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Rejection Therapy (2011)
- whoisburbansky 5y agoI wonder how long after the exercise the “affordance” effect lasted.
- cjlm 5y agoI think about Rejection Therapy [0] a lot. Being impervious to rejection has to be some sort of superpower. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejection_Therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejection_Therapy
- omginternets 5y agoAs with most things, I think it's a balance. A complete desensitization to rejection also implies an inability to regulate your social behavior, which in turn is a great way to get ostracized. The best hard-salesmen are also some of the most insufferable individuals, precisely because they can't take a hint.
- sirmarksalot 5y agoSo there's a difference between being able to handle emotions, and not feeling them at all. The point of a lot of these exercises isn't to desensitize you to these feelings, but to teach you how to recognize, process and deal with them. A lot of the maladaptations we have come from avoiding negative feelings, and sacrificing our long-term well-being to prevent ourselves from encountering them. I'm sure there's training out there to completely burn out your amygdala and turn you into a psychopath, but I wouldn't assume that's what this is.
- omginternets 5y agoSure. The parent poster was taking about being “impervious to rejection”, which is what I was responding to.
- munificent 5y agoUsing strangers as unwitting tools in your own psychological therapy without their consent seems super sketchy to me.
- morelisp 5y agoYou're just not thinking rationally enough.
- klyrs 5y agoWhat does "thinking rationally" mean in this context?
- anotherman554 5y agoThe article references some seminar on rationality, so "thinking rationally" means "thinking like the person at the seminar says people should think" presumably.
- morelisp 5y agoAs idlewords once described it, "AI cosplay" - a dumb person's idea of what a smart computer would do. It's honestly a little heartening that comments on HN don't immediately recognize the movement anymore.
- klyrs 5y agoI've heard of a few flavors of "rationality" and I was mostly curious what rationalism would specifically recommend in this situation. Particularly, I know that regionalists strive for a Vulcan-like emotionless mindset -- but even Vulcans are capable of reasoning about others' emotional processes. Simply ignoring/dismissing the emotions of others is absurdly irrational -- one might as well refuse to account for the effect of gravity because we don't fully understand it.
- EsperHugh 5y agoMy psychologist suggested I partake in 1 act of kindness every day, doesn't matter if in favor of a loved one or a stranger. This was to help me deal with some mental problems I had. Following this advice in multiple occasions I actively helped people on the streets, be it by helping them put the groceries in their cars or by taking something that fell off their pockets. I would say this helped me immensely, would you find it super sketchy?
- maerF0x0 5y agoafaik this is actually called "Exposure Therapy" the author is just being more specific about what it is they're being exposed to. https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/exposure-therapy https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/exp...
- sirmarksalot 5y agoI'm curious if this was actually done under the guidance of a mental health professional, or if it was more of an informal team-building type of thing. I say that because I can see this backfiring under some circumstances. Sort of like how drinking removes a lot of your inhibitions, but not the consequences that created those inhibitions in the first place. I can see getting into the groove of it and then doing a whole lot of things that you wouldn't normally do, and then going home that night and lying awake thinking to yourself "WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST DO?!!"
- yial 5y ago
- msluyter 5y agoSimilar to what the famous psychologist Albert Ellis did: "As an adolescent, Albert was extremely shy around ladies. At age 19, he started showing signs of thinking like a cognitive-behavioral therapist by forcing himself to talk to about 100 women in the Bronx Botanical Gardens within a period of one month. This helped him get rid of his fear of rejection by women."[1] "He found 130 women sitting alone that month on park benches. He sat next to all of them, whereupon 30 got up and walked away. He spoke to the remaining 100 — for the first time in his life — about the birds and the bees, the flowers, books, whatever came to mind. Al later said, "If Fred Skinner, who was then teaching at Indiana University, had known about my exploits, he would have thought I would have got extinguished, because of the 100 women I made one date — and she didn't show up! "But I prepared myself philosophically, even then, by seeing that nobody took out a stiletto and cut my balls off, nobody vomited and ran away, nobody called the cops. I had 100 pleasant conversations and with the second 100 I got good and made a few dates." [2] "Nobody took out a stiletto and cut my balls off" -- I've always loved that expression. [1] https://totallyhistory.com/albert-ellis/ https://totallyhistory.com/albert-ellis/ [2] http://www.rebtnetwork.org/ask/may06.html http://www.rebtnetwork.org/ask/may06.html
- colpabar 5y ago>"Nobody took out a stiletto and cut my balls off" -- I've always loved that expression. I think the modern era equivalent would be having your picture taken and posted on social media with the intent of shaming you. I cannot say for sure whether it's more likely to happen, but posting a pic on twitter is significantly easier than mutilating someone with a dagger. It'd be interesting to see how this would work out today.
- beaconstudios 5y agoSure that could theoretically happen, but so what? Some people you don't know make fun of you for being awkward. It's not the end of the world!
- phkahler 5y ago>> It'd be interesting to see how this would work out today. Start after work today. Report in next month when you've tried 100 times.
- whatshisface 5y agoThis is a tragedy of the commons scenario that will ultimately lead to people being less friendly. Right now it's assumed that if someone comes up to ask you for something, they have a good reason.
- sacrosancty 5y agoJesus Christ, why so much hand-wringing? MLM salesmen exist, religious prostheletizers exist, weird people exist. We manage to stay friendly regardless, even towards those people who often open their conversation with something dishonest to hide their true intent. Society isn't going to be altered by some wave of asking-for-favors fad. It's all perfectly fine.
