>>…unless I switch because I’m trying to make others feel more comfortable.
>Isn’t the main point of acting on cultural differences to make others feel more comfortable? Or to show that you’re interested in/you care about their culture?
As viewed from the outside, yes.
I think a better way of saying it is ”...unless I switch because I’m trying to avoid making people uncomfortable”.
There are all sorts of instrumental goals like “making people feel comfortable” which can be valid to focus on in the moment, provided that it’s context appropriate and appropriately delimited. For example, to hit your target with a rifle you might focus on bringing the cross hairs over the bullseye… unless your scope isn’t sighted in, or you’re far enough that there’s windage and drop to account for, etc. If you’re familiar enough with long range rifle shooting you’ll factor in drop and “kentucky windage” intuitively, yet at close range your mind is going to be only on bringing the cross hairs to the target, and that’s fine. Similarly, you can absolutely aim to “make people comfortable”, so long as you are aware of the limitations of this alignment and don’t get stuck when it doesn’t fit. So long as you’re happy to provoke temporary discomfort when it’s necessary AND so long as “make them comfortable” translates automatically with “be nonthreatening” AND “be nonthreatening” includes the self awareness that if the other person looks afraid, your self perception of “non-threatening” can’t be trusted and you have to actually look inwards to address potential threats until either you find a problem to fix or else seeing you do so causes them to feel comforted and stop giving you that error signal… then you’re fine.
The problem comes in when you try to “get away”, because almost everything that succeeds at “getting away” from a particular stimulus fails to get towards the actual goal. As a physical analogy, it’s hard to “push rope” because there’s nothing constraining it to that particular away and it just buckles towards any of the easier ones. You actually can push on similarly flexible throttle cables, but only to the extent that they’re tightly encased in stiff shrouds which restrict the directions of “away” that work. It’s a fundamentally unstable thing, and if you try to “get away from them being uncomfortable”, you have to be damn sure you’re restraining the buckling mode of “get away from them showing discomfort, by hiding it instead”, and any other potential buckling modes. That’s not what you want anyway, so better just to pull towards the actual goal, as best as you can identify it. You don’t actually know what this is, and trying to get towards an ill defined thing helps you notice when it’s not defined enough, and that further focusing on what you want is needed.
Dacyn’s comment and your distillation is relevant here: “would you rather self deceive or [have unacceptably bad thing happen]?”
To the extent that the consequence is actually unacceptably bad, and the hypothetical actually free of third options, then you gotta choose to not die. In everything else, it’s an open question of whether you can afford enough slack to accept risking the bad thing, and whether you can find a non-self-deceptive option that runs the risk down low enough. This gets especially bad when people lack the concept that “discomfort can be necessary and good”, because then you can’t even run the calculation and have to always err on the side of “not taking risks” and never getting the second marshmallow. If this is the case, then the more sensitive you are (in the “instrumentation” sense, where “sensitive” is good), then the more pathological this becomes.
For example, if you’re sensitive to disapproval from your hypothetical girlfriend’s parents, you try to “stay polite” and “not be rude or disrespectful” which totally sound like good things and you can easily convince yourself that they are unalloyed good… except that “treating someone like they can’t handle a little offense” is actually pretty disrespectful too, and being the kind of person who is afraid to say necessary things when they’re “slightly uncomfortable” isn’t how you take care of your girlfriend and isn’t how you gain her parents respect and approval. Crank this to 11, and what do you see happening?
In real life, there’s no such thing as “you either have to self deceive or you die”, but there are situations where figuring out how stay honest and not die is beyond your ability, or “not worth the effort”, or maybe just “not something you currently see how to do”. Having your cake and eating it too is always better though, and these skills do generalize a good deal, so its worth putting some work into holding yourself to “hard mode” and developing both the skills to make it economical and the mental fortitude to keep the option on the table.
I generally refer to this as being “security limited”. If you’re insecure and “need” approval of your girlfriend’s parents, then you can’t do things that risk not getting it, and you’re running away from disapproval (“death”). If you’re secure enough to take these risks, then you can remain faithful to your goals of being good for your girlfriend (even when it risks her parents’ disapproval, at least in the short term), and also your goals of being properly recognized as such because those two goals are not fundamentally and unchangeably misaligned. It applies far beyond what most people would recognize as “insecurity driven”, but it’s actually the same damn thing, and without a good understanding of the pattern you’re trying to match to (and a way of handling this information that doesn’t make awareness costly), it often flies beneath detection.
