dignity you would offer a loved one on their way out.
If you are an employee, you can start holding the family to task and ask it to live up to the role it keeps claiming, and then uphold your own part in it, doing more than expecting corporate mom and dad to tie your shoelaces for you.
Because who knows, if we try hard enough, we might just end up figuring out a way of making this crazy idea of work, work.