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> In a nutshell, good faith communication has the goal of mutual understanding, whether it leads to "agreement" or to the other person doing what you want or no
by jimkleiber 5y ago
> In a nutshell, good faith communication has the goal of mutual understanding, whether it leads to "agreement" or to the other person doing what you want or not. Bad faith communication has the goal of getting the other person to do what you want, by hook or by crook.
But who defines what the goal is? I guess I'm confused as if this is more about a self-reflection question: "Am I trying to come to mutual understanding with this person or trick them into doing what I want?" Or is it about asking this of others: "Are they trying to come to a mutual understanding or trick me into getting what they want?" I think in conflict, very very often we can assume we have good intentions and the other has bad intentions. I'd argue that's one of the most commom things I see in conflict: "I'm trying my best and they don't care about me, they only care about themselves," said by both sides.
> I don't think that's true, nor do I think it was the intent of the article. I think most people try to communicate with good faith.
I hear you and appreciate that. I may have got wrapped up in the frustration I was feeling towards the categorization and exaggerated how much they were assuming that, so thank you for providing your perspective.
> But in the world now, with instant mass communication, the small minority of people who do communicate in bad faith can often dominate the communication process. I think one way of looking at the question the article is asking is how that can be fixed.
Ah, I guess what I took from the article was less that they were asking a question and more they were giving an answer. Maybe I misread the amount of certainty they had in presenting of the solution or maybe I disagreed with the certainty they had in describing what was the specific problem.
As for how to resolve such things, I've often wondered if the solution is for many of us to communicate more openly and loudly. I remember watching a news report on a pharmaceutical sales guy who I think sold painkillers and it seemed to me that he was so focused on making a ton of money because he was quite emotionally numb or lonely. I think so many of us don't open up emotionally to others and start thinking others are out to get us and don't care about us so we preemptively try to get them and not care about them, further distancing and closing ourselves off from them and even ourselves.
- pdonis 5y ago> who defines what the goal is? The person doing the communication. So if that's you, you ask yourself the self-reflection question. If it's the other person, you have to try to figure out what their goal is in communicating with you: are they trying to achieve mutual understanding, or are they trying to get you to do what they want by hook or by crook? Of course any actual conversation is two-way, so you need to ask both questions.
- jimkleiber 5y agoAh ok, I think one of the hardest things I've worked on is trying to defend/believe in my own good intentions. I had an ex who somewhat insinuated I was manipulating her and it almost broke me, because I started to believe it. The next day, I reflected and came to the belief (not answer) that if I can't defend my own good intentions, who the heck would? And have been working on this since, 7 or so years ago. I guess I just think it's a really hard problem to definitively know whether I or someone else has such intentions and goals, so I often default to assuming that even if their or my behavior appears to be trying to manipulate, that underneath there may be something wanting mutual understanding, or actually, connection. I have seen so many conflicts resolve in my life when I have the courage to go deep enough to foster that connection. I got covid a few weeks ago and this woman called me weak and a baby and other things...then I found out a week later that she was struggling very hard with her relationship and broke up with her long-term boyfriend. So the name calling, which hurt and angered me in the moment, later revealed itself as stemming from deep pain she was feeling and maybe even the same language she was using towards herself as she struggled to make the decision. So I just don't know how easy it is to figure out these intentions.
- pdonis 5y agoI've generally found that if someone accuses you of manipulating them, they're projecting. (By which I mean "projecting" in the sense in which psychologists use the term: the person senses the presence of a quality they don't like, but they don't want to admit to themselves that it's coming from them, so they project it onto someone else. In this case, your ex correctly sensed the presence of manipulativeness because she was actually the one being manipulative, but she didn't want to admit to herself that the manipulativeness she sensed was coming from her, so she projected it onto you.) So in the case of your ex, I would say she was engaging in bad faith communication (though possibly without consciously being aware she was doing so). In the case of the woman you describe, I don't think she falls into either category we've been discussing. She was just expressing her own pain. I don't think every single human interaction has to fall within one of the two categories we've been discussing ("good faith communication" or "bad faith communication".)