When being right is wrong

Communication is a complex activity that is not intrinsically human but shared with many types of animals and even certain plants. There are all sorts of visual, acoustic and chemical signals that can be exchanged within or across species: from the warning represented by the bright colors of highly poisonous frogs, to the signs of underlying virility imbued in the fabulous tail of the peacock or the insistent chirp of some species of birds, every one of these displays conveys a message in a certain context, but admittedly, they have a very limited range of expression mostly limited to a binary clarification of whether there is something or there is not, or, at best, representation of a feature in a certain scale. But with humans the versatility of communication is, in comparison, huge.

Many of the signs we show are subconscious or completely involuntary, such as the pheromones and part of our body language, but the real workhorse of our intentional communication is the spoken language: not only the choice of words is immense, but it is also enriched in many ways through the intonation, the cadence, the mimics that we display alongside and, most importantly, the context. Because the context, on the one hand, limits the kind of conversations that would be socially acceptable, but it can also change the meaning of the same sentence. If you son asks you "can you fix the lawn mower?", he is probably inquiring about your technical abilities; if your spouse asks the same, they are probably wondering if you will have the time to do the fix; and if the question comes from your boss it is most likely the polite expression of a request or an order.

Photo: Jon Dawson

The three examples above are just a small subset of the possible uses of a conversation, which might not be linked to an exchange of information at all. Both your son and your spouse are requesting information, but of different kind, while your boss is transmitting information (I want this done) and not requesting much (at most a confirmation that it will be done by the end of the day). Some conversations are just a pure acknowledgement of the other's presence and identity, such as the weather talk on the elevator; by initiating a content-less exchange in the elevator we signal that we have seen the other person and (possibly) identified them as a known face, but that is conveyed in the act of speaking, not in the content of the communication. In fact, in this kind of situation one would only expect either a confirmation of the speaker's comment or an addition to it, but it would be extremely awkward to reply to "it's quite cold today" with something like "no, it is not that cold", but on the other hand it would perfectly acceptable to say "and it is getting even colder" or "fortunately the temperatures will rise towards the weekend". The exchange of information is minimal and unrequested, the function is purely social.

On the other end of the spectrum, when one engages in a discussion the first step is to inquiry about each other's position with respect to a subject and then both participants proceed to exchange arguments to support their view in the hope to convince the counterpart. In an ideal world, invalid or week arguments get eventually sorted out until consensus arises and both parties go away with the same opinion. In reality, it is not infrequent that the net exchange of information reaches zero before the positions have become identical, when the recipient of a message starts to reject its content and focuses only on producing convincing messages themselves.

There is however one type of conversation that is particularly sensitive to the right interpretation, because otherwise it can very easily turn into a complete disaster: the requests for emotional support. When a friend, a colleague, a spouse or a child comes to speak about what is troubling them, most of the times they are not asking for a solution to their problems, just for some understanding, and focusing on the literal content of their words can make us look like real jerks. Consider the case of a friend that has been cheated by their spouse and comes to you to grieve about it. Whenever they lament "how can they do this to me?" it would just be too easy to say "well, considering the long time they spend in the office it is very easy to disappear unnoticed for a couple of hours to see their lover". The sentence is factually true, but it certainly does not serve the intended purpose of the speaker, who was most likely looking for something along the lines of "yes, after all the time you have spent together, this is a despicable treason". That is where the context comes to play in a big way.

But the situation is even more difficult when the aggrieved person has been engaging in a somewhat dangerous behavior and then regrets the consequences. "What are the odds that I get caught speeding?" or "who would have thought that the baseball would break the window?" are rhetorical questions that are very difficult to ask with a straight face, because it is obvious that speeding or throwing the baseball raise the chances of an undesirable result from virtually zero to something non-negligible. Still, pointing out their poor choices are not the best option and instead we would do better confirming that they were, indeed, unlucky. To some extent, confirming that the negative outcome was unlikely in spite of the risks that they have taken is relieving some of the guilt from their shoulders: it will not fix the window or spare you the fine, but at least it will provide the solace that the rest of the world is not (at least not openly) laughing at the offender, which on the other hand is already kicking themselves for being so foolish.

I came to think about this today because Karen updated her design tools only to find that all her carefully curated settings had not made it across the transition. "Literally months of work". My first impulse was to state that it seemed very unlikely that all would go lost just like that, but instead I acknowledged the injustice and the loss. After some minutes of desperately checking on the support website we found that, in all likelihood, the settings had been preserved in an old version of the program and they had not been successfully transferred, so all we had to do was copying them. After roughly a half hour of tears and desperation we finally found the old settings and successfully copied them to the new program with no (or little) loss. Reality proved me right, but it was certainly not the moment for a triumphant dance. Instead, I focused on the relief we all felt that the loss had been averted, because sometimes being right is just wrong. I hope you have a nice evening.