A note on this, which I definitely don’t mean to apply to the specific situations you discuss (since I don’t know enough about them):
If you give people stronger incentives to lie to you, more people will lie to you. If you give people strong enough incentives, even people who value truth highly will start lying to you. Sometimes they will do this by lying to themselves first, because that’s what is necessary for them to successfully navigate the incentive gradient. This can be changed by their self-awareness and force of will, but some who do that change will find themselves in the unfortunate position of being worse-off for it. I think a lot of people view the necessity of giving such lies as the fault of the person giving the bad incentive gradient; even if they value truth internally, they might lie externally and feel justified in doing so, because they view it as being forced upon them.
An example is a married couple, living together and nominally dedicated to each other for life, when one partner asks the other “Do I look fat in this?”. If there is significant punishment for saying Yes, and not much ability to escape such punishment by breaking up or spending time apart, then it takes an exceedingly strong will to still say “Yes”. And a person with a strong will who does so then suffers for it, perhaps continually for many years.
If you value truth in your relationships, you should not only focus on giving and receiving the truth in one-off situations; you should set up the incentive structures in your life, with the relationships you pick and how you respond to people, to optimally give and receive the truth. If you are constantly punishing people for telling you the truth (even if you don’t feel like you’re punishing them, even if your reactions feel like the only possible ones in the moment), then you should not be surprised when most people are not willing to tell you the truth. You should recognize that, if you’re punishing people for telling you the truth (for instance, by giving lots of very uncomfortable outward displays of high stress), then there is an incentive for people who highly value speaking truth to stay away from you as much as possible.
Also I’d like to comment that the “Do I look fat in this” question is an example I quite like. It’s a fantastic example of the sort of question that has a stereotypical negative response so strong that many people will just assume, even the first time, that you don’t ever say yes to that question.
And also, I had an ex boyfriend that I got to participate with me in an exercise to help me get over my own fat shame. I asked him outright to call me fat, and to do it with a smile so that I could practice associating “fat” with anything other than ugly and shameful. He agreed, and sometimes we would just call each other fat while cuddling and being flirty, in an attempt to disarm the word’s cultural baggage.
It’s also a pretty terribly phrased question, but it can still be answered honestly and positively. An honest fashionista friend might do well to comment, “Darling, it’s too small and it’s squeezing your hips in a way that looks terribly uncomfortable; try a different cut or a larger size.” Or someone else might reply as most of my exes have done, “I have no idea, I don’t do fashion.” This response is a bit disappointing sometimes because it offers no useful feedback, but has never offended me.
Oh, absolutely. That’s why I work so hard to try to reward those people I can trust to tell me the truth. To mitigate all the messages of high-stress that I can’t help but put out when I encounter something unexpected and distressing as well as I know how; asking for a moment to decompress, using distractions to calm down until I can deal with it more directly, and all-importantly remembering to thank and affirm the behaviour even when it’s stressing me out, and afterwards at other times when it isn’t. I say things like “it’s important that you’re able to talk to me about these things” and “it would be so much worse if you didn’t tell me and then it blew up later”. They are vital mantras to me, not only to reassure my friends but also to remind myself.
I tell my trusted friends that I love them and trust them because I don’t have to worrywort over everything they say, and I can ask them to remind me of the comforting truths as well as alerting me to the uncomfortable ones and they seem to be alright with that. Because it’s true. Because it’s helping me to recover some of my paranoia and deal with relationships in which I don’t have that openness by being able to reliably turn to ones in which I do.
Sometimes I still get stuck in a panic spiral about the negative reinforcement stimuli that I know I’m putting out. But recently, my honest friends have been quick to reassure me on that front. I notice it far more than they do, because I care so much about noticing it, for exactly the reasons you give.
Putting a lot of energy on rewarding people might also leads to them giving less feedback because it signals that getting feedback is a big deal and that it’s not possible to give you feedback without you making a big deal about it.
