mindlace

We all make snap judgements about people and situations. One of the ways to test for the existence of these judgements is something called an implicit association test. There are some association tests on the web, and I just took a few. They suffer from one serious problem, in my view, and that is of UI. You’re supposed to pair “good” words with a particular sort of stimuli, and then “bad” words with another stimuli. There are two words in each corner; for example “young and bad” vs. “old and good”. You press either the e or the i key to indicate whether the word/image on the screen is associated with one of two groups.

My issue is that the association, for me, is related to a.) how many times the stimuli for the same key come in sequence and b.) how recently the stimuli association has been changed (i.e. moved “young” to the e key rather than the i key).

Things I would change: I would change the key to be pressed each time I changed the stimuli; I would change the location of the word pairs when I changed the pairing (i.e. from upper left to lower left); I would enforce a pause between stimuli changes; I would allow no more than two repeat key presses in a row.

Still, a very interesting little game to play; by its measure, I make quite a few implicit associations that I don’t particularly care for.

Learning how to deal with interpersonal conflict, the subject of the last chapter in Looking out, Looking in, is a difficult matter. The most difficult conflict style for me to learn to deal with is the passive aggressive conflict style, both in myself and in other people.

Someone using a passive aggressive conflict style presents a face that is substantially at odds with either the ‘ground truth‘ available, other presented faces of theirs and even their perceived face. They will also deny any observation of such deviation, either by simple rejection or a more nuanced dismissal.

This severely damages many of the interpersonal communication techniques we’ve been taught in Interpersonal Communication. Perception Checking, suggested in Chapter 3: Perception, reveals what you’ve seen. The Clear Message Format covered in Chapter 9: Improving Communication Climates is a recipe for broadcasting your intentions. Paraphrasing, as suggested in Chapter 7: Listening, is another technique of deliberate revelation. These tactics work great when someone is genuinely interested in communication, but how effective are they when your interlocutor is willing to twist their response to any disclosure to match their aims?

It’s difficult to figure out how to relate to people that use these sorts of tactics, and part of the reason is the difficulty apprehending intentionality. We all say one thing and do another some times, because of circumstances out of our control, or judgement calls that we made in the face of additional information, or because of an emotional response. Furthermore, passive aggressive folk like to play up these factors.

To an extent, I think, I’ve discredited explanations that play too heavily into the hands of passive aggressive. For example, I’m way more likely to be sceptical if someone gets all teary eyed at how rough things are for them, lately, and that’s why they’ve been such a dork. Unfortunately, that sort of intentional stance can waver pretty far across the line towards a lack of empathy; someone really can have a rough time, and it really can affect them adversely, and your being cold to them just makes you the asshole.

I don’t have any real good answers. I’ve burned people hard and I’ve been burned hard by this sort of behaviour. I really haven’t found foolproof ways of figuring out whether someone is taking me for a ride aside from getting on it and seeing how it comes out. I’ve tried the whole being-more-cautious thing, but I just can’t maintain that kind of distance for long, so what’s happened is I’ve had these kinds of experiences repeatedly, which taught me that a lot of things that seem really scary are kind of all right in the end. It’s led me towards is a sort of sacrificial openness. I reveal things to people that, in my experience, others are unwilling to be very open about. This means they’ll consider me to have “revealed” something to them. Then I pay attention to what they do with those pieces of information, and that gives me some indication as to whether or not they’re engaging in passive aggressive or manipulative behaviours.

Gossip is also essential to checking the unbridled effectiveness of the passive aggressive tactic, because through gossip people compare notes and figure out discrepancies in behaviour displayed over time; one of the characteristic behaviours of the passive aggressive is trashing you behind your back, and that’s the sort of thing that’s fairly easy to correlate.

I’m glad LoLi gave a number of excellent tools for enhancing decent communication. I’m very interested to see if there’s a course that deals more with relating with very advanced forms of social manipulation on an interpersonal and group level, because that’s what I feel like I have to navigate in my day to day life that currently doesn’t go very smoothly for me.

