When dealing with someone who’s doing something bad, and it’s not clear whether they’re conscious of it or not, one tactic is to tell them about it and see how they respond. (It is the most obviously prosocial approach.) Ideally, this will either fix the situation or lead towards establishing that they are, at the very least, reprehensibly negligent, and then you can treat them as malicious. (In principle, the difference between a malicious person and one who accidentally behaves badly is that, if both of them come to understand that their behavior causes bad results, the latter will stop while the former will keep going. Applying this to the real world can be messy.)
To take an easy example, if the scenario involves a friend repeatedly doing something that hurts you, then probably you should tell them about it. If they apologize and try to stop, this is good; if their attempts to stop fail, then you can tell them that too, and take it from there. If, contrariwise, they insist “this can’t actually be hurting you”, or deny that it happened, or otherwise reject your feedback, then I’d consider this evidence that they’re not such a good friend.
In the case of a non-friend, there is less of a presumption of good faith. Since the effect of them agreeing with you would mean they have to restrict their behavior or otherwise do stuff they’d rather not, they may be reluctant to agree, and further they might take it as you attempting to grab power or bully them. Which are things that people sometimes do, and so the details matter: exactly what evidence there is, the relation between them and the person(s) raising the issue, etc.
Suppose the issue involves subjective judgments of how someone behaved in 1:1 contexts. If one person thought you behaved badly in a situation, and you think differently, maybe you’re right. If, the last N times you were in that type of situation, with N different people, they all thought you behaved badly, then that gets to be strong evidence, as N increases, that your approach is wrong. (Depending on the issue, it’s possible that all N people believe the wrong philosophy—e.g. if the interaction was that they said “Praise Jesus!” and you replied “Sorry, but I’m an atheist”. Though one then asks, why are you getting into all these situations that you can predict will go badly? Are you doing what you should do to avoid them?)
At a certain point, as the evidence mounts, a responsible person in your position, when confronted with the evidence, should say, “Ok, I still don’t agree, but I have to admit there’s an X% chance I’m wrong, and if I am wrong and continue like this, then the impact of being wrong is Y; meanwhile, there are certain safeguards, up to and including “stop it completely”, which have their own expected values, and at this point safeguards A and B are reasonable and worth doing.” (A truly mature person in certain situations might even say, “I know I’m innocent, but I also know that others have no way of verifying this, and from their perspective there’s an X% chance I’m guilty, and I’m in favor of the general policy of responding with these countermeasures to that level of evidence of this crime, and I’m not going to fight them on this.”)
A certain kind of narcissist would completely reject the feedback and say they’re being unjustly persecuted, and (assuming our evidence is in fact good) we can condemn them here. Depending on the situation, some predators would say, “Hmmph, those safeguards prevent me from doing the fun stuff or make it unacceptably risky; I’ll agree and then just quietly leave the community”. Some others would pretend to agree and then try to continue misbehaving in whatever way they can. There’s always the possibility of an intelligent psychopath behaving exactly like an innocent person.
(If you want to get advanced about it, you could try having the “confronting” be initially done by some person who looks sane but not powerful, to maximize the likelihood that the “prideful narcissist” would openly reject it while the “reasonable, accidental misbehaver” would accept it; or, if the safeguard you have in mind is highly effective but is a major concession, you might have it be done by people who are officially “in charge” (e.g. with the power to ban people from events) so as to pressure cowardly offenders to agree.)
If you don’t have enough evidence to be confident that the guy who rejects the feedback and insists he’s correct is in fact wrong… Well, at the very least, by telling him, (a) if he’s good but misguided, he should at least be more cautious in the future, and there is a chance you’ve helped; (b) if he’s bad and cowardly, he knows that official eyes are on him and he’ll have less benefit of the doubt in the future, which may dissuade him. (This is conventionally known as a “warning”.) Having the right person tell him in the right way may help with (a) and possibly (b).
There may be circumstances in which you don’t want to tell him about the evidence you do have. (Maybe it would break a confidence; maybe it would teach predator-him how to hide his behavior in the future; maybe predator-he would know who snitched on him and take revenge [though my brain volunteers that this would be an excellent way to expose him, if you can protect the witness].) There are also plenty in which this isn’t a problem.
Overall, this is such a large topic, and appropriate responses depend so much on the details, that I think it would help to be more specific.
Yes! This is an excellent approach. Rather than focusing only on whether there is malicious intent, keeping in mind the more practical goal of wanting bad behavior to *stop* and seeking to understand how it might play out over time is a much more effective way of resolving the problem. Using direct communication to try and fix the situation or ascertain a history of established negligent or malicious behavior is very powerful.
