How I apply (so-called) Non-Violent Communication
In a discussion elsewhere, someone asked about simple communication patterns that they could use with their partner when they’re having difficulties and want to avoid causing hurt or verbalizing projections. I ended up sharing an explanation of how I try to apply so-called Non-Violent Communication (NVC), one of the most useful tools for this that I’ve ran across; and then I figured that I might as well also share those remarks more widely. Here’s an edited version of things I ended up saying in that conversation.
---
I think one of the most important parts of NVC is the idea about distinguishing observations and interpretations, where an “observation” is defined as something that you could objectively verify (e.g. by capturing it on camera) and an interpretation is something that blends in more stuff, such as generalizations or assumptions about intent the other person’s intent.
For example, “You’re always late” and “You don’t care about my time” are interpretations, “On the last three times when we agreed to meet, you showed up 15 minutes after the agreed-upon time” is an observation.
If you can separate those, you can then go into a potentially charged conversation by transforming something like “You are always late, why don’t you care about my time” to something like “On the last three times when we agreed to meet, you showed up 15 minutes after the agreed-upon time. I found that frustrating because I made sure to be on time and could have spent that extra fifteen minutes to do something else”, which is often quite helpful.
This doesn’t mean you’d need to keep detailed records to express things as observations. If you don’t remember earlier specifics, you can just say something like “Hey you were fifteen minutes late today and I think that’s happened before too”. The main intents are to
1) avoid phrasings like “You’re always late” or “You don’t care about my time” that come across as accusatory or potentially unfair
2) be sufficiently specific that the other person understands what you’re talking about—the original NVC book has an example of a person being told “You have a big mouth” after he repeatedly started telling personal stories in the middle of meetings, but the feedback wasn’t effective because he didn’t understand what was meant by this
As long as those goals are met, it doesn’t matter even if the observations are a bit fuzzy.
NVC has this famous formula of “observation, feeling, need, request” that it recommends phrasing things in terms of—“First state the observation, then say that when that happened you felt X because you have need Y, then make a request of how you’d like the person to act differently”. But people fairly point out that it can make you sound a little robotic and it doesn’t always sound very natural.
What I use in practice is a simplified version which goes something like “State the observation, then explain what about it made you feel bad, taking care to frame things in terms of why it felt bad for you rather than making any claims about the other person’s intent or character”. (So “it feels bad to me that you’re untrustworthy” is out, “it feels bad to me when I feel like I can’t trust you” might be okay.) I don’t normally put in an explicit request at this point, because just verbalizing my experience usually leads to a conversation about it anyway.
Also, while NVC is normally taught as a way to express negative things, I’ve also found it useful to draw inspiration from it for expressing _positive_ things. For example, I told a friend, “It made me feel nice when you said [X] because I interpreted it to mean that you’re prioritizing seeing me over other things that you could do, and I appreciate that”.
Here I am mentioning an interpretation, but it’s a positive one. It could still be wrong, but a mistaken interpretation is less likely to cause upset in this situation; I’ve personally enjoyed hearing people ascribe positive interpretations to my actions even when I thought they were off. And if the other person does care about not being misinterpreted, if the interpretation is incorrect then saying this gives them a chance to correct the interpretation. (I guess that’s a thing that I’ve picked up from Circling more than NVC—that it can be prosocial to verbalize your interpretations of other people in situations where it’s unlikely to cause upset, since that gives them useful information of how they are perceived.)
To the point about using NVC for positive things to, as a manager I try to keep something like this in mind when giving feedback to reports, both to signal where they need to improve and to let them know when they’re doing well. I picked up the idea from reading books about how to parent and teach kids, but the same ideas apply.
The big thing, as I think of it, is to avoid making fundamental attribution errors, or as I really think of it, don’t treat your observations of behavior patterns as essential characteristics of a person. Both negative and positive character assignments, when given by an authority figure, can easily become stuck in people’s minds. This might not seem like a big deal, but, for example, if you tell someone “you’re a good communicator” that can cause them to be less likely to notice when they’re struggling with communication and will have a harder time accepting that they mishandled some communication because it threatens their identity as a good communicator.
Instead I try to focus on actions, like “you handled the communications with that customer well” or “I’ve been happy with how you’ve managed your recent projects”. Now I can’t stop people from drawing their own inferences from this to assume they have a character trait, but at least I’m not directly powering it, and I expect it prevents some amount of reification into character traits in peoples’ ontologies on the margin.
