We all receive lots of messages – of many different types - in the course of our daily life. Most of the time, it’s not difficult to decide what each message means. But in many other cases the meaning is less clear; we have to read between the lines, interpret the tone of voice and body language, strip off the overstatements and allow for speakers’ and writers’ biases and prejudices.
Just taking the literal meaning of the set of words spoken or written in a particular language will not necessarily give us the intended meaning. There is often a serious risk of misunderstanding, and some seemingly trivial misunderstandings can give rise to anxiety, quarrels, vendettas or maybe even world wars.
We may fail to interpret non-verbal signals that are really an essential part of the message - like when a speaker winks an eye as he speaks to you. And we may fail to spot where the speaker or writer is ‘coming from’ - that is, what his or her agenda is.
Some particular problems for us today are:
Technology has contributed to these problems. But this is not a new trend; it goes back a long way – from the first drawings, carvings and handwriting, through printing, newspapers, telephones, typewriters, cameras and photocopiers, to computers and today’s portable electronics.
A good starting point is to recognize that the purpose of most messages is not to inform us. Rather, it’s to have some desired effect on us, e.g. to get us to do or think some way, or to get us to answer a question.
So, unless the message sender’s meaning is instantly obvious, the first question to ask is – “What is he or she asking us to do?” Answering this question is sometimes easy, but sometimes hard. If we are in a conversation we may get the chance to ask for clarification, but not every time.
Message senders’ intended meaning may not be apparent from a single message; they may be playing a ‘game’, or conducting a ‘campaign’ on us. The questions to ask ourselves are then “What is his or her game?” and “Where’s this all leading?”
If we can answer these questions, we may not like what we find – or, we may simply not be interested. So, what should we (initially as message receivers, but then as senders of our reply or follow-up messages) do about this?
Throughout these chapters, the words ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’ are frequently used in the particular sense of ‘message sender’ and ‘message receiver’. So a ‘sender’ could be a speaker, a writer, a blogger – or a contributor to a blog. A ‘receiver’ is a listener or reader. Of course if there is a conversation going, the roles will alternate – or, in a discussion with three or more people, change according to who has ‘the floor’.
A ‘sender’ is the ‘they’ in the title of this document, in other words the person, organization or thing communicating with you. It might be a family member, friend, salesperson, work colleague, business contact, customer, newsreader, reporter, manager, baby, child, or teenager. Or it could be a company, or some relatively faceless organization; or it could be a dog, cat, bird, spider or even a tree.
As well as the more familiar forms of communication like text, speech and body language, the ‘message’ might consist of diagrams, music, drama or a work of art – or in fact any sound, light or other stimulus that we as receivers can notice.
The word ‘mean’ has lots of different senses in the English language. This is true even if we exclude the senses of ‘uncharitable’ and ‘average’, which are not considered here. The senses in the list below are all somewhat related to what we are talking about in these chapters.
Intention
This usually appears in the combination ‘mean to’. In one of Conan Doyle’s short
stories, Sherlock Holmes says: “Watson, I mean to burgle Milverton’s house tonight”.
Correspondence
Here ‘mean’ asserts an ‘equivalence’ between two concepts, as might apply between
words in two different languages, or a code and its clear form. For example,
‘Nein’ (in German) means ‘no’ (in English).‘Dot dot dot, dah dah
dah, dot dot dot’ (in Morse code) means ‘SOS’ or ‘Mayday’ or ‘M’aidez’ (in French). An old male sexist joke goes: “When a lady says no, she means perhaps. When she says perhaps, she means yes. But when she says yes, she’s no lady.”
Explanation, or Implication
This appears in the form ‘mean by’, as in “What do you mean by coming in here with dirty shoes on?” or, “What do you actually mean by that request?” If
someone has issued us with a vague threat, we might ask “What do you mean by ‘or else!’?”
Significance, Interest or Relevance
This is used in phrases like ‘means something’, ‘means nothing’ or ‘is meaningless.
One could say, for example, “That period of my life meant a lot to me”; “TV programs about that era mean nothing to me” or “That issue is meaningless as far as this project is concerned.”
Motivation, or Inspiration
Slightly stronger than the previous sense, the meaning in a message could actually act
as a spur to get us to take some action. For example, “This means that we should sell our BP shares” or “What that preacher said means that I must go out to Africa as a missionary.”
If we have a ‘meaningful relationship’, it means we are an item, or more than just good friends. Of course ‘just good friends’ is one possible cliché for meaning that we actually are ‘an item’, but are not admitting it.
We can also have ‘meaningful glances’ – implying that no words are being communicated, but eye contact is carrying some unstated message.
‘Meaningful’ could mean “making some sense within some environment or topic with which we (the receivers) are familiar”.
More often, it means little more than “just a bit more significant than general chatter and polite clichés”.
Probably, ‘meaningfulness’ or just ‘meaning’ isn’t a simple ‘yes or no’ matter. There’s a scale, from ‘very little meaning’ to ‘very rich in meaning’. Absolute zero meaning is unusual, if not impossible.
Some authors (I am thinking here of Michael Polanyi or Anton Zijderveld) would say that what they call ‘functional’ meanings – i.e. what gets everyday things to happen – are second-class meanings compared with ‘higher’ inspirational and motivational ones, like “What does this mean to you?” or “What’s the meaning of life?”.
My late father used to refer to a particular sort of radio play as “what do you mean?” dramas – they were usually typical ‘mystery and adventure’ thrillers. People said “what do you mean?” at regular intervals.