Defensiveness is an excellent example of a generally unhelpful behaviour that appears to be a direct consequence of maintaining a selfplex. Looking out, Looking in describes defensiveness as protecting ourselves against face-threatening acts. They specifically suggest defensiveness results from an attack on their presenting face, that is, those aspects of their self-concept they show (or think they show) to other people. This seems to be counteracted by their later discussion of “below the belt” attacks, which strike me as attacks against the perceived self, which would seem to map to an inner face as opposed to the outer, presenting face. From my experience, attacks like these generally invoke at least as much defensiveness as those against the presenting face.

So without a selfplex from which to draw the presenting face or perceived self, it would seem that the problem of managing defensiveness largely disappears. Defensiveness on behalf of an attack on another may continue to exist, but it seems likely that someone without a selfplex wouldn’t be too tremendously interested in utilizing defense mechanisms that don’t make sense without a selfplex. While I may defend my friend’s extensive collection of care bears, the fact that I myself lack both interest in and posession of care bears will quell some of the passion of my defense.

Some stimuli that generally trigger defensiveness presumably continue to bring about emotional responses. It seems possible that even a selfless person might get embarrased if, say, they inadvertently violate a social taboo. I don’t think that this behaviour is necessarily evidence for a selfplex, because dogs feel shame, presumably without human-scale self-concepts.

Listening is difficult and underappreciated, at least in English. After reading the chapter on Listening in Looking out, Looking in, I looked around on the web to see if I could find additional research like I had for some of the prior chapters. I didn’t really find anything; a simple google for listening courses vs speaking courses shows a little over twice as many hits for speaking; furthermore the top hits for listening are all for people who do not have english as a primary language. Perhaps this is related to English cultures being low context, individualistic, and generally oriented away from the inner qualities of subjective experience. I don’t know enough about other linguistic groups to know if the same bias is present elsewhere.

The book suggests that most people overestimate their capability at listening. On the one hand this seems in line with people’s general inability to self-asses, but on the other listening seems particularly difficult to self-assess; the speaker’s assesment of one’s listening is a large measure of success, and failure at listening almost invariably means that the failed listening event will not be as accurately remembered as an excellent listening experience, which generates a selection bias.

That being said, I notice that the quality of my listening varies wildly. I’m prone to inattention due to preoccupation and I’m very prone to assume what someone wants out of my listening. Another thing I’ve done a lot is what the book calls “stage-hogging”, or turning the conversational topic over to something that happened to me. In my defense, I had long held the opinion that people wanted some confirmation that you have enough shared experience to be empathetic, so I would often relate something they were talking about to something that happened to me.

Improving my listening is going to take some work, because all of these problems are ones I’ve had for a while, and a few of them – like assuming that someone wants me to suggest solutions when they talk to me about a problem – I find myself falling into even though I have long been aware that people are often not interested in hearing a fix.

One way I’ve tried to improve my listening is by making fewer statements and asking more questions. The danger I have encountered is I often ask leading questions that direct someone towards a fix I have in mind for their problem.

In order to improve my listening skills, it seems apparent that I should try to find ways to get feedback as to what sort of interaction the speaker is looking for. Since I don’t know of any really good ways to do this, I should make the default assumption that they do not want me to solve their problem. Furthermore, when they ask for my opinion on something, I need to be more careful about trying to answer not using my personal opinion, but from my understanding of who they are as a person and the context of the situation they’re in. I’ll also be on the lookout for more information about listening.

Looking out, Looking in talks about the different aspects of relationship formation, maintenance, and dissolution. One area I find to be oversimplified is the discussion of the “social exchange theory” of relationships. The formula presented is Rewards – Costs = Outcome, which suggests a self-interested basis for relationship: if I think the rewards of interacting with you are greater than the costs, I will do it; otherwise, I won’t. While there certainly are self-interested people that behave this way, most people do not. Since the example suggests it is a ‘semi-economic model’, we’ll look for more evidence from economics. It turns out that through prisoners dillema games and other set ups, economists have been probing the nature of human interactions for a while. A consistent pattern of behaviour emerges that suggests that the equation presented above is inaccurate. “People repay gifts and take revenge even in interactions with complete strangers, even if it is costly for them and yeilds neither present nor future material rewards” (The economics of reciprocity).

