Using strangers as unwitting tools in your own psychological therapy without their consent seems super sketchy to me.
Talking about the weather = using strangers as unwitting tools in your compulsive need for social interaction.
How about rejection therapy = "Harmlessly interacting with other humans to overcome your trauma, so you can become a more productive member of society"?
The whole point of "rejection therapy" is to interact with a stranger that pushes against their boundaries such that they feel the need to assert themselves in order to reject you.
I'm all about helping people overcome their trauma, but not at the expense of making nonconsenting strangers uncomfortable.
Did you read the article? Rejection therapy isn't just talking to someone. It's making some kind of request of them that you know they don't want to do in order to force them to actively reject you so that you can experience the rejection.
It's not, "Hey, how's the weather." It's, "Can I see what's in your wallet?"
So I think it's a delicate balancing act, and there's no easy test for whether it's good or bad. I think holistically it can come down to what kind of energy you're putting into your environment, and whether it's positive or negative.
The value of social alienation is that you can walk down a crowded street and not be asked by every single person how your day is going, what you got up to last night, how your cat's doing, etc. etc. Caring about the intimate details of everyone else's life just doesn't scale. At some point you need to be able to call out some people as being more important to you than others, and ignore the rest.
And of course, this can damage you emotionally, make you numb to the needs of others, and prevent you from forming a community with the people around you.
Social forces encourage people to engage in profitable activities like media consumption over unprofitable activities like community engagement, and the transient and impersonal nature of employment prevents people from easily making connections in the place they spend most of their time around others.
To the extent we do not have enough pro social behavior, injecting random kindness encourages more. Showing up and demanding nonsense favors encourages less.
That's pretty different to me from making a request that's pushy enough that someone has to "reject" it in order to say no.
Yes, in a way we are always using others as means to an end. But to make this interpretation true, I have to really push the boundaries of what I mean by using others, by mean, and by end.
However, let us try to think this from a different perspective. How about what others in this _experiment_ felt? How would you feel if someone came out of nowhere and asked you to give them this or that when you cannot even fathom why they are doing it?
To me, this so-called therapy may work for the people exposing themselves in order to get exposed to negative reactions. But this is just a very self-centered way of treating other people as cardboard cutouts, not as real persons. They are merely background features like trees, cars or streetlights.
In the end, maybe you get a kick out of getting out of your comfort zone. But you're also training yourself to be indifferent to the feelings of others. If that's the trade-off of this _therapy_, no thank you.
Obsessive focus on the feelings and opinions of others (self consciousness) is at the root of many people's social anxiety.
Complete indifference makes you a pyschopath but there's such a thing as being too concerned about other people's feelings.
To open your mouth and speak to another person is to risk offending them. There are people who are so afraid of that possibility that they never speak. In that case, less empathy/more indifference is good.
That being said, I have an issue with this being called 'therapy'. It may as well be, if we just think about the person receiving the benefit. However, it's a bit predatory through the lense of the other person.
But it's like you said. It's not binary. Yes, it bothers me a little. Nonetheless, as with everything, it may have its uses.
Again, thanks for your comments.
The point of rejection therapy is to make a request in a pushy enough way for something that the other person doesn't want to do that they end up assertively saying no.
It's not "friendly offer therapy" or "polite decline therapy".
My point is that you don't have to push other people into strange territory to get rejected.
If it's not your honest intention to date them, that's still a shitty thing to do.
Would you want someone doing this to you?
At that point, you're not doing "rejection therapy", you're just asking people out.
> Why would you be nervous to be rejected by someone you wouldn't actually want to date and thus weren't invested in the answer?
The premise behind rejection therapy is that some people do feel intense anxiety about being rejected even in cases where the stakes are low like this, and deliberately seeking rejection is essentially exposure therapy to get over that.
Both activities have a useful end, and would let someone assertively say no.
If the theory endorses selfish deceptions then its not worth adherence. If it doesn't endorse them, then it doesn't support the practice in the article, and its not worth discussing here.
Contriving a way to talk to a stranger such that your goal is to force them so far outside of their comfort zone that they assertively reject you is not great.
These are not at all the same thing. I'm not saying don't talk to strangers. I'm saying don't use unwitting strangers in your contrived boundary pushing scenarios for your own psychological growth at the expense of their comfort and consent.
You wouldn't walk around putting spiders on people and tell them, "It's cool, bro, I'm just doing spider therapy."
Putting spiders on people is immoral because it causes psychological distress and potential harm due to spider bites. However, other behaviors are far more reasonable (e.g. asking for their newspaper, for a few dollars, or for a food sample from, say, an ice cream store). In isolation, these other behaviors sound perfectly reasonable in other contexts.
However, I agree with you for some of the other examples in the article (e.g. asking to try on someone's shoes or someone's sunglasses) wouldn't be reasonable or useful in other contexts.
This could be discouraging towards “new” employees though. Maybe they should walk around and learn getting rejected… oh well
I may not like it, but people regularly approach to ask for money, to sign up for a recurring donation, to sign a petition, to give a flyer, to sell a CD of music (yes, even in modern times), or to give a product sample. I may also get photographed by a street photographer. A small request that can help someone with their problems looks relatively mild compared to most of these other actions.
I've always liked how Terry Pratchett put it: “Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are...well...human beings.”
It's honestly a little heartening that comments on HN don't immediately recognize the movement anymore.