Why does NVC work? From the way it is described, it seems to short circuit the conflict machinery in humans. Why is there this loophole? Note that I’m note talking about just using observations vs interpretations. For instance, if we looked at your example
Clearly, NVC has more going for it than just interpretation vs observation. As far as I can tell, it seems to work by removing blame from the equation, and other verbal actions which can be thought of as an “attack”. But I don’t get why we don’t view an observation of events we caused, which another person doesn’t like, as an attack. And I mean “I don’t understand” in the sense that I wouldn’t have predicted NVC would work for another intelligent social species.
Good question, and good observation. My answer, in short, is that NVC is about credibly removing (or diminishing) threat of conflict.
If you step on my toes it very well might be an accident. If it’s an accident, and I know it’s an accident, there’s no reason for me to attack you for it because as soon as you see that I don’t like what you’re doing you’ll stop on your own. In that case, “Hey man, you’re on my toes” isn’t an attack, and there’s no reason to treat it like it must be an attack just because I didn’t like my toes getting stepped on.
However, if you start adding additional pieces to the picture, then the story changes. If I’m “stating an observation” through clenched teeth and with clenched fists, it’s starting to seem a lot more likely that I’m adding a layer of interpretation that is calling for conflict—even if I don’t verbalize the interpretation explicitly.
In the latter case, “nonviolent language” isn’t gonna work because people are generally smart enough to see the incongruence and prefer to trust the body language over the words which are easier to fake. But it’s also not easy to simultaneously hold onto that sense of righteous anger while saying the words that point out the facts which show the anger to not fit.
So if you were to hold yourself to saying “I know you don’t mean to hurt me and aren’t doing it on purpose, but it is very physically painful when you step on my toes, and I worry that bearing so much concentrated weight might even damage them. Can you please gently step back?”, and you know that “you don’t mean to hurt me and aren’t doing it on purpose” is true, then it’s a lot harder to keep doing anger at that person, and even if you’re a bit clenched it’s going to come off more like “this person is overwhelmed and trying to keep it together because they recognize we’re on the same side” than “this person is threatening me”.
I think for an individual who is skilled enough about what stuff is theirs (what stuff they (and only they) can observe; what stuff they (and only they) can control), and what stuff isn’t theirs, then they would not register this as an attack.
In practice, though, I think many people are bad at this skill, and so when they hear someone say “(You’re doing a bad thing!)”, they interpret this not as just a remark that is coming from somewhere outside of themselves, but more as something coming from inside of them— as a statement already has merit.
Meanwhile, if you were to instead say “(You’ve been late : objective fact)”, you haven’t tried to make their judgement for them (as you would’ve in the previous example). Then they can step through the logic themselves and be like “Have I been late? Yes. Ok, what does that mean? …”.
(Praise can be harmful for the same reason.)
I’m writing a post about what I think is the generator and compressed representation of things like NVC, subscribe to my posts on my profile to get notified when i post it.
I started getting into NVC about a year ago and at this point I’ve read the book, watched about 10 hours of workshop videos, and have tried to apply it in many real-life situations, though I feel that it takes a lot more practice than that—it is hard.
I appreciate that you are emphasizing on observations, because IME it is one of the components of NVC which can work well on its own, whereas a lot of its other lessons only work well together, e.g. if you were to completely cease using any “punitive force”, such as being upset as a punishment for them not keeping their word, then you also need to make your feelings and needs clear to them, which is very difficult to do, especially when you first need to infer theirs—otherwise they might not be aware that they even did anything wrong, if you avoid punishment but don’t communicate anything. (Although I’ve done this, and people who are my friend or my partner, aren’t abusing the lack of punishment and I usually can’t stop them from feeling guilty for what they’ve done because I believe that guilt is a very ineffective and painful way to bring about change. So this particular concept did work well on its own; but most other techniques don’t. I guess I picked a non-ideal example, but you get the point.)
I’ve decided to invest a lot more time in it in the future because I believe there is a lot of promise in the framework.
Hi Velizar, I’ve just finished reading the book, but I’m hoping to do more practice. However, the workshops on cnvc.org are pretty pricey and the timings aren’t great for my time zone. Do you have any suggestions? I might miss other practice opportunities.
Yeah, I strongly recommend going to a workshop, someone I practice together with has told me about NVC New York: https://www.nycnvc.org/
She went there and she seemed pretty good at it.
