Tag: psychology

Online Acrimony

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

It is much commented on that there is far more anger, acrimony, and ascerbic speech online than in real life. There is, of course, more than one reason for this. Anonymity reducing people’s normal inhibitions is a commonly cited one, and there is, no doubt, some truth to it. Sometimes a lot of truth. But I think that an often under-appreciated aspect to this is the non-interactive nature of online interaction. The people we interact with online don’t react like we’re build to expect them to, and that screws with our social instincts.

In normal human interaction, that is, interactions that take place face-to-face with people in the same place, the person listening reacts to what the other person is saying through body language. But they don’t wait to react; they react while the other person is speaking. And we look for this while we’re speaking. In the normal course of events, the other person’s reactions as we’re talking may well change how we finish our sentences, to say nothing of what the next sentences are. If we are saying something important to us, we look to see that the other person is giving us their full attention—a sign that they understand the importance of what we’re saying. And here’s the crucial part: if we don’t see that they get how important this is, we amplify our intensity.

That might mean using greater volume, or it might mean using intensifiers like “dirty words”, or it might mean intensifying the thing being said. A person might go from “there’s a problem” to “There’s a !@#$ problem” or they might go to “This is a catastrophe.”

If that doesn’t work, the next intensifier available is to indicate that the relationship between the speaker and the person listening is threatened. This will tend to take the form of insults, because a person is only willing to insult someone that they are willing to do without. This is true in theory much more than in practice, of course; a great deal of insulting is really an attempt to signal where things are headed rather than to indicate where they currently are.

If we consider the nature of online interactions, it should immediately jump out that they all lack real-time feedback. But unlike previous technologically-intermediated means of communication, such as books and letters, the online ones feel far more immediate. When you write a book or a letter, you know that, if you get a response, it will be days or weeks in the future. Online, you might receive a reply in the time it takes someone to type a sentence. This can kick our processing of what they say into real-time processing, as we prepare to immediately respond to them. But our real-time processing relies very heavily on the many aspects of communication apart from the words being spoken and it’s easy to forget how much of the person’s response we actually lack.

We lack it first because most of the time we’re using text so there is neither tone nor cadence nor facial expression nor volume conveyed, all of which are very important to understanding how to interpret the words. The other problem is that the space limitations of text mean that we have to pick and choose what we respond to in what the other person said. But this act of picking and choosing, coupled with the lack of facial expressions/body language as they were speaking, means that they got precisely zero feedback on everything else they said.

It is extremely easy, under these circumstances, for people who have shifted into real-time processing to take this as complete indifference to their attempts to communicate the importance of what they were saying. When this happens, their instinct is to do what they would do in person—amplify and exaggerate.

The instinct to exaggerate, here, is really about accuracy within a context. If a person who is hard of hearing doesn’t hear you, the polite thing to do is to repeat yourself. If you’ve ever had a loved one who suffered from hearing loss in the age before ubiquitous hearing aids, this might get to the point of almost shouting into the person’s ear so they can hear you. In like manner, if you say that a problem is a problem and the other person pays no attention, and you say it’s a catastrophe and they pay no attention, and finally you say that the world is about to end and they finally rouse themselves to listen to you, the intention is to clearly communicate that there is a problem, not to stimulate them into a panicked rush. (This is distinct from people who use exaggeration in order to achieve disproportionate effects, but these people usually start off exaggerating, they don’t start off reasonable. And even the approach meant to accurately calibrate to the insensitivity of the other is fraught with problems, and I’m only trying to describe it, not defend it.)

The other thing that people may do when they perceive that the importance of what they’re saying isn’t being appreciated, you will recall, is to start indicating that the relationship is in danger of being breached. That is, they may start insulting the other person to get their attention.

I suspect that this explains more than a little bit of the acrimony that we see online.

Feelings and Facts Can Be the Same Conversation

On By Christopher LansdownIn Life Skills, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Conversations about feelings have something of a low reputation and not entirely undeservedly. People who are bad at emotional regulation will talk about little else besides feelings and generally in a very unproductive way. Further, self-control is an important skill which has been rightly lauded by religions and philosophical systems alike. If you want to do something which takes precision, such as building a bridge or disinfecting surgical equipment, “facts not feels” will lead to more success.

All of this is true, and I very much prefer conversations about facts, even if personal facts, to conversations about feelings. But all this misses something.

