Reminds me of my favorite response to a popular stopsign.
Alice: Mark, please tell Bob I'm not speaking to him.
Mark: Um...
Bob: I heard her.
Bob: I just don't understand women, Mark.
Mark: (twitch) Actually, that which you don't understand is Alice. But if you spent as much energy actually trying to understand Alice as you do blaming her gender for your lack of understanding, you'd understand her just fine and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I don't know, the whole "I'll never understand women!" excuse has always had a bit of a (Sacred?) Mystery smell to it, I thought.
"Why can't I understand Alice? Why did Alice behave this way?" "She's a woman!"
Calling it a Mysterious Answer seems apt to me.
One possibility is that Bob may observe that other men seem to understand the women they interact with, but to Bob it's magic. This looks like an example of the fundamental attribution error: Bob concludes that those other men have an intrinsic enduring "understands women" trait that he does not have.
I think there are two separate mistakes that Bob could be making, actually. 1. Bob thinks understanding Alice is beyond him because she's a woman. (Genuine confusion?) 2. Bob thinks women-in-general aren't understandable and therefore he shouldn't try to understand Alice. (Sexism?) The first seems like a simple case of lacking Narrowness. The second, I'm not sure.
Given as everyone seems to want to pile unjustified extra assumptions onto the scenario, here are several actual scenarios that I know have occured that took this form:
Alice is angry/upset because of something Bob did. Bob is unaware of what he did, but has picked up on Alice's anger and wants to help her. a. Alice is trying to convince herself that it doesn't matter. -----b. Alice thinks Bob knowing what caused her anger will cause further problems.
Alice wasn't actually angry/upset at all. Bob believed she was, but was incorrect. His repeated questioning has resulted in her getting angry; making him more confident that there is a problem.
Alice is emotionally abusing Bob, manipulating him so that he will grovel for an explanation, such that when she tells him what she wants him to do, he'll be forced to do it.
Alice is angry at Bob for something he did. Bob is aware what this is, but wants to pretend he isn't in order to be able to make Alice feel as though she's over-reacting
Alice is angry/upset for reasons that have nothing to do with Bob. Bob is concerned for Alice's wellbeing, but Alice doesn't want to share.
Alice is angry. Bob knows this, but Alice is actually, honestly, unaware of this fact.
You leave out the fact that there is a common belief in women that "I shouldn't have to explain. You should just know." -- thereby rendering the need for explanation a further injury to the initial insult.
I usually find that this is what needs to be bypassed early on if any real communicating progress is to be achieved. Generally speaking I resolve this by making it perfectly clear that if the injured party is unwilling to communicate the injury, they are not "allowed" to require redress in any form. Including being angry -- thereby making them the party that is acting in the wrong, and requiring them to make amends. (This usually makes me quite "unreasonable" and causes a bigger blow-up than was necessary, but it gives me a vehicle towards more successful resolution after that initial blow-up and furthermore prevents similar scenarios from arising again. Mainly because I will have firmly estabilshed that that belief is not valid with regards to me. Those whom are capable of learning instead of just adding to their cached beliefs will have better relations with me.)
As a side note: in several of these scenarios I saw, Alice was male. In several, Bob was female.
Some possibilities about what Alice is thinking:
One possibility is that being understood intuitively feels so good that actually explaining what one wants feels like settling for something grossly inferior. There are cultural ideas about what true love is like that can be really destructive, and aren't any living individual's fault. It would, of course, be nice if people had better sense than to fall for such stuff, but this may be expecting clear communication from the universe, and I don't think it's reliable about that. Sometimes the universe won't even show it's angry until it drops an anvil on your head.
Another is that women are sometimes trained to not be clear about what they want-- it isn't nice. I can't be sure how common this is, but I've got a streak of it myself, and I've heard other women complaining about it. Having the conditioning is extremely unpleasant (if you want to ask for something but have a high internal threshold to get past to try), and I think the conditioning can produce a background fund of anger which isn't about the current situation.