If you tell them that you are low on money then they might be willing to either offer you a discount or to let you do the workshop for free, I don’t remember which one it was.
In terms of practice, I tend to take it easy because there are so many things to master.
One of the easier things to get better at is to stop making things worse, by applying punitive measures in cases where it’s counter-productive.
One of the way harder (for me) things is to actually go through the entire observation-feelings-needs-request chain in a conflict, because I find it that during a conflict, I need empathy so my capacity for empathy towards others is limited, so the first step is to give yourself empathy. Don’t expect initial good results doing this, the book doesn’t warn you how hard it is, you could practice just the first step (observations), and also practice things in your own mind, without sharing them—Marshall Rosenberg says that the most important part of the process is not the words that you use, even if you do all of it silently it would still work well, but if you do it out loud and do it wrong then people might be pissed off at you, it has happened to me sometimes. I’ve also had good results, and it’s unreliable. So this takes a lot of practice.
Another great thing to practice is empathic listening.
I find it that coming up with the magical keywords for the correct emotions and needs is not as powerful as we might believe; instead, the powerful part comes when you are fully listening and you are connecting with the other person’s feelings and needs.
Rereading parts of the book is also worth it. Also watching their workshop videos on Youtube is both inspirational and instrumental.
Good luck! Workshops are expected to be totally worth it!
Thanks for the response! Coincidentally, I did reach out to a nearby NVC community after receiving the same suggestion from a coach. Let’s see how it goes. :)
Yeah this is still very tough for me too. I remembered ruminating quite a lot when my need for respect wasn’t fulfilled in some online forums. After writing this down, I immediately went to reread some parts of the book. I don’t think I’ve internalised this yet, but small steps… :)
Apologies for the somewhat offtopic question, but...
With that being a central tenet of NVC, do you perceive anything odd about going around saying “My method of communication is non-violent communication”?
(I tried to find out Marshall Rosenberg’s rationale for using the name. Hmm, it looks like the Wikipedia article has been updated. In the video it points to, Rosenberg says he doesn’t like the name for multiple reasons, and lists two of them; neither is the one I’m thinking of, but it’s possible he’d thought of it too. Of the listed alternatives, “giraffe language” would not suffer from this issue; “Rosenberg communication” would also work.)
What the creator of NVC means by “violence” isn’t just physical violence, and it can apply to any behaviour. Funnily enough there’s even a chapter about when to use physical force if it’s necessary—it says: only preventative force; never punitive.
So what it does mean is anything that is for punishing others. The idea of the framework is that we can do better than that, and reach harmony without having to do an action that is mildly harmful to yourself and (typically) much more harmful to others, by getting them to care for your needs instead of using leverage to incentivize them to do that if they’re an entirely self-interested rational agent. The author doesn’t talk about game theory, those are parallels that I’m drawing to make it clearer to people reading Lesswrong, and the reason author is disagreeing with game theory is that game theory makes the core assumption that every participant doesn’t care whatsoever about every other participant, whereas the author of NVC says that if your needs are heard then you are much more likely to hear other people’s needs.
It’s possible that sometimes it means alienating language, for example if we call someone a word—even a compliment—thus making the generalization about them, instead of being connected to our observations about them—such generalizations kinda suck, they’re too inaccurate, and our brains do a really good job automatically without us doing them explicitly. Once I told someone, “you’re a great showman”, and then it felt weird, and I don’t think he liked hearing it either. What he would have liked hearing more was my observation that when he was presenting this writer’s meetup (I wish I could remember which specific moments of that), I could hear the people laugh and when I talked with people, I did not feel tense and people seemed easy-going because of this established context in my opinion, so I enjoyed myself at the event… okay that’s not that close to my original observations, but it’s still a lot more information and now he’ll know better what he did right. There’s no such thing as being a great showman anyway, there are many micro-skills.
I edited the title and introductory paragraph to read “How I apply (so-called) Non-Violent Communication” to help signal that I don’t endorse the implication.
Do you mean that saying “my method of communication is non-violent communication” implies that everyone else is communicating violently? That’s a reasonable point; I hadn’t really thought about it, since I’d been mostly treating NVC as a technical term or proper noun rather than as something that was intended to communicate literal meaning. (Especially since it’s often referred to as just “NVC”, so you don’t necessarily even say the words.)
