Thank you for this great and well thought article on a topic of “kindness” that interests me in connection with the big puzzle: “how do people understand what people are meaning with their words?” In my observation, the process of understanding is not yet fully understood, except where understanding takes place without language.
In all the situations of ambiguity you describe, we again encounter the problem of language, that even clear and unambiguous sentences can be understood differently. And this is even possible in situations in which the context is shared by the speaker and the listener. In fact, even apparent sentences can be particularly difficult to understand if it remains unclear why they are being said.
Interestingly, this is always immediately the case when people have unfriendly feelings towards each other — the evidence for this is provided daily in heaps on social media (where the vast majority of “debates” revolve around the meaning of words and sentences that the other side supposedly misunderstands).
This leads to a surprising hypothesis: people can only understand each other in conversations when their minds are friendly towards the person they are talking to. Kindness means: I understand or want to understand what is happening inside you.
Suppose you understand this and really want to be friendly. In that case, every embarrassing situation is “easy” (in fact: nothing comes easy in human communication) to resolve:
1) Start a dialog: If there is the slightest embarrassment or uncertainty about a motive, always ask: “Do I understand you correctly that … ?”
2) “Please” is reciprocal friendliness in advance and an underestimated factor for successful sociality.
3) Communicate your own feelings when there is an embarrassing moment. Allow your conversation partner to recognize how you feel.
4) Smile. It is no coincidence that we live in the era of “smileys”, the substitute signs for facial expressions and gestures. Smiling is a key signal for the willingness to understand the person you are talking to because you have no bad or rejecting feelings towards her. Unfortunately, men tend to lack expression. In the clips (Tik-Tok, YouTube, etc.), however, we see how smiley faces are increasingly being imitated in real facial expressions. This seems cartoonish and silly, but can be explained by the concern that the words spoken alone could be misunderstood without further signals for “intention detecting”.
In my eyes, however, humans much to easily fall into the loop of misunderstanding. There is no such thing as non-ambiguity. And when hidden feelings are involved, embarrassment is difficult to avoid. It even happens to lovers.
Thank you for this great and well thought article on a topic of “kindness” that interests me in connection with the big puzzle: “how do people understand what people are meaning with their words?” In my observation, the process of understanding is not yet fully understood, except where understanding takes place without language.
In all the situations of ambiguity you describe, we again encounter the problem of language, that even clear and unambiguous sentences can be understood differently. And this is even possible in situations in which the context is shared by the speaker and the listener. In fact, even apparent sentences can be particularly difficult to understand if it remains unclear why they are being said.
Interestingly, this is always immediately the case when people have unfriendly feelings towards each other — the evidence for this is provided daily in heaps on social media (where the vast majority of “debates” revolve around the meaning of words and sentences that the other side supposedly misunderstands).
This leads to a surprising hypothesis: people can only understand each other in conversations when their minds are friendly towards the person they are talking to. Kindness means: I understand or want to understand what is happening inside you.
Suppose you understand this and really want to be friendly. In that case, every embarrassing situation is “easy” (in fact: nothing comes easy in human communication) to resolve:
1) Start a dialog: If there is the slightest embarrassment or uncertainty about a motive, always ask: “Do I understand you correctly that … ?”
2) “Please” is reciprocal friendliness in advance and an underestimated factor for successful sociality.
3) Communicate your own feelings when there is an embarrassing moment. Allow your conversation partner to recognize how you feel.
4) Smile. It is no coincidence that we live in the era of “smileys”, the substitute signs for facial expressions and gestures. Smiling is a key signal for the willingness to understand the person you are talking to because you have no bad or rejecting feelings towards her. Unfortunately, men tend to lack expression. In the clips (Tik-Tok, YouTube, etc.), however, we see how smiley faces are increasingly being imitated in real facial expressions. This seems cartoonish and silly, but can be explained by the concern that the words spoken alone could be misunderstood without further signals for “intention detecting”.
In my eyes, however, humans much to easily fall into the loop of misunderstanding. There is no such thing as non-ambiguity. And when hidden feelings are involved, embarrassment is difficult to avoid. It even happens to lovers.