Why you feel attacked even though nobody is attacking you
How a sentence without an emoji can turn into an attack that never actually happened
So far, we’ve mainly been looking at our own minds and how our fast and slow thinking works within them. Today we’re going to look at what happens when a second mind enters the picture. More specifically, we’ll explore why two people can go through the same experience yet draw completely different conclusions from it, and why this in particular can lead to conflict.
„The only real journey, the only fountain of youth, would not be to seek out new lands, but to acquire new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of others, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is.“
It was just a text message
I’d had a bad day. I hadn’t really had a good night’s sleep, work was piling up and my head was a whirl of thoughts. My mobile beeped and I saw new messages in the shared Signal group for our circle of friends. Not long ago, we’d been laughing at old photos of ourselves and teasing each other. Then I see that a friend has replied to one of my comments, which I’d meant as a joke in my head and typed out in Messenger. The message is short, contains no emojis and strikes me as cold, yes, almost confrontational. I feel a twinge inside and negative feelings start to well up. I mention it to my wife and she looks at me with a raised eyebrow. “I don’t know what you’re reading into it, but to me it seems like a normal reply and nothing against you.” The pressure building inside me intensifies. Now even my wife doesn’t see that I’m being attacked, and she’s defending my friend on top of that. I feel misunderstood and my mood is at rock bottom…
This week is all about situations exactly like this. Situations we experience every day, and the way in which we interpret them as matter of fact.
To me, my friend’s sentence had a certain tone that I’d assigned to it in my head whilst reading it. It was so clear and unambiguous to me that I didn’t doubt its subtext. But it only dawned on me later, when I stumbled across a few studies on this phenomenon, that this tone wasn’t actually present in the sentence.
A text message on its own isn’t a big deal. What we make of it, however, can take on proportions that damage our interpersonal relationships, when we let conversations escalate over it, make insinuations and let friendships suffer, even though these sentences were never meant that way.
The tone isn’t in the sentence
Justin Kruger and Nicholas Epley investigated precisely this situation in the mid-2000s. They had people write sentences to one another, some meant seriously, others ironically, and asked them to estimate how much of this subtext would be picked up by the recipient. The senders were extremely confident that 97 per cent of their messages would be understood correctly. Reality, however, showed that only 84 per cent of the messages were interpreted correctly.
Whilst this may sound like a small margin at first, it says a lot about our self-assessment, as it means we misjudge the clarity of our messages far more often than we realise. And who would want to be misunderstood and judged on that basis in 16 per cent of cases?
The real revelation came in the second stage of the experiment, where the same sentences were read aloud in the sender’s own voice on one occasion and sent as an email on another. When delivered by voice, around three-quarters of the messages were understood correctly. Via email, however, the success rate was indistinguishable from a coin toss, standing at 50 per cent. Yet the senders’ confidence remained just as high! The channel therefore altered how the messages were received by the recipients, whilst the senders’ perceived clarity remained the same. One and the same sentence can sound different in an email than it does in a WhatsApp message.
The explanation is very simple. When you type an ironic sentence, you inevitably hear your own ironic tone as you type, and this conveys information that completes the meaning of the sentence for the sender. However, this additional information is missing when only the text is transmitted.
The sentence I’m writing sounds to me just as I hear it in my head. The sentence you’re reading sounds just as you hear it whilst reading. They are two different sentences, and nobody realises it.
How the World Cup makes this clearer
The World Cup has once again illustrated this effect very clearly. We see our own teams fighting and being fouled, whilst the other team is just diving. And anyway, the referee always seems to be against our team.
If you talk to football fans, they even say as much themselves: “I’m not objective about this… but”.
And that is precisely what makes it such a special moment. When such subjective bias feels like a bias even from within, and it’s clear to everyone that their own team is the best, we readily admit it and are often proud of it (that’s what makes you a true fan). However, it becomes dangerous when this bias doesn’t feel like a subjective sense of solidarity, but rather like a factual reality.
This is precisely what Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril investigated as far back as 1954, when they showed students at Dartmouth and Princeton universities footage of a match between their two teams that had got a little out of hand a few years earlier and ended with a broken nose and a broken leg. They asked students from both universities to count the fouls, and it became clear that the Princeton students saw roughly twice as many fouls committed by the Dartmouth team as the Dartmouth students did.