- whatshisface 5y ago>MLM salesmen exist, religious prostheletizers exist, weird people exist. Those three groups contribute substantially to what people expect when they meet a stranger in public and adding more disingenuous possibilities would make it worse.
- morelisp 5y agoSince the context of this event was a rationality seminar, I think it even counts as a hat-trick.
- turmeric_root 5y ago
- omginternets 5y agoI dunno, I've lived in places where casual interaction is more common, and it can be delightful. A culture of "don't talk to me unless there's a practical issue" is, at the very least, prone to atomization. In fact, I don't think you're quite right about the tacit assumption involved. I rather think it is assumed that if someone asks you something, they it is not for instrumental purposes. If someone is talking to me, it's because they want something; that request had better be legitimate. And this is what I find unnerving about "Rejection Therapy" and its ilk: I'm being used as a means to an end. I think we need more interaction with no-strings-attached, not less.
- dtrent 5y agoAsking strangers for things subjects them to anxiety too. Doing it as a form of free therapy is kind of shitty.
- cobertos 5y agoI disagree. I get this exact anxiety, but the anxiety needs to be challenged. The communication is what forms the bedrock of a healthy society that can talk about it's problems and needs and find it's way to the empathy of the decision makers.
- dtrent 5y agomaybe but making the decision for someone else of whether, when, and how their anxieties should be challenged is, again, kind of shitty
- olyjohn 5y agoAre you saying that you should never interact with strangers because you might make them anxious? There's probably tons of things that can make people anxious. I'm not going to lock myself in the house to avoid making others anxious. As a socially anxious person myself, I would love for someone to start the conversation with me.
- dtrent 5y agoNo. I'm saying you shouldn't deceptively use people for your personal benefit by interrupting whatever they're doing with a pretextual request as a form of therapy for yourself. I hear you--I dealt with social anxiety severely for many years and still do to a lesser extent. But nothing about this justifies cynically exploiting people under false pretenses for selfish ends. If you want to talk to strangers, great! Just don't deceive them for selfish ends.
- ionwake 5y agoYou are taking this to an extreme and I’d argue that at this level aren’t all conversations self serving ? In the end it’s an exchange of information. At this extreme not clarifying a question would be a deception.
- dimitar 5y agoWhen I was a student in university many years ago I didn't know anyone in a new city so I decided to say hi to the whole floor in the dorm which was around 60 people. There was some awkwardness, but I actually made some friends and had some interesting conversations with people I would probably never speak to otherwise. When I returned to my room it was maybe two hours later and I was exhausted and had started to become drunk thanks to the customary shots of rakia I was often offered. I think it should be a tradition of some sort.
- klabb3 5y agoSlightly OT: It seems to me that a large part of our social fabric is based on chance encounters. Talking to strangers in passing, as you go about your day to day business. With increasing digitalization, especially in the first world, we're quickly losing these opportunities. There is often no longer any need to talk to anyone when buying groceries, running errands, asking for directions, etc. All of these are potential entry points to friendship/acquaintances/romantic partners/knowledge sharing. There are a few new opportunities, such as message boards, meet ups, social media, etc but it's become very clear to me they are mostly inferior substitutes, lacking in both quantity and quality. Online dating took off, which is overall a good sign imo, despite its problems. However, other chance encounters mostly disappeared. This could in part explain the modern paradox of being increasingly connected but more isolated, especially in terms of diversity (people of different ages, socioeconomic groups, interests, thought patterns, political leanings etc).
- armchairhacker 5y agohonestly i think it’s a shame that online ways to meet people are inferior than chance encounters. Chance encounters rely on luck, with online you get filters and algorithms to pair you with similar people. Unfortunately the filters filter out good people, the algorithms are shoddy and gamed, and you genuinely don’t know if who you meet online is some weirdo who could turn out to harass or stalk you (of course there are weird people in person too, but it’s a lot harder to look and act “normal” in real life than it is on Reddit).
- its_bbq 5y agoYou're acting like chance encounters are like uniformly random samples or something. If you're doing the same thing at the same place at the same time you probably have something in common. If that thing is a hobby you enjoy, you now both have a hobby in common.
- klabb3 5y ago> Chance encounters rely on luck, with online you get filters and algorithms to pair you with similar people. Agreed, but this change in topology isn't obviously beneficial or desirable. Superficial interest based similarities are not necessarily a good predictor of meaningfulness, and likely a negative predictor for understanding and acceptance of people who are different from us.
- dtrent 5y agoAsking people for things subjects them to anxiety too. Doing it as a form of free therapy is kind of shitty.
- earthscienceman 5y agoI understand why you say this, I upmodded you for the sake of a discussion, and it seems that society is trending towards "interact with people as little as possible". However, it's not like asking someone for something in public is imposing on their autonomy or forcing them into doing something they don't want to. You can say no. If no is too much, you can just walk away. You live in a society with implicit agreements on interactions in public spaces. If that gives you anxiety, maybe you should also try some therapy, free form or otherwise.
- LAC-Tech 5y agoI live rurally now, running errands in towns of about 8000, 200 and 900 people respectively. I've been engaging in a lot more smalltalk. I'm very rusty at it to be honest (no one talks to anyone in cities), but I think overall it's been good to me. Asking for favours though... I don't know, seems a little weird. I'd be extremely mistrustful of any strangers asking me for a favour.
- bckr 5y agoI emailed Lincoln for advice, following[1], on a whim. He emailed me back with a thoughtful reply. I appreciated it (he told me my idea is bad, which I appreciate, sting as it does). [1] https://www.lincolnquirk.com/2021/11/18/advice.html https://www.lincolnquirk.com/2021/11/18/advice.html