An experimental example of reciprocity is a trust game where the experimenter gives X dollars to a Proposer; the Proposer can then give as much of that as they like to a third party, the Responder. If the Responder refuses, neither gets money. The formula above would suggest that the Responder would never refuse the money, because the cost is always 0 to accepting the lower amount, and the Proposer would always offer a very inequitable distribution, as his reward diminishes proportionally to his exchange. Nonetheless, the Responder almost always refuses the amount if it is “too low”, and the Proposer almost always offers 40-50% of the amount.

It seems that a reciprocal model of relationship is more accurate than an exchange theory model; whatever theories we use to explain why people form and maintain relationships, we are probably mistaken if we assume that the reason is based on a cost/benefit analysis.

Nonverbal signaling is an interesting component of interpersonal communication because it is extraordinarily significant while being ambiguous and idiosyncratic.

While we are capable of improving our ability to understand nonverbal communication through training, the ability itself is innate. It is contingent upon hereditary components; autistics generally have to undergo extensive training to comfortably interact with the neurologically typical. Since it contains a hereditary component, it must have historically conferred differential reproductive success. To me it seems initially counterintuitive that we would have an evolved capacity for interpreting such ambiguous signalling. If communication is important for reproductive success in other species, they generally adopt rather unambiguous modes of communication, like the clear, distinct tones of birdsong, the croak of a frog, or the vivid extravagance of a peacock’s tail.

Our forbears, with their machiavellian intelligence, obviously had some hereditary capacity for interpreting gross motor movements like threat displays and teeth-baring. In addition to neurological adaptations, we have several physiological adaptations whose primary function is to improve non-verbal signaling.

The prominent chin and pronounced cheeks of the movie star highlights the attractiveness of the capacity to make more nuanced facial expressions. The number of muscles in the modern human face and our degree of control over them far exceeds that of our cousins, and presumably our ancestors as well.

Modern research suggests that we make facial expressions preconsciously; we express them and then we suppress them, making microexpressions that last 1/5 of a second. Why is this? It seems like we should either be unable to make an expression or in control of the expression. This tension leads me to infer that expressions came first, and control over expressions later. Experiments to see if any of our cousins (with similar, though simpler, repertoires of facial expression) also have microexpressions would help test this thesis. Another piece of supporting evidence is that people who are lying tend to reduce expressiveness, something that may indicate that controlling facial expression carries a heavy cognitive burden.

The emotional system is present in all mammals to a greater or lesser degree, so it had to serve a purpose before simians arose. Emotions probably developed as a sort of neurological system for categorising experience. In a social situation, both the recognition of emotion’s behavioural correlates in others and the amplification of them in yourself would be selected for.

As soon as you live in a social situation where everyone is signalling their internal state, it becomes helpful to manipulate your signalling. Not just for deception but to let decisions based on social perceptions mediate emotional responses based on direct perception.

Language is a peculiar thing. In some ways it can be considered the fundamental neurological adaptation of the human species. Indisputably a cultural artifact, language is also a neurological one; speaking utilises definite neurological constructs. One of the interesting characteristics of these neurological constructs is that they are not bilaterally symmetric. While there is ongoing controversy about whether humans are the only neurologically asymmetrical primate, it seems clear that language’s neural correlates are asymmetrical. Furthermore, while modern language skills definitely require the use of hereditary linguistic ability, as the inability to teach language to primates demonstrates, it seems evident that language could have arisen as a sort of neural software in a primate that happened to have exess neural material just “lying around”. It turns out that megaencephaly in mice is only a recessive mutation away, so we have some reason to suspect that megaencephaly is the sort of evolutionary mutation that could arise and persist independent of any particular selection pressure; in other words, it could be that a significant sub-population of a H. sapiens precursor could have been megencephalic, much like a significant sub-population of modern H. sapiens is a dwarf or polydactyl today.

This sub-population of big brained freak monkeys tended to hang together, since the machiavellian intelligence of their non-mutent bretheren tended to socially ostracise them, and frankly the other monkeys were kind of boring.

Excess neural tissue doesn’t just sit there. I remember vividly seeing a child who was congenitally deaf experience his first sound through a cochlear implant at age 6 or so; he reacted with shock, and vivid discomfort. I don’t think we can quite imagine what that experience was like. Just as the auditory centers of his brain were doing something else before they were stimulated by the chochlear implant. Similarly, the novel brain tissue of these proto-humans organized itself according to its experience.