Conversations about facts and conversations about feelings can be the same conversation in different languages.

The reason for this is that emotions are, in their essence, a kind of sense perception. They’re not a bodily sense perception like sight, smell, etc. but they are a kind of sense perception. Fear is the perception of danger. Anger is the perception of injustice. Gratitude is the perception of received benefit. And so on.

Feelings can be mistaken, of course, but so can bodily senses. We can think we felt something small touch us but when we look there’s nothing there. We can think we heard somebody say something but when we ask them what it was they said that they didn’t make a sound. There’s an entire field of making things that we see incorrectly called “optical illusions.” Our emotions are not infallible, but neither are any of our other senses. All of life requires the humility to acknowledge our fallibility.

When you consider a discussion of feelings in this light, as long as the discussion is between two people with enough humility to admit they could be mistaken, a discussion of feelings is really a discussion of the things that the feelings are perceptions of. If an object caused high amplitude sound waves in the air, among non-narcissists, “a high-energy sound was just produced” and “I heard a loud noise” is saying essentially the same thing. It is true that the latter involves the first person singular pronoun, but that’s merely giving you the added information of what instrument registered the high-energy sound. This can actually be quite useful because every instrument has its strengths and weaknesses and knowing which instrument produced the measurement described allows the other person to calibrate accordingly.

This is true of feelings, too. “In the last month, you washed the dishes three quarters of one time and swept the floors one quarter of one time” and “I’m feeling alone with the housework” differ somewhat in their precision, but they are describing the same thing. (And before you get any ideas, I do most of the housework in my house.)

It is possible, then, when someone initiates a conversation about feelings, to have an actual conversation with them. That won’t work if they have no humility, but no conversations really work with the proud, since pride tends towards solipsism and conversation requires acknowledging the existence of the other person. But most people have at least some humility, and it just takes practice to recognize it in people who are talking about their feelings. In some cases people will even talk about their feelings in order to present their observations more gently; to continue with the above example, they would consider the recitation of facts about the frequency of housework to be likely to come across like a personal attack, whereas if they instead focus the conversation on their feelings they expect it to come across like less of a personal attack. This can work very badly when done with someone else whose conversational style takes facts as non-aggressive and discussions of feelings as nebulous and dire. (This kind of mismatch can happen between anyone, though it is most stereotypically between two people where one has a higher-than-average number of X chromosomes and the other a higher-than-average number of Y chromosomes. (Bear in mind that, across the entire population, the average number of X chromosomes is, roughly, 1.5 and the average number of Y chromosomes is, roughly, 0.5))

The good news is that, like all differences in language, it is possible to become “bi-lingual.” It takes practice and discipline, not to mention humility, but a person who tends to either communication style can learn to understand the other one, and even learn to communicate in that style. It’s ideal if both people learn it, of course, but if one isn’t strong enough to do it it will still work pretty well if the stronger one learns how to do it and condescends to the weaker one. (I mean condescend in the etymological sense, “to come down to be with”.)

The Development of Psycho-Analysis Makes Sense if you Assume it Doesn’t Work

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently read the transcript of Freud’s lectures explaining to a Clark University audience what Psycho-Analysis is (Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis). One of the things that struck me was that the development of Psycho-Analysis that he outlined makes sense if you assume that Psycho-Analysis doesn’t work.

The background we need was provided by Freud in the first lecture: a description of hysteria, which was the condition he was trying to treat. Basically, it’s a catch-all for severe ideopathic symptoms in a female. That is, if there’s something really wrong in a woman and doctors can find no physical cause, that’s then called hysteria. This isn’t trivial stuff—one example Freud gave was a woman who suffered paralysis in part of her body for extended periods. But, here’s the background we need: according to Freud, instead of despairing, doctors tended to give a good, if indefinite, prognosis. That is, the symptoms often went away on their own, though on their own time frame and not a predictable one.

So before we look at Psycho-Analysis, let’s look at the properties that a scheme of treatment which doesn’t work needs to have in order for the person developing it to be able to convince himself that it works, if it’s applied to conditions which tend to eventually get better on an unpredictable time frame.

The first and most obvious property it needs to have is that it can’t be supposed to work immediately. If it was supposed to work immediately, it would be obvious that it doesn’t work. Any such scheme of treatment must, therefore, be a process. However, it cannot be a definite process, because the patient might get better before the process is finished (which would not be a disaster because it could be credited to the process working extra well, somehow, though it would sew seeds of doubt) or else they might still be ill when the definite process has finished. It must, therefore, be an indefinite process.