To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that, and I don’t subscribe to the interpretation that people who don’t use NVC are being violent in any sense. I also think that attempts to police other people’s language by saying things like “you must always use NVC” are going against the spirit of the original. I think that using NVC is something that you do for your own sake rather than something that you require others to do. (Though I do also sympathize with people who have gotten used to using NVC and then get frustrated when other people use language that seems to leap to unfair conclusions.)
That said, since the “NVC” term has gotten established, it’d feel a little clunky to try to switch; in practice, I’d probably end up saying something like “giraffe language, more commonly known as NVC but I don’t like that term because...”. Maybe it’d be worth the overhead in some situations, though—I’m not sure how common it is for people to actually read that implication into the term.
I’ll bite that bullet. People who aren’t communicating in the spirit of NVC are “communicating violently”. Not in the sense of “Words are literal violence!” because “sticks and stones”, but in the sense that “If you don’t give me what I want I will use sticks and stones to break your bones” is “communicating violently”.
NVC points at the important insight that much of what passes for “normal communication” is actually subtle and implicit threats, which can and do escalate to real physical harm and literal violence. “Why are you being so mean?” doesn’t pass for NVC, and that’s not unrelated to the fact that it can be used to recruit someone to do violence on your behalf against the person who you accuse of doing you wrong. It doesn’t usually get that far, in the same way that parking tickets aren’t usually enforced with guns drawn, but there’s a reason that libertarians like to point out that all laws are ultimately enforced at gunpoint and the same thing applies here.
That doesn’t mean that we should “must” at people who aren’t communicating in the spirit of NVC, because as you point out, that would be violating the spirit of NVC. But I do think the term fits, and the way to get around the hubris of saying “my method of communication is nonviolent communication!” is to 1) point out how the term “violence” is actually legit and doesn’t just mean “offensive”, 2) don’t run around claiming that you actually succeed at doing it more than you do, and 3) point out how “nonviolent” isn’t even the goal to aspire to 100% of the time and definitely not synonymous with “good”.
There is something to that. However...
I would like it to be possible for people to say things like “Bob is wrong”, “Bob is lying to you”, “Bob’s products don’t work very well / are flawed”, “Bob’s studies have bad methodology”, “Bob has made horrible decisions as a leader and should be voted out”, etc. And when they do so, if Bob gets offended and escalates to violence, I want there to be a very strong presumption that Bob is absolutely wrong to do so, that this effectively proves the criticism was well-founded (not because that’s logically necessarily true, but because it disincentivizes violence). If Bob hints that he may escalate to violence, I want there to be a strong presumption that he is wrong to do so and that this proves the criticism right. If any onlookers (possibly aligned with Bob, possibly not) say, “Hey, um, you might not want to say that, it carries some risk of escalating to violence”, I want the culture to provide a strong answer of “No, Bob will not do that—or if he does, it proves to everyone that he’s monstrous and we’ll throw him in jail faster than you can say ‘uncivilized’. Civilians should act like there’s no risk to speaking up, and we will do our best to make this a correct decision.”
This ethos seems difficult to reconcile with enshrining the idea “Unless you’re very careful about what you say and how you phrase it, you may end up saying things that may provoke someone into violence” into the name of your philosophy. Like, it is possible to “expect good behavior, punish not-good behavior, but also practice how to handle bad behavior”; but to call non-careful speech violent (either implicitly, or biting the bullet and making it explicit as you do) seems to imply it’s your fault for making Bob punch you. Which is kind of true in a causal sense, but not in a “blame” sense.[1] Calling it provoking—”non-provoking communication”—would be somewhat better, though I’m not entirely happy with it. “How To Communicate With Uncivilized People Who Are Dangerously Prone To Violence” would be ideal in this sense.
Rosenberg seems to have developed and exercised his philosophy around people who are in fact dangerously prone to violence. His lecture talks about growing up with some race riots that killed people, and then (either that or another one) talks about visiting somewhere like Iraq and having someone scream “Murderer!” at him because he was an American, and getting the guy to calm down and have a valuable conversation.
To be sure, one probably will encounter, in life, a decent number of people who are dangerously prone to violence. Many of them you can probably get a good guess about, from quick observation, but not all. So it is useful to have such skills, and additionally some of them help make conversations more productive in general (the central example being to state specific observations, rather than leading with controversial interpretations of not-stated evidence). But, for abovementioned reasons, I don’t want the terminology to have any shred of implication that escalating from speech to violence is justifiable.