So you’re a comely proto-human lass, and you’ve got this moderately intricate series of vocalizations and gestures that let you get by pretty well in the world, and you’re looking for someone to get it on with. Now, if you go outside the dome-heads, you know you aren’t going to get any sort of gesticulation, so you look for another dome-head. Once you’ve found a worthy mate, you have another problem; your offspring are likely to be megaencephalic, which will make your reproduction more difficult, and your offspring’s larger brain will take longer to fully develop.

As a strapping young proto-human man, you could stick with sowing your wild oats, and that still pays dividends, but most of your big-brained offspring are going to require careful attention if they’re going to survive, so those boys that stick around and help out more with child-rearing are more likely to have progeny that make it to reproductive age.

These increased needs and changing reproductive strategies drive an explosion of culture like nothing else. Enhanced cultural needs imply enhanced ability to model and project our colleagues’ internal state, and this drives the improvement of not only our capacity to recognize facial expression but our capacity to make facial expressions; the development of a chin and the cheekbones enhanced our facial repoitoire and our capacity for making sounds. Being able to make a variety of interesting sounds led to pressure towards more capacity to make interesting sounds and so our larynx dropped. That making sounds was extremely important is suggested by the fact that the dropped larynx means we’re the only mammal that can choke to death while drinking water.

With all of these pressures encouraging the development of the anatomical prerequisites of modern language, pressure was active in the brain, as well. During development brains undergo a sort of evolution in miniature, where neurons that effectively participate in neural networks survive and those that do not commit apoptosis. This means that genes only have to provide a rough outline of neural structures, and the brain is capable of ‘filling in the blanks’. Nonetheless, the intense selective pressure of increased vocal ability rapidly resulted in key neurological mechanisms that give language a ready home in the human brain.

The story of the interpersonal communication’s evolution seems nearly synonymous with the emergence of humankind. The many interrelated factors that went into the development of human language as a cultural and physiological artifact both illustrate the core of what we are as a species and the sort of capacities and challenges we have to face in our individual experience of our linguistic world.

About two years ago, I had a disastrous series of personal events that left me in a situation where I was regularly out of control of my emotions. This was new for me, as generally I was able to talk myself down from a particular emotional precipice. At the time, I had a mental model of what went on in the brain that more or less put my mind in a conscious arbiter sort of situation; I thought I got to consciously choose what I expressed or how I behaved. In the circumstances above I was not: I was furious and unable to quelch it, jealous and unable to avoid snarky, biting comments, embarrassed and unable to reign in the feeling of utter worthlessness. When I finally managed to extricate myself from that situation, I set myself to discovering what was going on in my brain to allow these things to occur. As part of that research I read The Emotional Brain by Joseph Ledoux and several other books and research papers on the subject of emotional functioning. They led me to some interesting insights. The latest chapter of Looking out, Looking in (LoLi) purports to discuss emotions, their impact on communication, and how to work with them. While the ideas it expresses have merit, it is wrong about emotions in a way that may lead someone following its advice to abandon it.

Emotional responses are not all mediated by the same system in the brain. Moreover, the most studied emotion is fear, and much of what follows in this paper is based on fear experiments. Nevertheless, many emotions seem to be at least coordinated by the amygdala, an almond-shaped smooth structure at roughly the center of our brains. The amygdala has its own, dedicated connections to the sensory centers of the brain, and its own mechanisms for accessing the hippocampus, a structure that is involved in forming and recalling memories.

The amygdala is very fast; it makes a ‘decision’ about whether to respond to stimuli emotionally in about 50msec. The conscious brain, by comparison, is very slow; it takes between 150msec to 200+msec to form a conscious impression of stimuli. What this means is that by the time you become aware of something, you could already be angry about it, or afraid of it.

LoLi proposes an approach to understanding and manipulating one’s emotional state based on the premise that emotions are induced by “self-talk”; that our conscious mind induces an emotional response. While we can induce an emotional response consciously, it is generally not the case that consciousness originates an emotional response.

The book argues that one should not think of an event as causing an emotional reaction, but instead that our interpretative frame for an event causes a particular emotional reaction. Furthermore, it has a whole section dedicated to the “Fallacy of causation”, where they try to debunk the notion that others cause emotional reactions.