What sort of properties would an indefinite process need to have, given that it’s not actually doing anything? Well, it will be tremendously helpful if it consists of a series of steps, each of which does have a definite conclusion, since that will give a feeling of accomplishment. If the indefinite process were just endless repetition of the same thing (e.g. identical breathing exercises), most people will get bored. By breaking the process up into steps, the feeling of completion of each step will give a sense of accomplishment, even if the total number of steps are not known. There will be a feeling that something has happened.

It would also be helpful if at least parts of this process are enjoyable or fulfill some other human need such as companionship, sympathy, etc. People will be a lot more inclined to believe that a process is doing what they want if it’s at least doing something that they want. This one you nearly get for free, though, since it’s hard to have a human being who sees you on a recurring basis and not have this feel like some amount of companionship. As long as the process doesn’t feel entirely adversarial, most any process that involves regularly meeting another human being will check this box.

The indefinite process also needs to be able to be explained as completed whenever the patient gets better. If you were supposed to keep doing something forever and the patient gets better, that creates a big credibility problem. And remember that we’re not talking about credibility to the patient, but credibility to the practitioner. A patient can just think he got lucky and who wants to question being well too soon? But a practitioner can only get lucky so many times before he starts to think that there’s something wrong with his theory.

If the indefinite process consists of some kind of peeling back of layers, that will do a pretty good job with this, so long as there’s no way to tell how many layers there are before you hit the last layer. Each layer being peeled back will feel like an accomplishment, and whenever the patient gets better anyway, you can declare that the layer you most recently peeled back was the last layer and this explains why the patient is cured.

Another requirement for the indefinite process is that the steps involved need to be something that everyone can do. You can only remove a splinter from the skin of someone who has a splinter, but you can massage anyone who has a body. If the process is a peeling back of layers, the process needs to be something where anyone can think that they have those layers.

OK, so, given all of that, what do we see in Psycho-Analysis?

The basic premise is that the patients’ symptoms are caused by unresolved conflicts from the past which they have purposely forgotten in order to not have to deal with them (“repressed”). These must be dealt with in reverse chronological order, that is, you have to resolve the most recent first. There are various techniques for uncovering the memories so that the patient can deal with the repressed conflict but one of the chief ones is doing free association with dreams, guided by the therapist.

So, how does this correspond to what we’d expect to see in a treatment that doesn’t work for a condition which will eventually get better on its own?

Perfectly.

We have an indefinite process with distinct steps—the uncovering of each individual repressed conflict (and its resolution, though that’s often easy once it’s faced directly). This allows a feeling of accomplishment with each step. We also check the box of fulfilling some other need—regularly spending time with someone who is interested in us usually feels good. Indeed, a noted feature of psychotherapy is “transference,” which is the patient feeling for the therapist feelings that they “actually” have for someone else. Often this is sexual attraction, but it can be anything—friendship, a parent-child relationship, etc. Of course, another interpretation of this is that the patient, who is lonely in some way, is starting to believe that the therapist is meeting this need. That will certainly provide the reason to keep coming back.

We also have a peeling back of layers. Each repressed conflict must be dealt with before the next one, starting from the most recent to the oldest. This can be terminated at any time—once the symptoms stop, you conclude that you’ve finally uncovered the original repressed conflict. We also have the feature that anyone can do the work. One of the main techniques is to free associate on the substance of one’s dreams. We all dream, and anyone can say whatever comes into one’s head when thinking of some part of the dream. The analyst’s chief job in this free association is to direct it. The analyst picks up on the key parts and asks for more free association on that, as well as asking questions about the subject. Whenever that stops working, there are always more dreams and more free associations to be made. Truly, anyone can do it.

In short, I could not have predicted Psycho-Analysis merely by the assumption that it doesn’t work at treating conditions which tend to get better on their own, but nothing about it surprised me at all.

Well, that’s not quite true. I didn’t expect Freud to redefine “sexual”to mean “sensory.” Which means that a lot of his theories about things like the oedipal complex aren’t nearly as whackadoodle as they sound when you first hear them. I’m dubious that they’re true, but they’re not “had your brains surgically replaced with rat droppings” insane.