This raises something of a parallel with the whole “What was she wearing? To what extent is it her fault she got sexually assaulted?” thing.
I see where you’re coming from, but it doesn’t actually work except for in the egregious cases and NVC highlights a more complete picture that includes the non-egregious cases. If you can’t say “I think maybe we should get pizza” without Bob explicitly threatening to punch you in the face, then yes, that is a serious problem and it is crucial that Bob gets shut down.
However, there are two important points here.
One is that even if people respond in the way you prescribe, the person being threatened probably doesn’t want to be punched in the face before you haul Bob off, and will likely be swayed by the threat anyway. If you try to pretend this doesn’t exist, and say “Oh no, Bob isn’t threatening because if he did that would be bad and we’d respond then”, then Bob gets to say “Oh yeah, totally not threatening. Would be a shame if someone punched you in the face for suggesting we get pizza. Wink wink.” and carry out his coercion while getting off scot free. This isn’t good. In order to stop this, you have to make sure Bob feels punished for communicating the threat, even though the threat was “just words”.
The second one, which gets at the heart of the issue, is that your prescribed response to Bob threatening violence is to threaten counterviolence (and in the spirit of this conversation, I’ll explicitly disclaim here that I’m not saying this is “bad”). It’s important that people feel free to express their values and beliefs without fearing violence for contributing to the cooperative endeavor, but “No risk to threatening violence” can’t work and is the opposite of what you are trying to do with Bob “speaking up” about what he will do to anyone who suggests getting pizza.
Most real world conflicts aren’t so egregious as “I will punch anyone who suggests getting pizza”. Usually it’s something like Adam lightly bumps into Bob, and Bob says “Watch where you’re going, jerk”, Adam says “Don’t call me a jerk, asshole”, Bob says “Call me an asshole again and see what happens”, Adam says “If you touch me I’ll kill you” and then eventually someone throws the first punch. Literally everything said here is said from a place of “I’m only threatening violence to suppress that guy’s unjustified violence”, and the “initial aggression”—if there was any—was simply not being careful enough not to bump into someone else. And “How careful is “careful enough?” isn’t the kind of question we can agree on with enough fidelity and reliability to keep these unstable systems from flying off the rails.
The idea that “Unprovoked violence should be suppressed with zero tolerance [backed by willingness to use violence]” immediately explodes if “microaggressions” are counted as “violence”, and so given that policy there’s reason to push back applying the term “violent” to smaller infractions. However, that’s just because it’s a bad policy. Smaller levels of aggression still exist, and if you have to pretend to not see them then you de facto have infinite tolerance for anti-social behavior just below threshold, and clever Bobs will exploit this and provoke their victims into crossing the line while playing innocent. It’s a pattern that comes up a lot.
The idea of NVC is to respond to threats of violence with less threat of violence, so that violent tension can fizzle out rather than going super-critial. That doesn’t mean you let Bob threaten to punch people who express a liking for pizza, but it does mean that you recognize “Watch where you’re going, jerk” as the first step of escalation and recognize that if you do that—or if you respond to a line like that with “Don’t call me a jerk, asshole”—you may get punched and you will have contributed (avoidably) to that outcome.
Seems to, yes. But that “seems” is coming from preexisting ideas about “who to blame”, and NVC’s whole idea is that maybe we should just do less of that in the first place.
The question is “How much do we want to avoid speaking truth so as to avoid people jumping to wrong conclusions when they combine the new truth with other false beliefs of theirs?”. Sometimes we’re kinda stuck choosing which falsehood for people to believe, but a lot of times we can just speak the truth, and then when people jump to the wrong conclusions, speak more truth.
Yes, there’s something “violent” about a lot of incautious communication. No, that does not call for further aggression, physical or otherwise. Quite the opposite.
Provocation isn’t a bad thing in general though, and doesn’t necessarily contain threat of violence. Provocation can be done playfully and cooperatively even when not playful, and is critically important whenever the truth happens to be uncomfortable to anyone involved. Heck, NVC can be quite provocative at times.
“Nonthreatening communication” would be a better fit, IMO. Or “Nonadversarial”. “Collaborative communication” works too, but kinda hides what makes it different so I do like the “define by saying what it isn’t” kind of name in this case.