It is true that an emotional response isn’t “caused” by a situation, but rather by your amygdala interpreting a particular set of circumstances according to the stimuli and its own memory of the past, it is certainly “caused” in the sense that it arrives in your conscious mind in much the same way as a perception.

Furthermore, rationalizing away your emotional responses does not work in many circumstances. The types of memories that the amygdala forms are extraordinarily robust and not subject to erasure just by rationalizing about it. The only proven ways to deal with extremely strong debilitating emotions are to remove yourself from the triggering stimuli (in the case where the stimuli is rationally associated with the emotion) or to expose yourself repeatedly to related stimuli (in the case where the persistent emotional response isn’t reasonable).

For example, being in an abusive relationship with a male may make a woman leery of all men; dealing with that emotion most likely requires removing herself from the relationship, and once the emotion isn’t as present, expose herself to similar stimuli in known-safe situations until the memory diminishes.

Anxiety appears to be mediated by the dorsal raphe nucleus and thus may not be amenable to this form of treatment. Regardless, the idea that if we could just have the right frame of reference we could not only cope with our emotions but actually control their arising is an incomplete picture that may lead someone to abandon the techniques described in the book when they fail to work.

Much of the theory involving the way individuals communicate is rooted in the notion of the self-concept or level of self-esteem as some sort of qualitative measure of well- being. Unfortunately, this received object of agency seems to be largely a theoretical device of early 20th century American male scholars, and not an assesment of something existing in the psyche of all humankind, like anger. The fact that Looking out, Looking in (LoLi) promotes this concept as a fulcrum around which interpersonal communication revolves suggests that social bias may be subtly distorting the concepts the book is trying to convey.

There are some aspects to the notion of self-concept that have merit. We have a literal self sense in the form of proprioception and kinaesthesia that allows us to have an idea of where our bodies are in space; when conjoined with our other senses, it combines into a visceral awareness of our particular embodiment. Furthermore, we have a fairly integrated consciousness in the moment that can generate what Daniel Dennett calls the “benign user-illusion“. Finally, and probably most relevant to LoLi’s discussion of the concept, humans have a very advanced form of Machiavellian intelligence – a dedicated mental capacity for maintaining elaborate models of interpersonal relationships in their heads. All these qualities have made human minds fertile ground for the social “self-concept” or “self-esteem” that have such extraordinary currency in modern western discourse, but much like many plants can be grown in fertile ground, humans can exist without self-esteem or any appreciable self-concept.

The book is primarily concerned with how these matters relate to interpersonal communication. In order to introduce the self concept, it starts with an exercise that serves to reinforce it. It asks the reader to describe herself on several qualitative axis; appearance, talents, intellectual capacity and social roles are all included. Then it goes on to ask the reader to rank the generated elements of the description, and contemplate how her identity would change if those elements stopped being true, one at a time.

The authors then suggest that “this exercise dramatically illustrates just how fundamental the concept of self is.” However, like a man asked when he stopped beating his wife, this leads the question. By putting together a list and calling it “you”, the authors induce the reader to engage in the same sort of exercise that sometimes seems to be the dominant US pastime – creating, feeding, and manipulating self-concepts. Individuals in this society are continuously encouraged to think of themselves as a self with a particular identity. This encouragement is almost never altruistic; the Government wants you to identify as a Good American, the school wants you to to identify with it, your family to identify as one of them. The self-concept is the perfect place to hang these hooks: once you have incorporated some concept into your self-concept, you are much more willing to defend it regardless of its merits.

Having participated in the reification of the self-concept, the authors go on to suggest that it may be measured on some kind of scale called “self-esteem”. This goes back to William James’ (1890) construction of the concept and the six-point self-esteem scale used by Rosenberg in Society and the Self-Image (1965). The notion that there is a global scale applicable to everyone has been strongly critiqued. Nonetheless, the authors use it to construct a notion that our self-esteem value influences our communicative behaviour; undesirable behaviour leads to ‘negative thoughts’ which reduce self esteem, reduced self esteem generates more negative thoughts, which in turn induce undesirable behaviour. The positive loop is described identically.

LoLi gives a passing nod to the way other cultures have a different view of self esteem, by comparing ‘collectivist’ approaches to ‘individualist’ ones. It doesn’t seem to significantly impact their broader approach. This is unfortunate as there are coherent alternative formulations of personality from other cultures, some of which show interesting analogues to evidence being uncovered on the neurological level.