I don't know whether it was necessary to explain this in such detail, but sometimes I get the impression that a lot of the men here are aware of that sort of conditioning in themselves, but don't realize women might have a variation of it.
This is utter gold. Thank you for posting this!
Not understanding people's behavior is your confusion, not theirs
I agree soooooooo much on this point.
I teach math courses for college students who want to become elementary teachers. The course I'm currently teaching is arithmetic - not that they can't do arithmetic, but there are a lot of things that often confuse kids that teachers just don't understand are confusing unless they've been told about them. For instance, there's a difference between partitive division ("Johnny has 10 apples and wants to give them to each of his 5 friends; how can he do so most fairly?") and quotitive division ("Johnny has 10 apples and wants to make bags of 5 apples; how many such bags can he make?"). When division is explained as "equal sharing" and then the teacher teaches the quotitive long-division algorithm, it confuses kids. But most teachers seem to default to the theory that if they explain something they think they understand and their kids don't get it, then that's a display of the kids' stupidity.
The mantra I have to tell, pretty much every single day in these classes, is that everything anyone does is s...
I'd really like to know some basic, repeatable exercises that build empathy and social skills. Changing your everyday behavior to incorporate little bits of training here and there is not very effective. It's like wanting to get fit and deciding to walk a little faster whenever you need to get somewhere, instead of joining the gym. Or wanting to be a musician and deciding to hum along to songs more often, instead of getting a tutor.
Great points in this article. I noticed in high school that I had difficulties in this area, but rather than approach it with this conceptual pwno has, I sought out training regimens more like what you describe.
I can't say that they've been super effective. I still come across as a bit "off" a lot of the time, but they've certainly helped. YMMV, of course.
If you're single (or, at least, not locked down), join a dating website (or a few). Don't try to find the love of your life. Just try to go on as many first dates as you can. Try to learn as much as you can about the other person, and practice empathy techniques. This is good because people tend to have very little tolerance for odd behavior, and will be experiencing a lot of odd uncertainty, curiosity, excitement, etc., themselves. Make it your goal to learn about them, and build a model of this new person.
Take a foreign language. This is good because it's regular, safe, and you'll have to interact and converse with a bunch of people. Since you're all struggling, people tend to let their guard down, and the conversation topics are usually pretty basic (what's your name, where do you live, how many pets do
I've had very mixed results with this technique. Some people respond to it very positively, others very negatively. The same is true of asking targeted questions (e.g., "Are you angry...?") or open-ended questions (e.g. "How do you feel about that?") or asserting my own observations (e.g., "You seem angry to me").
Face to face, I can usually figure out with some tentative probing which approach works best before I commit to one. But the safest tactic I've come across, and the one I generally use on the Internet (where I cannot tell who is listening to me or how they might respond), is sticking to related statements about my own experience (e.g. "That would anger me") and avoiding the second person pronoun altogether.
I don't have a handy exercise regimen, but I'll toss in my two cents.
An exercise I often do in this space involves explicitly looking for symmetry: if I am judging someone for doing X, I look for and articulate ways in which I also do X; if I am feeling aggrieved because Y has happened to me, I look for and articulate ways in which Y has also happened to other people. I doubt it helps build empathy directly, but it helps me curtail some reflexes that seem incompatible with empathy.
Another involves building models of worlds in addition to people: if someone is behaving in a way that seems inconsistent with how the world actually is, I try to work out in some detail how the world would have to be for their behavior to make sense... or, rather, what the minimal changes would have to be. It seems like something that ought not make a difference, and yet it does: the way I approach someone who I model as operating in a fictional world where everyone is a dangerous threat, for example, is different (and much more compassionate) than the way I approach someone who I model as being frightened of everyone.
Taking a step back... I find it's helpful to remember that every time someone seems to ...
Taking a step back... I find it's helpful to remember that every time someone seems to be doing or saying something unconscionably stupid, or thoughtless, or evil, or otherwise behaving in ways that I want to classify as other-than-me, that's an opportunity to instead practice empathy and compassion.
