Mixed Signals: Why People Misunderstand Each Other | Hacker News Reader

Mixed Signals: Why People Misunderstand Each Other

theatlantic.com

75 pointsDiabloD324 comments

Just out of college I did a short stint at a staffing agency doing outside sales. It was a highly competitive environment with a lot of personalities. On top of that the average age in the office was probably 23-24 and it was almost everyone's first real job.

You would think this environment would be a hot bed for miscommunications and drama. Oddly enough, there never really was much drama in the office. The company had an extreme focus on metrics, they measured everything and benchmarked everyone (# of meetings/wk, calls/wk, forms submitted, time spent on email, etc.).

Every 3 months they also brought everyone in the office into a room and we would all go around and say one good thing and one bad thing about each other to the entire group. This brought a lot of the miscommunication out into the open and helped get everyone on the same page.

The company made it to a billion dollars in revenue in under 10 years so they were definitely on to something. I have never been in a sales environment since where communication and understanding were that well maintained.

Every 3 months they also brought everyone in the office into a room and we would all go around and say one good thing and one bad thing about each other to the entire group.

That (saying a negative thing) seems like it could backfire.

The big meetings were mostly about constructive criticism. There was also a policy where if you had a problem with someone you'd immediately step in another room with them and hash it out. Some things are better discussed 1 on 1 rather than in a group.

If you consistently had lingering issues with people this would hurt your chance for promotion. You were expected to deal with issues as soon as they arose.

The CEO believed that lingering issues can greatly impact your productivity and are a huge distraction. I tend to agree.

I'm a little disappointed in this article, in that upper face movements are generally (as far as I've read and seen) very reliable indicators of emotion. The only two common misconceptions I've read about are this, which is a confusion likely caused by brow furrowing and lower eyebrow tensing used in some anger faces and while concentrating, and when some women crinkle their nose when they enjoy something, which is also used when feeling disgust.

In general, people (especially men, who perform less well in face-reading tests) are more likely to miss a emotion on someone's face or not know what it means than misinterpret it (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2273571/Why-men-ha...).

Hahaha yes, my concentration face is also mistaken for my pissed off face.

Another complication is that the way people perceive themselves may not be a "true" read on their behavior. If a person acts anxious in stressful situations, it makes sense to cut them some slack. But what if a person is always in stressful situations that seem avoidable? Everybody else may think of them as anxious, while their internal view is that they're unlucky.

> "Can you imagine how exhausting it would be to weigh every possible motivation of another person?"

Which is why people take the shortcut of assuming anyone who says things they don't like is an asshole.

Here is where the cultural differences comes into play. In a particular culture, there is an usually semi-well defined set of protocols that assists us to decipher the non-verbal communications. But in a global village, I find it easier to give everyone the benefit of doubt.

Why? Because to me it feels, we are mostly rational people and at the end of the day we don't want to do anything that will hunt our consciousness. So we will always try to balance out our good and evil.

And we can all link hands and sing Kumbaya.

I don't have the mental energy to give everyone I come across the benefit of the doubt. When it's all said and done, the people who don't take the time to try and understand me get dismissed pretty quickly.

I know, I know, that makes me a terrible person. But it's also true that some people are more considerate than others, and all things being equal, if I'm going to expend my limited energy on someone, it's going to be the person who is a little more considerate.

I guess that's my failing, but whatever.

There is this recorded saying that they've been playing on the subway in NYC... It's trite -- borderline oppressive when you're stuck in a sardine can of a subway car -- but it applies here: "Courtesy is contagious, and it begins with you."

There's no reason for you or anyone else to think you're a terrible person because of what you're saying, but at the same time, it might be helpful for you to reconsider your position. What happens if someone catches you on a bad day in which you aren't trying to understand people? They "dismiss you pretty quickly" and you're left holding the bag.

We're not discussing courtesy.

I can excuse me and hello, nice to meet you all day long without a second thought. But I'm not going to spend my time trying to reconcile with someone who is being unfair to something I said when I could instead be using that time to reconcile with someone who is instead simply misunderstanding me.

there is an idea known as irreconcilable differences, that idea applies here.

It's called "courtesy" on the subway, but the analogous traits are "empathy" and "earnestness" in general discourse. My point was less about the specific trait and more that often times we can encourage/evoke the traits we want to see in others by first developing and portraying them in ourselves. I guess I am looking at the grey area between someone being unfair to you and someone who is misunderstanding you. I think that trying to empathize and understand the "other" often results in finding out that someone isn't actually being "unfair" to us, but rather, is actually "misunderstanding" us. That working point can give way to deeper understanding in a conversation/venture that might have otherwise been discarded because of "irreconcilable differences."

no, this is courtesy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR5rIv4Qros

If you're not willing to empathize enough to do this for another human being, then you're a terrible person who needs to work to be better.

> I don't have the mental energy to give everyone I come across the benefit of the doubt... people who don't take the time to try and understand me get dismissed pretty quickly.

So you basically demand others spend mental energy on you, but you refuse to return the favor?