When dealing with someone who’s doing something bad, and it’s not clear whether they’re conscious of it or not, one tactic is to tell them about it and see how they respond. (It is the most obviously prosocial approach.) Ideally, this will either fix the situation or lead towards establishing that they are, at the very least, reprehensibly negligent, and then you can treat them as malicious. (In principle, the difference between a malicious person and one who accidentally behaves badly is that, if both of them come to understand that their behavior causes bad results, the latter will stop while the former will keep going. Applying this to the real world can be messy.)
To take an easy example, if the scenario involves a friend repeatedly doing something that hurts you, then probably you should tell them about it. If they apologize and try to stop, this is good; if their attempts to stop fail, then you can tell them that too, and take it from there. If, contrariwise, they insist “this can’t actually be hurting you”, or deny that it happened, or otherwise reject your feedback, then I’d consider this evidence that they’re not such a good friend.
In the case of a non-friend, there is less of a presumption of good faith. Since the effect of them agreeing with you would mean they have to restrict their behavior or otherwise do stuff they’d rather not, they may be reluctant to agree, and further they might take it as you attempting to grab power or bully them. Which are things that people sometimes do, and so the details matter: exactly what evidence there is, the relation between them and the person(s) raising the issue, etc.
Suppose the issue involves subjective judgments of how someone behaved in 1:1 contexts. If one person thought you behaved badly in a situation, and you think differently, maybe you’re right. If, the last N times you were in that type of situation, with N different people, they all thought you behaved badly, then that gets to be strong evidence, as N increases, that your approach is wrong. (Depending on the issue, it’s possible that all N people believe the wrong philosophy—e.g. if the interaction was that they said “Praise Jesus!” and you replied “Sorry, but I’m an atheist”. Though one then asks, why are you getting into all these situations that you can predict will go badly? Are you doing what you should do to avoid them?)
At a certain point, as the evidence mounts, a responsible person in your position, when confronted with the evidence, should say, “Ok, I still don’t agree, but I have to admit there’s an X% chance I’m wrong, and if I am wrong and continue like this, then the impact of being wrong is Y; meanwhile, there are certain safeguards, up to and including “stop it completely”, which have their own expected values, and at this point safeguards A and B are reasonable and worth doing.” (A truly mature person in certain situations might even say, “I know I’m innocent, but I also know that others have no way of verifying this, and from their perspective there’s an X% chance I’m guilty, and I’m in favor of the general policy of responding with these countermeasures to that level of evidence of this crime, and I’m not going to fight them on this.”)
A certain kind of narcissist would completely reject the feedback and say they’re being unjustly persecuted, and (assuming our evidence is in fact good) we can condemn them here. Depending on the situation, some predators would say, “Hmmph, those safeguards prevent me from doing the fun stuff or make it unacceptably risky; I’ll agree and then just quietly leave the community”. Some others would pretend to agree and then try to continue misbehaving in whatever way they can. There’s always the possibility of an intelligent psychopath behaving exactly like an innocent person.
(If you want to get advanced about it, you could try having the “confronting” be initially done by some person who looks sane but not powerful, to maximize the likelihood that the “prideful narcissist” would openly reject it while the “reasonable, accidental misbehaver” would accept it; or, if the safeguard you have in mind is highly effective but is a major concession, you might have it be done by people who are officially “in charge” (e.g. with the power to ban people from events) so as to pressure cowardly offenders to agree.)
If you don’t have enough evidence to be confident that the guy who rejects the feedback and insists he’s correct is in fact wrong… Well, at the very least, by telling him, (a) if he’s good but misguided, he should at least be more cautious in the future, and there is a chance you’ve helped; (b) if he’s bad and cowardly, he knows that official eyes are on him and he’ll have less benefit of the doubt in the future, which may dissuade him. (This is conventionally known as a “warning”.) Having the right person tell him in the right way may help with (a) and possibly (b).
There may be circumstances in which you don’t want to tell him about the evidence you do have. (Maybe it would break a confidence; maybe it would teach predator-him how to hide his behavior in the future; maybe predator-he would know who snitched on him and take revenge [though my brain volunteers that this would be an excellent way to expose him, if you can protect the witness].) There are also plenty in which this isn’t a problem.
Overall, this is such a large topic, and appropriate responses depend so much on the details, that I think it would help to be more specific.
[edit: fixed link]
Yes! This is an excellent approach. Rather than focusing only on whether there is malicious intent, keeping in mind the more practical goal of wanting bad behavior to *stop* and seeking to understand how it might play out over time is a much more effective way of resolving the problem. Using direct communication to try and fix the situation or ascertain a history of established negligent or malicious behavior is very powerful.