That is a great use case, heh. But that undersells the utility among people who aren’t uncivilized or dangerously prone to violence, and obscures why it works with those who are.
I guess I’m less worried about that. I’d prefer those misunderstandings have a chance to surface and be dealt with, because without that it’s hard to actually convey the important insights behind NVC.
I’m deeply suspicious of any use of the term “violence” in interpersonal contexts that do not involve actual risk-of-blood violence, having witnessed how the game of telephone interacts with such use, and having been close enough to be singed a couple times.
It’s a motte and bailey: the people who use the word as part of a technical term clearly and explicitly disavow the implication, but other people clearly and explicitly call out the implication as if it were fact. Accusations of gaslighting sometimes follow.
It’s as if “don’t-kill-everyoneism” somehow got associated with the ethics-and-unemployment branch of alignment, but then people started making arguments that opposing, say, RLHF-imposed guardrails for proper attribution, implied that you were actively helping bring about the robot apocalypse, merely because the technical term happens to include “kill everyone”.
Downside of most any information being available to use from any context, I guess.
I’ve seen/heard the term NVC for this in multiple places, and “non-violent communication” as the expansion whenever I’ve asked. I agree with others that the name is not great. The hyperbole of violence and the implication that not using it is akin to aggression is a pretty aggressive move itself. The term “NVC” is at odds with the tenets of NVC.
But it’s established and out there, and I generally have low hopes of changing a common usage. I hope the poor name doesn’t devalue the actual concept and attempt to separate observation from interpretation. Especially hyperbolic interpretation.
The term gets its name from its historical association with the nonviolence movement (Think Ghandi and MLK.) The basic concept in THAT movement is that when opposing the state or whatever, you essentially say “We wont use violence on you, even if you go as far as to use violence on us, but in doing that you forfeit all moral justification for your violence” as a way to attempt to force the authoritarian entity targeted to empathise with the protestor and recognize the humanity.
So from that NVC attempts to do something similar with communications. Presumably in its roots in the 1960s non violence movement and rhetorical and communicative techniques used by black folk in the south to try and get government and civil officials to see black folks as equal humans.
How this translates into a modern context separated away from that specific historical setting is another matter, but within its origin, I dont think hyperbole is quite the right term, as at that point in history black folks where very much in danger of violence, particularly in the more regresive parts of the south. Again, outside of those contexts, its unclear as to how the term “violence” works here.
It should be noted that Marshall Rosenberg who originated the methodology was not a fan of the term as he disliked it being defined in the negative (ie “not violent”, negative) and prefered terms that defined it in the positive like “compassionate communication” (“is compassionate”, positive)
It occurs to me that “peacemaker communication” would be historically accurate, conveys what seems appropriate, and seems much better at avoiding controversial implications.
If some people consistently and explicitly disavow the implication, but other people consistently and explicitly endorse the implication, then I don’t think that that’s motte and bailey? As I understand it, M&B involves the same person being inconsistent about the meaning, not different people sticking to consistent but conflicting interpretations; that’s just people disagreeing with each other.
My understanding is that M&B is intended to be broader than that, as per:
“So it is, perhaps, noting the common deployment of such rhetorical trickeries that has led many people using the concept to speak of it in terms of a Motte and Bailey fallacy. Nevertheless, I think it is clearly worth distinguishing the Motte and Bailey Doctrine from a particular fallacious exploitation of it. For example, in some discussions using this concept for analysis a defence has been offered that since different people advance the Motte and the Bailey it is unfair to accuse them of a Motte and Bailey fallacy, or of Motte and Baileying. That would be true if the concept was a concept of a fallacy, because a single argument needs to be before us for such a criticism to be made. Different things said by different people are not fairly described as constituting a fallacy. However, when we get clear that we are speaking of a doctrine, different people who declare their adherence to that doctrine can be criticised in this way. Hence we need to distinguish the doctrine from fallacies exploiting it to expose the strategy of true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte.” [bold mine]
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey-doctrines/
So there’s something to that, but I’m a little wary about taking that interpretation too far. Taken far enough, it implies that if group A has a sensible take on a concept, then as soon as a group B shows up that has a bad take on it, you can use it to discredit A as a motte for B. It seems bad if we can discredit any concept—including valuable ones—just by making up a bad take on it and spreading it.