This is a very common case. Both sides attempting to communicate their point and get acknowledgement that it's been understood and at the same time neither side making an attempt to understand. Sometimes it's not even a disagreement, just a difference of expression, aka. 'in violent agreement'.

Which is of course a misunderstanding of my point.

The question is going to be will you start telling me what my point is? because I'm not going to waste my time on you.

No reasonable person who has been online for any length of time is going to really argue with what I just said. There is no way you sit and really contemplate and try to communicate as best you can with everyone you come across online, you would never make it out of a single youtube video.

There's how you view yourself and then there's the way you really are. You pick and choose just as readily as I do, the only difference is I'm pretty open about it.

You recognize the irony here, right?

You won't give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but only take seriously the people who offer it to you.

That strategy doesn't seem like it would pan out very well!

check out this video, it's ironic too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jne9t8sHpUc

That's the primacy effect from the article. Where assuming 50% smoothly distributed random assholery in the general population (for the sake of easy math) and X opinions, then people who know significantly more than two times X people (lets say ten X) will tend to have met at least one person with the "wrong" opinion who is an asshole therefore by the primacy effect the next person they meet with the "wrong" opinion has been sabotaged by someone from their past to be autocategorized into asshole status much like that jerk from 8 years ago or whatever.

This all came up in a verbal discussion I had with someone as to why evolution hasn't "fixed" memory, it subjectively seems technically possible looking at skill memory (riding a bike, etc), and the theory we more or less proposed is social cohesion is reproductively valuable and social cohesion is destroyed if people remember minor slights (or, worse than minor slights...) forever. So a population where people forget is a population that will be more reproductively successful over time and outcompete a more petty society where members remember everything. And that's why google searches and/or social media are a net negative for society, or rephrased its a competitive advantage for a culture not to have google/facebook integration. I don't think that was the result they were looking for, and now as per the above any time that poor bastard runs into a new user of the Socratic method of discussion he's going to auto-categorize the new guy as an asshole, all my fault. Oh well, at least its not google searchable (aside from here), LOL.

> social cohesion is destroyed if people remember minor slights (or, worse than minor slights...) forever.

Quite a few cultures worked like this. Minor issues of "honour" would turn into persistent and violent multi-generational vendettas. Unfortunately, violence isn't necessarily a problem for social cohesion. It makes your culture a horrible place to be, but it doesn't keep humans from breeding successfully.

Re: memory, I think it's more likely that a better memory would take extra energy and perhaps a different brain structure, but would add no obvious survival benefits.

Early humans basically needed enough memory to find their way around an environment, to recognise each other, and to know a few heuristics for group values and survival practices (often camouflaged as myths and stories.)

There was no need to learn every possible back-of-the-book calculus formula or the entire syntax of Haskell. From that pov, human memory is already an order of magnitude better than it really needs to be.

Interestingly, some cultures were allegedly much better at memory than we are. Supposedly epic poets and druids endured long and incredibly arduous trainings with huge amounts of rote memorisation.

> It makes your culture a horrible place to be, but it doesn't keep humans from breeding successfully.

I remember a Maori exhibit at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. The gist was, they had these never-ending violence cycles based on perceived points of honor, but as you say they weren't a huge deal because their weapons weren't very good and most conflicts had few fatalities. Then they got guns from the Europeans and suddenly had an actual problem. At this point, some of the chiefs converted to Christianity for, according to the museum, the sole reason that it let them 'turn the other cheek' without losing honor (and thus their leadership position).

I remember only a small amount from the rest of the museum, but that bit was fascinating.

This is a subject that is pretty close to my heart, and which I think extends beyond demeanor. I witness on a near-daily basis conversations turning into heated arguments simply because the protagonists fail to see beyond their own perspectives and convey their own inadequately. Quite often, it seems, the points brought forward by the "opposing" party are largely ignored, the arguments are no longer about who/what is right, but about who wins. You therefore end up with conversations where the two parties are in fact talking about the same thing, but are so caught up in their own narrative that instict (System 1) takes over. Alternatively, people may be talking about completely different things and fail to realize they're doing so, effectively and unknowningly arguing in a vacuum, where loudness and displays of anger are more often than not the deciding factors. In both instances, this often results in disgruntled people and feelings being blown out of proportion. One only needs to look at political debates to see what I'm referring to.

On a lighter note, and hopefully providing more positive (anecdotal) examples than the article provides, signalling can be a very powerful tool too, even when mixed. It seems I have one of those faces that instills trust; quite regularly, completely random people will smile at me, say hello or even engage in conversation. Similarly, I'll be, say, on a bus and transport inspectors will get on and check everybody's tickets, except mine. They will look at me, smile at me, and completely ignore whether I do have a ticket. This sort of thing happens to me so regularly that I'm not even sure what to make of it, though it is definitely nice.

Do you have a baby face? I remember research showing these description all happen for people with a baby face. Their prime example was Matt Damen.

To look at the subject matter more generally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

Theory of mind (often abbreviated ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc. — to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own.

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