Jokes aside, I feel like there have been actual occasions where somebody has been angry at me after I did X, where the primary reason for their anger seems to be neither that X happened to them nor that my doing X was careless, but rather that I did X knowing full well what the consequences were… even when they could see that that was not true.
Upvoted for the term, but how do you know lack of information empathy was the primary cause, not something such as a subconscious motivation to blame someone for X (either to deflect attention away from their own contributions to X, or to put you in social debt to them) and “you did X knowing full well what the consequences were” allows them to blame you more than “you did X because you were careless”?
I call this skill Information Empathy, and from what I can tell, the median age at which children develop it is 35.
what I’m really referring to is not the skill of being able to do this in a neutral situation like the Sally-Anne test that Raemon linked — which I dearly hope almost everybody is able to do — but rather the skill of being able to do it even when they are motivated not to. Maybe I should have framed this as a cognitive bias instead of a skill.
My expectation is that this varies. My subjective experience when I’ve been on the “angry person” end of this is something like:
a) yes, I’m motivated to stay angry for the sorts of reasons that you describe
b) the mechanism by which I (sometimes/usually/hopefully?) successfully step out of the “unwarranted anger” state is by focusing on the fact (or, exploring whether it seems accurate) that the other person couldn’t have actually known the the thing. And in some cases, when I nonetheless feel the need to be angry at _something_, try to shift that anger towards “the universe”.
(If the angry person isn’t trying to cooperate, none of this may matter. But information empathy has felt relevant in my experience towards updating to emotional states that I endorse)
Upvoted for the term, but how do you know lack of information empathy was the primary cause, not something such as a subconscious motivation to blame someone for X (either to deflect attention away from their own contributions to X, or to put you in social debt to them) and “you did X knowing full well what the consequences were” allows them to blame you more than “you did X because you were careless”?
Good call. I guess when I say:
what I’m really referring to is not the skill of being able to do this in a neutral situation like the Sally-Anne test that Raemon linked — which I dearly hope almost everybody is able to do — but rather the skill of being able to do it even when they are motivated not to. Maybe I should have framed this as a cognitive bias instead of a skill.
My expectation is that this varies. My subjective experience when I’ve been on the “angry person” end of this is something like:
a) yes, I’m motivated to stay angry for the sorts of reasons that you describe
b) the mechanism by which I (sometimes/usually/hopefully?) successfully step out of the “unwarranted anger” state is by focusing on the fact (or, exploring whether it seems accurate) that the other person couldn’t have actually known the the thing. And in some cases, when I nonetheless feel the need to be angry at _something_, try to shift that anger towards “the universe”.
(If the angry person isn’t trying to cooperate, none of this may matter. But information empathy has felt relevant in my experience towards updating to emotional states that I endorse)