The buddhist doctrine of Anatta or Anatman literally translated means “no self”. The core contention is that there is no subsistent self in humans, and that pretensions to the contrary are illusory. Since this doctrine is rooted in entirely different methods of inquiry than psychology, it may be tempting to dismiss it. However, modern research, particularly the work of Gerald M. Edelman and colleagues, have shown that the brain is the result of a huge series of selection events during development, and on an ongoing basis consciousness itself behaves more like a flock of mutually-influencing neuronal clusters whose membership and direction varies radically from moment to moment than any sort of coherent or stable pattern of activity.

These underlying problems with the self-concept model show themselves in the book’s discussion of the different personalities we present in different contexts. If we are different people in different contexts, how then can we have a self-concept or self-esteem? The book itself neglects to address this, discussing identity management with little relation to the prior notion of self-concept.

Letting go of self-concept or self-esteem addresses many of the problems that the chapter tries to discuss. If self-esteem is not on a linear scale, then we needn’t fret over increasing it or that it might dip too low. If there is no essential self, then the ‘problem’ of maintaining a self-image that is somehow proportionate to reality is no longer an issue. This is a huge problem; we are fairly limited beings that cannot be aware of everything that is going on inside ourselves, much less every way in which we present to others. Indeed, others are generally better at making an assessment of us precisely because they don’t have the distorted perspective of residing in our skull. Maintaining a realistic self-identity is a practical impossibility in the face of these difficulties. Accepting that no concept of oneself is sufficient to describe oneself frees you to utilise the capacities that are bent towards maintaining self-integrity to more useful tasks.

Placing the social construct of the self as the primary agent of discourse for interpersonal communication makes communication more difficult, more likely to have conflict, and more susceptible to subtle, systemic bias. As we move through the book it will be unsurprising if this bias shows up in the choice of issues to discuss and how they are portrayed.

Perception is a very significant component of interpersonal communications. Over the internet, it is very easy for perception to be misconstrued, and difficult for affect or context to carry itself.

I participate in a lot of internet communications; I use email extensively, participate in Internet Relay Chat almost every day, and write in my blog and on my website. I have often had very severe difficulties in communicating, and many of the difficulties were related to perceptual problems.

Looking out, Looking in describes verifying your perceptions to ensure their accuracy; the three components of it are a description of observed behaviour, two or more possible interpretations, and a request for clarification.

I have lately begun to use this technique more, but I have largely not used it even though it has been in common service in my face-to-face interaction. I think there are characteristics of internet communication that make it harder to use perception checking.

The first, in email, is that your responses are not real-time: in a face to face conversation you can do a perception check and after you’ve received feedback, continue on. Pausing for verification of a perception check in email could lag the conversation by hours or days, rendering you unable to pick up your train of consciousness. If you do include a perception check and then continue based on one of your interpretations, the respondent often ignores the request for clarification and replies as if the interpretation you used was your decided stance.

In chat, the challenge is that discussions are simultaneously lower and higher bandwidth than in-person interactions. On the one hand, ten people can simultaneously have three conversations, where in person they would have to pair off or not participate in the other two. On the other hand, multiple threads of conversation make misinterpretation easier, and individual participants generally cannot communicate as fast as they could via speech. Furthermore, many types of perception checking that can occur in person; the general tenor of the group, the number of people paying attention, their expressions and level of participation all provide hints as to the reception you’re getting for what you say. In chat it is very easy to talk over people and to frustrate people for whom you would otherwise temper your message because you can’t see these signals.

Finally, in writing for my website I am writing into the void. I am interested in a variety of topics and the depth of my knowledge is sometimes very deep and sometimes very shallow. I have no way of knowing what concepts are familiar to my audience and what style of writing will be off-putting. It is extremely difficult to get perceptual checking on writing that I intend to post, because even when I do solicit feedback prior to posting something, I am invariably getting feedback from an unrepresentative sample of those who will experience my post.

Perceptual difficulties pervade internet communication, and working around them requires developing different tactics than are readily applied in regular interactions. Through additional use of disclaimers, reducing the use of declarative speech, providing additional background, and directly asking where possible, I have tried to come closer to accommodating the perceptions of my multifarious communication partners.