A note on this, which I definitely don’t mean to apply to the specific situations you discuss (since I don’t know enough about them):
If you give people stronger incentives to lie to you, more people will lie to you. If you give people strong enough incentives, even people who value truth highly will start lying to you. Sometimes they will do this by lying to themselves first, because that’s what is necessary for them to successfully navigate the incentive gradient. This can be changed by their self-awareness and force of will, but some who do that change will find themselves in the unfortunate position of being worse-off for it. I think a lot of people view the necessity of giving such lies as the fault of the person giving the bad incentive gradient; even if they value truth internally, they might lie externally and feel justified in doing so, because they view it as being forced upon them.
An example is a married couple, living together and nominally dedicated to each other for life, when one partner asks the other “Do I look fat in this?”. If there is significant punishment for saying Yes, and not much ability to escape such punishment by breaking up or spending time apart, then it takes an exceedingly strong will to still say “Yes”. And a person with a strong will who does so then suffers for it, perhaps continually for many years.
If you value truth in your relationships, you should not only focus on giving and receiving the truth in one-off situations; you should set up the incentive structures in your life, with the relationships you pick and how you respond to people, to optimally give and receive the truth. If you are constantly punishing people for telling you the truth (even if you don’t feel like you’re punishing them, even if your reactions feel like the only possible ones in the moment), then you should not be surprised when most people are not willing to tell you the truth. You should recognize that, if you’re punishing people for telling you the truth (for instance, by giving lots of very uncomfortable outward displays of high stress), then there is an incentive for people who highly value speaking truth to stay away from you as much as possible.
Also I’d like to comment that the “Do I look fat in this” question is an example I quite like. It’s a fantastic example of the sort of question that has a stereotypical negative response so strong that many people will just assume, even the first time, that you don’t ever say yes to that question.
And also, I had an ex boyfriend that I got to participate with me in an exercise to help me get over my own fat shame. I asked him outright to call me fat, and to do it with a smile so that I could practice associating “fat” with anything other than ugly and shameful. He agreed, and sometimes we would just call each other fat while cuddling and being flirty, in an attempt to disarm the word’s cultural baggage.
It’s also a pretty terribly phrased question, but it can still be answered honestly and positively. An honest fashionista friend might do well to comment, “Darling, it’s too small and it’s squeezing your hips in a way that looks terribly uncomfortable; try a different cut or a larger size.” Or someone else might reply as most of my exes have done, “I have no idea, I don’t do fashion.” This response is a bit disappointing sometimes because it offers no useful feedback, but has never offended me.
Oh, absolutely. That’s why I work so hard to try to reward those people I can trust to tell me the truth. To mitigate all the messages of high-stress that I can’t help but put out when I encounter something unexpected and distressing as well as I know how; asking for a moment to decompress, using distractions to calm down until I can deal with it more directly, and all-importantly remembering to thank and affirm the behaviour even when it’s stressing me out, and afterwards at other times when it isn’t. I say things like “it’s important that you’re able to talk to me about these things” and “it would be so much worse if you didn’t tell me and then it blew up later”. They are vital mantras to me, not only to reassure my friends but also to remind myself.
I tell my trusted friends that I love them and trust them because I don’t have to worrywort over everything they say, and I can ask them to remind me of the comforting truths as well as alerting me to the uncomfortable ones and they seem to be alright with that. Because it’s true. Because it’s helping me to recover some of my paranoia and deal with relationships in which I don’t have that openness by being able to reliably turn to ones in which I do.
Sometimes I still get stuck in a panic spiral about the negative reinforcement stimuli that I know I’m putting out. But recently, my honest friends have been quick to reassure me on that front. I notice it far more than they do, because I care so much about noticing it, for exactly the reasons you give.
Putting a lot of energy on rewarding people might also leads to them giving less feedback because it signals that getting feedback is a big deal and that it’s not possible to give you feedback without you making a big deal about it.