Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

I wonder, is there any research on offensive communication? Like, people who seize control of a conversation by going on the attack, who respond to another person's statements by changing the subject to something they've done wrong. Defensive communication is unattractive and tends to be ineffective, and I think there are people who pursue a consistent strategy of trying to make others look bad by triggering defensive behavior in them.

View on HN

It's all in the article, the "offensive" communication examples you describe fall into author's definition of defensive communication categories, which he names "Control", "Strategy" etc.

The paper says about those, "Behavior which a listener perceives as possessing any of the characteristics listed in the left-hand column arouses defensiveness." So the author doesn't describe it as defensive behavior, and he's not even concerned with it as behavior, only as a perception that might arouse defensive behavior.

Well, isn't a communication behavior that triggers defensiveness in the listener an offensive behavior by definition?

It's quite old but german philosopher Schopenhauer wrote about it in "The art of being right"

He talks about dirty tricks to win an argument regardless of the content

You can easily see that behavior in politics

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right

Number 14 is “Claim Victory Despite Defeat” - coincidentally, there was a lot of “14/88” being thrown around in recent weeks in USA politics.

And a metric shit-ton more than that thrown around in 2020.

I think recent events have shown clearly that, regrettably, offensive communication works wonders in convincing people.

If you're talking about Trump, I feel like the offensive communication there has done a bad job of convincing people who the offense is aimed at, and only a good job of motivating people who perceive themselves to be aligned with the offense.

Or if they’re talking about those calling people extreme names like Hitler and fascist, it didn’t do a very job convincing people to vote the way the name-callers wanted.

Luckily it didn’t work well enough.

Trump won twice. That is pretty clear signal that what works the best is to attack, insult and throw a lot of outrage to whereover it sticks.

Works and works best may be far apart. His approach was not battle tested against very many alternatives and only against alternatives saddled with severe constraints.

I think lawyers do a really effective job of offensive communication. Their job essentially boils down to redirecting the conversation.

One side poses a question that the judge or jury needs to answer. The other side then responds with: "The question we really need to answer is...". I.e., "You're trying to solve the wrong problem. Let me show you the real problem that needs to be solved."

Reframing the conversation is offensive communication.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com