The distinction between pretending and being can get pretty fuzzy. I like the ‘pretend to pretend to actually try’ approach where you try to stop yourself from sending cheap/poor signals rather than false ones. That is, if you send a signal that you care about someone, and the ‘signal’ is something costly to you and helpful to the other person, it’s sort of a moot point whether you ‘really care’.
I think that in the context of caring at least, the pretending/being distinction is a way of classifying the components motivating your behavior. If you’re “faking” caring, then that implies that you need to actively spend effort on caring. Compared to a situation where the caring “came naturally” and didn’t require effort, the “faker” should be expected to act in a non-caring manner more frequently, because situations that leave him cognitively tired are more likely to mean that he can’t spare the effort to go on with the caring behavior.
Also, having empathic caring for other people is perceived as being a pretty robust trait in general: if you have it, it’s basically “self-sustaining” and doesn’t ordinarily just disappear. On the other hand, goals like “I want to fake caring” are more typically subgoals to some other goal, which may disappear. If you know that someone is faking caring, then there are more potential situations where they might stop doing that—especially if you don’t know why they are faking it.
Wow, you can care about other people in a way that doesn’t even begin to degrade under cognitive fatigue? Is that common?
I like defining ‘real’ caring as stable/robust caring, though. If I ‘care’ about my friends because I want caring about friends to be part of my identity, I consider that ‘real’ caring, since it’s about as good as I get.
The distinction between pretending and being can get pretty fuzzy. I like the ‘pretend to pretend to actually try’ approach where you try to stop yourself from sending cheap/poor signals rather than false ones. That is, if you send a signal that you care about someone, and the ‘signal’ is something costly to you and helpful to the other person, it’s sort of a moot point whether you ‘really care’.
I think that in the context of caring at least, the pretending/being distinction is a way of classifying the components motivating your behavior. If you’re “faking” caring, then that implies that you need to actively spend effort on caring. Compared to a situation where the caring “came naturally” and didn’t require effort, the “faker” should be expected to act in a non-caring manner more frequently, because situations that leave him cognitively tired are more likely to mean that he can’t spare the effort to go on with the caring behavior.
Also, having empathic caring for other people is perceived as being a pretty robust trait in general: if you have it, it’s basically “self-sustaining” and doesn’t ordinarily just disappear. On the other hand, goals like “I want to fake caring” are more typically subgoals to some other goal, which may disappear. If you know that someone is faking caring, then there are more potential situations where they might stop doing that—especially if you don’t know why they are faking it.
Wow, you can care about other people in a way that doesn’t even begin to degrade under cognitive fatigue? Is that common?
I like defining ‘real’ caring as stable/robust caring, though. If I ‘care’ about my friends because I want caring about friends to be part of my identity, I consider that ‘real’ caring, since it’s about as good as I get.