I think a better way of saying it is ”...unless I switch because I’m trying to avoid making people uncomfortable”.
There are all sorts of instrumental goals like “making people feel comfortable” which can be valid to focus on in the moment, provided that it’s context appropriate and appropriately delimited. For example, to hit your target with a rifle you might focus on bringing the cross hairs over the bullseye… unless your scope isn’t sighted in, or you’re far enough that there’s windage and drop to account for, etc. If you’re familiar enough with long range rifle shooting you’ll factor in drop and “kentucky windage” intuitively, yet at close range your mind is going to be only on bringing the cross hairs to the target, and that’s fine. Similarly, you can absolutely aim to “make people comfortable”, so long as you are aware of the limitations of this alignment and don’t get stuck when it doesn’t fit. So long as you’re happy to provoke temporary discomfort when it’s necessary AND so long as “make them comfortable” translates automatically with “be nonthreatening” AND “be nonthreatening” includes the self awareness that if the other person looks afraid, your self perception of “non-threatening” can’t be trusted and you have to actually look inwards to address potential threats until either you find a problem to fix or else seeing you do so causes them to feel comforted and stop giving you that error signal… then you’re fine.
The problem comes in when you try to “get away”, because almost everything that succeeds at “getting away” from a particular stimulus fails to get towards the actual goal. As a physical analogy, it’s hard to “push rope” because there’s nothing constraining it to that particular away and it just buckles towards any of the easier ones. You actually can push on similarly flexible throttle cables, but only to the extent that they’re tightly encased in stiff shrouds which restrict the directions of “away” that work. It’s a fundamentally unstable thing, and if you try to “get away from them being uncomfortable”, you have to be damn sure you’re restraining the buckling mode of “get away from them showing discomfort, by hiding it instead”, and any other potential buckling modes. That’s not what you want anyway, so better just to pull towards the actual goal, as best as you can identify it. You don’t actually know what this is, and trying to get towards an ill defined thing helps you notice when it’s not defined enough, and that further focusing on what you want is needed.
Dacyn’s comment and your distillation is relevant here: “would you rather self deceive or [have unacceptably bad thing happen]?”
To the extent that the consequence is actually unacceptably bad, and the hypothetical actually free of third options, then you gotta choose to not die. In everything else, it’s an open question of whether you can afford enough slack to accept risking the bad thing, and whether you can find a non-self-deceptive option that runs the risk down low enough. This gets especially bad when people lack the concept that “discomfort can be necessary and good”, because then you can’t even run the calculation and have to always err on the side of “not taking risks” and never getting the second marshmallow. If this is the case, then the more sensitive you are (in the “instrumentation” sense, where “sensitive” is good), then the more pathological this becomes.
For example, if you’re sensitive to disapproval from your hypothetical girlfriend’s parents, you try to “stay polite” and “not be rude or disrespectful” which totally sound like good things and you can easily convince yourself that they are unalloyed good… except that “treating someone like they can’t handle a little offense” is actually pretty disrespectful too, and being the kind of person who is afraid to say necessary things when they’re “slightly uncomfortable” isn’t how you take care of your girlfriend and isn’t how you gain her parents respect and approval. Crank this to 11, and what do you see happening?
In real life, there’s no such thing as “you either have to self deceive or you die”, but there are situations where figuring out how stay honest and not die is beyond your ability, or “not worth the effort”, or maybe just “not something you currently see how to do”. Having your cake and eating it too is always better though, and these skills do generalize a good deal, so its worth putting some work into holding yourself to “hard mode” and developing both the skills to make it economical and the mental fortitude to keep the option on the table.
I generally refer to this as being “security limited”. If you’re insecure and “need” approval of your girlfriend’s parents, then you can’t do things that risk not getting it, and you’re running away from disapproval (“death”). If you’re secure enough to take these risks, then you can remain faithful to your goals of being good for your girlfriend (even when it risks her parents’ disapproval, at least in the short term), and also your goals of being properly recognized as such because those two goals are not fundamentally and unchangeably misaligned. It applies far beyond what most people would recognize as “insecurity driven”, but it’s actually the same damn thing, and without a good understanding of the pattern you’re trying to match to (and a way of handling this information that doesn’t make awareness costly), it often flies beneath detection.