Furthermore, 36 per cent of the Dartmouth students stated that Dartmouth had started the rough play, whilst 86 per cent of the Princeton students said the same.
It was the same film, the same images, but two different games.
Why we spot this so quickly in others
In a study conducted in 2002 by Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin and Lee Ross, people were asked how susceptible they thought they themselves were to various cognitive biases and how susceptible they thought others were. The result was as interesting as it was predictable: the respondents considered themselves less prone to such errors than the average person. So far, so good. However, the researchers also included in the list items that are not invisible biases, but rather minor everyday weaknesses that one can easily recognise in oneself, such as procrastination, stage fright or the tendency to underestimate how much time one needs. With these three items, the overestimation of one’s own abilities disappeared completely and even tended to reverse.
At the start of this series of essays, I wrote about the warning light in our heads that only comes on when something feels challenging. It reappears here too, because in our own minds, the world around us feels coherent. We interpret it in such a way that a coherent overall picture emerges, and this sense of coherence blinds us to the potential distortions through which we view our world.
A conversation feels clear and unambiguous from within; our perception is the valid reality. Yet that is exactly what it is: our perception.
A Change of Perspective
When you read it like that, the solution is actually clear: we need to listen to one another more carefully and put ourselves in other people’s shoes more often. But although this is, of course, true, this piece of advice, which we’ve heard a hundred times and put into practice far too rarely, doesn’t quite hit the mark.
The reason lies in what we’ve just seen. You don’t put yourself in someone else’s shoes when what you’re currently experiencing feels like reality. There is simply no trigger to make you go to the effort required to change your perspective.
Yet we do, in principle, have the ability to do so. In the first study mentioned, most of the message got through, but we lacked the awareness of the gap when something did come across differently. We’d be fantastic listeners if we had a sense of where we needed to ask for clarification. A mere intention alone isn’t enough here, especially when strong emotions are involved, as in the example from my everyday life. One could simply put it down to the fact that I’d had a bad day, but that would be the easy explanation and it wouldn’t do anyone justice. Nevertheless, our emotional states greatly exacerbate this tendency towards misunderstandings by pulling us even further into the tunnel of our own perspective.
What helps is to paraphrase the other person’s point of view once it has been expressed. What initially looks like a conversation technique allows us to reflect back how we think we’ve understood the other person. This creates a space in which misunderstandings can be corrected before they escalate.
Incidentally, my girlfriend’s curt reply the other day wasn’t actually a reply. She’d simply fired off a response with a similar touch of irony to mine, the irony of which had escaped me. That explained my wife’s raised eyebrow.
A brief thought to conclude: perhaps whenever something feels absolutely clear to us, we should interpret that as a reliable sign that we’re currently only listening to ourselves. In this way, we hone our intuition for such situations and can avoid the odd stumbling block.
For the week ahead
In a conversation this week, try summarising your conversation partner’s point of view out loud before you reply. If any misunderstandings arise, discuss them until you can get to the heart of the other person’s perspective. Don’t use this as a technique, but as a way of checking how often you get it wrong at the first attempt.
And when you’re writing a message where tone matters, read it aloud in the tone you least intended. If it still works, it’s ambiguous and harder for the other person to interpret.
Three questions for the week.
Does my view currently feel like a perspective or opinion, or like reality?
What exactly did the other person say, and what have I added to it?
Where am I certain I’ve been understood, without ever having checked?
Enjoy reflecting on these, see you next week.
— Luc
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Hastorf, A. H., & Cantril, H. (1954). They saw a game: A case study. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49(1), 129–134.
Kruger, J., Epley, N., Parker, J., & Ng, Z.-W. (2005). Egocentrism over e-mail: Can we communicate as well as we think? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(6), 925–936.
Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y., & Ross, L. (2002). The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 369–381.
Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1996). Naive realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. In E. S. Reed, E. Turiel, & T. Brown (Hrsg.), Values and knowledge (S. 103–135). Erlbaum.
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Thinking from Scratch
by Luc Albrecht
Exploring how we think, decide and create clarity