I talked about that in this post:
In the comments of that post, the most upvoted comment was one suggesting that you can distinguish a motte and bailey by looking at whether one of the groups actively disclaims the other:
So if we think that a party not explicitly disclaiming a bad interpretation makes it more of a motte and bailey, then a situation where a party does explicitly disclaim it should make it less.
Also, with regard to the bit you quoted… I’m not sure if you could characterize it as “true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte” if the ones who defend the Bailey and the ones who defend the Motte have positions that are the exact opposites of each other?
The original example of motte and bailey, as explained by Scott Alexander, was:
Here what’s going is that the motte and bailey are basically weak and strong versions of the same claim, so people believing in the strong version can take support from arguments in defense of the weak claim. But if some people say that “yes I think people who don’t use NVC are being violent” and others say that “no that just happens to be an unfortunate established term, what kind of language you use has no bearing on whether you’re violent or not”… then that doesn’t seem like the strong and weak versions of the same claim? That’d be like saying that creationists and evolutionary biologists together form a motte and bailey, because both use the term “evolution” but assign different meanings to it (some saying that it’s true, some saying that it’s false).
That kind of thing, yes. I should mention that I have no systematic perspective here—I’ve had several acquaintances mention they’ve learned about NVC, and seen various internet discussions, but I have no idea what the “usual” or “average” usage is like. (I’ll also mention that I think at least some of the central techniques are good ones—I’ve elsewhere encountered the formulation of “I statements”, as in “I see X” and “When Y, I feel Z”.)
I have seen a few people say that abusive people have used NVC as a tool. Essentially using it as a way of communicating, legitimizing, and lending weight to their unreasonable desires. Googling, I found this (I don’t endorse everything this article says, and much of it is “I have no idea how often what you’re saying happens in practice”, but posed as a hypothetical it makes sense):
My memory traces also include (a) someone saying he and his ~10-year-old kid took a class on it, and (b) a boss using it with her employees [although the source I found on this seems to be a hypothetical], both cases leading to discovering how to use it for emotional blackmail. (I think someone opined that NVC shouldn’t be used when there is a power disparity; I wonder if this is common advice.)
I mean, to some extent any improved communication technique is going to be a tool that increases the options available to an abuser, especially when their interlocutor isn’t very sophisticated. The existence of misusers doesn’t prove it’s bad on net.
Still, having the name be as virtuous-sounding as “Nonviolent Communication” seems to make a couple of things easier:
pressuring someone to go along with it (“How could you possibly object to this?”, or someone anticipating that response and staying silent)
practitioners and teachers being blithely unaware of possible misuses by themselves or others
It may also turn away some of the more scrupulous, who instinctively avoid a label that sounds like it encourages failure mode 2 above (I think I’m in this category); and some who perceive the naming choice as a manipulative move.
And problems with a naming choice seem to matter more for a philosophy that is deeply concerned with the use of language. (Another case of this comes to mind, which I’ll avoid mentioning because it’s political.)
Again, I have no idea how often NVC is used well vs used badly. But it does seem to me that very thoughtful practitioners of it should at least be aware of the naming issue, and that it would reflect badly on such practitioners if they’d never thought of it (sorry) and on the practice in general if none of the “top brass” (so to speak) were aware of it either. Hence my wanting to probe on it.
NVC generally wouldn’t say that having a need is wrong by itself. Rather its defense against unreasonable demands is to emphasize that when responding to a request from someone else, you should first check how those fit with your own needs, and only accept requests that are actually aligned with your needs. (NVC does not say that anyone would have an obligation to fulfill other people’s needs.) So one could respond to that by saying that they e.g. have a need for the freedom to talk with anyone they like, so they aren’t willing to fulfill this man’s request.
NVC explicitly tries to get away from the frame of needs being reasonable or unreasonable, and I think that this can actually be a strong defense against manipulation. If you accept the frame of reasonable/unreasonable needs, then you open yourself to the possibility of being convinced that your needs might be unreasonable and the abuser’s need to abuse you might be somehow reasonable. Whereas if you stick to “everyone’s needs are valid but nobody is obligated to fulfill other people’s needs” then you can eliminate that whole angle of attack. (Speaking from experience—I’ve at least once been caught in an abusive situation where the other person was very good at convincing me that their needs were more reasonable and important than mine, and I could only get out by rejecting that whole frame. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that knowing about NVC allowed me to get out, but I do think that it helped.)
Yeah, that’s my view too.
It’s a fair point! Appreciate you raising it.