I think this is an excellent point. From most people's own point of view, they never do anything stupid, thoughtless, or evil. Everything is justified as the best or only course of action that anyone they consider reasonable could take when put into the same circumstances. If you look at what they're doing and judge it to be stupid, thoughtless, or evil, and you don't understand how they could see it otherwise, then your model of them is incomplete. This method has almost always worked for me in terms of figuring out the missing bit of my model, and usually works for reducing frustration. (Sometimes my own emotional response is still "I know I'd do exactly the same thing in your place, but it's still freaking annoying!")
I like to watch movies and decide who is the smartest person, who is the most compassionate person, and who is the meanest person. And then ask myself: Why? Some mean behavior is actually an irrational self-protective response, for example.
I'm wondering how much reading fiction can help with that. I never really thought about it before reading HP:MoR which uses the argument quite extensively, but I do feel that my ability to understand others was greatly improved by the fact that, since early childhood (I remember being like 8 or 9 and spending a whole afternoon just devouring a book) I read a lot of fiction (mostly sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, and a bit of thrillers too).
Reading fiction, especially as a child, forces you to put yourself in the shoes of other people (usually the hero(es) of ...
I read a lot as a child too, but it was writing that I've found has motivated me to develop more complete models of people. Whether it was my mom's detailed criticism of early stories that I wrote (included the dreaded "that's awfully implausible, sweetie"), or the fact that writing gave me incentive to go out and talk to people or try new things in order to have something to write about, that's where a lot of my motivation came from to develop better empathy.
Aside: I think a surprising number of my life decisions boil down to wanting to understand people better (whether "just because" or in order to be better at other things.) Example case: choosing to study nursing instead of physics. Despite my mother's insistence that I would be "an incredible academic", there was a part of me that always chimed in: "You're already good at school/studying/learning/etc. You're terrible at people skills. People skills are more important than study skills for writing good stories. Can you imagine how awesome your people skills would be after 10 years of being a nurse? There you are!"
People tend to explain such confusing behavior with stupidity, creepiness, neurosis or any other traits we associate with the mentally ill. With Occam’s Razor in perspective, these careless judgers are statistically the mentally ill ones.
Words cannot express my appreciation of less wrong for getting this clearly stated.
I have absolutely nothing to add except praise, so here is praise.
Thank you for writing this. I will be memorizing its points and using them.
I am trying to be more empathetic with someone, and am having trouble understanding their behavior. They practice the "stubborn fundamental attribution error": someone who does not in fact behave as expected (as this individual imagines she would behave in their place) is harshly judged (neurotic, stupid, lazy, etc.). Any attempts to help her put herself in another's shoes are implacably resisted. Any explanations which might dispel harsh judgement are dismissed as "justifications". One example which I think is related is what I'll ca...
I like your suggestion to learn to learn to like things. If anyone is looking for things to learn to like, these are some nice ones.
Ligeti's etudes (and other 12-tone music); www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0qoue0JbbU
This piece by Charles Ives; www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBU_XzWZNtc
Plays! You don't need to buy hundred-dollar tickets to fancy Broadway shows; community theater productions are often comically horrible in movies, but I've only seen good ones in real life (I did just put drama in a group with Ligeti etudes and cowboy music, but not because it's really weird).
Thanks for the article, I have been considering doing that very thing for years, not out of a desire to connect with humans though, but to understand them and their behavior. Now that I know that it is a viable concept, it's time to make my own Field Guide to Human Interaction.
I found this article very helpful, thank you. It helped convince me that giving people the benefit of the doubt is almost certainly the best option and that being straightforward with people in my life will make things simpler. I'll make effort to memorize these methods. Thanks for writing!
This post just deals with explaining observed behaviours. Not only is that rarely useful, there is a much easier way to do that: just ask them.
I can not remember a single occasion where I've failed to explain an observed behaviour. At least in my case, the problem is noticing behaviours in the first place, and an inability to read facial expressions.