At Singapore’s Changi airport, a group of Sydney-bound travellers were informed that their flight was delayed by an unspecified time due to bad weather in Sydney. Because of terrorist threats, airport security had installed a number of listening devices in the terminals. The following snippets of conversation (like those in later chapters) were gleaned from the tapes.
PA system announcement: Ding dong! We regret to inform you that flight QS345 to Sydney has been delayed due to adverse weather conditions in Sydney. No revised departure time is yet available. Please watch the departure boards for further news.
Female A: Shit!!!
Male B: That’s a bummer. We don’t even know if they are talking one hour or twelve hours.
Female A: I’m getting really pissed off. We seem to get so many delays like this these days. What’s going wrong with the world? What does it all mean?
Male B: Maybe it’s global warming. Maybe the pilots don’t want to take so many risks these days. Maybe the airline doesn’t want to take on the risks.
Female A: I guess there are all sorts of explanations, but that wasn’t what I meant. I just meant I am fed up with it all.
Male B: I think it means we need a stiff drink. Let’s find somewhere.
This chapter is an overview of the different reasons why people communicate, and the various ways in which they indulge in communication.
My advice to everyone reading this chapter is to print a paper copy of ‘Diagram 1’ and have it nearby when you read this text. You can download the diagram as a JPG file from my website. The full ‘URL’ address is http://users.tpg.com.au/suetagg/roger/wdtm/Diagram1.jpg.
The basic story behind this diagram is that the guy on the left is sending a message to the guy on the right. The ‘sender’ is in fact my brother Phil, who, coincidentally, is also writing a book about ‘meaning’, but in his case it’s ‘Music’s Meanings’. The receiver is Roger, i.e. me, the author of this piece. The photos are how we looked in 2011, about 18 months after we both retired from our main working lives. Phil was a Professor of Music, while I was a lecturer in IT and researcher into how computer software might help us detect meaning in business communications.
The main flow follows the thick green arrows from Phil to ‘The Message’, and then the thick pink arrows from ‘The Message’ to Roger. The first green arrow is Phil’s ‘intended message’, in other words what he wants to communicate to me, for whatever reason. Maybe he wants me to do something, or to ask me a question. Or maybe he has something interesting to tell me. Maybe he wants to make a suggestion, something that depends on circumstances and my agreement. Maybe he wants to tell me how he feels, what he wishes, dreams or hopes for. Or maybe he just wants to make small talk and pass the time of day.
Before the green arrow turns down to ‘The Message’, it passes through what I call ‘Lenses’ and ‘Filters’. This means that Phil is influenced, maybe unconsciously, by things in his life, before he actually starts ‘signalling’ in the words and signs that make up the message. In a camera or spectacles, a lens ‘bends’ the light and a filter cuts some light out. In the same way, the lenses and filters discussed here ‘bend’ and ‘filter’ the message. The other symbols in the top half of the diagram give a clue as to what causes the bending and filtering. I will just list these for now, as I will say more about them in the next chapter. The symbols I am referring to are:
Having taken all this on board, Phil then creates his message. This might be in the form of spoken words or something written. But it might just be a hug because we haven’t seen each other for a while. Or he might cry out and point to a car behind me that is about to run me over. Or he posts me a map of somewhere for my birthday – maps being what we usually exchange for birthdays.
The word ‘message’ itself has two senses – or meanings. One is the physical communication, i.e. what is transmitted (e.g. “Did you get my message?”); the other is the meaning of that communication (e.g. “So, what’s your message?”). However in this second sense, ‘message’ means what the speaker intended; if I as receiver then say “OK, I get your message”, it’s what I think the speaker intended. For most practical purposes, the meaning of a message is whatever the receiver takes it to mean. A popular slogan in this regard is “ The meaning of your communication is the response you get”.
In the next chapter on lenses and filters, we will see more about why the meaning taken by the receiver of a message diverges from what the sender intended or said,. So we will leave the second sense of ‘message’ for now and consider just the first one, i.e. the physical communication itself.
Back on the upper right part of the diagram, I pick up the message and feed it through my own lenses and filters, which again depend on the things 1 to 4 listed above. Obviously my knowledge of Phil’s inclinations, and his likes and dislikes, helps me in the interpreting and filtering. I then have to decide what the message ‘means’ to me, which triggers my reaction.
This section goes into more detail, first about informational (i.e. ‘telling someone else something’) messages, then about other types of message that do not primarily convey information.
Even within informational messages, there is much variety. Stating a simple fact is only one possible type of information; we can differentiate several sub-types as follows.
First-hand or second-hand ‘facts’
A fact may be first-hand knowledge, but it may be second hand, like something we
have heard on the news, or learnt from someone else. It may be an ‘allegation’
– maybe justified, but possibly wild or ill-considered. The sender’s knowledge
may be good, but may be ‘ill-informed’. And of course the facts stated may or
may not be true.
Examples: “The bus has just gone – we’ve missed it”; “The
NASDAQ fell by 2% yesterday”;
“Fred was to blame for his car accident”; “The earth was created in six days, literally”.
“Pigs can fly”.
Expressing personal emotions
We may want to express our emotions verbally, but very often no words are needed.
Examples using words: “I feel terribly tired today”; “I am fed up with all this politics”;
“I love you”; “I am really upset by what has happened”; “I see no future here”.
Examples without words: a kiss, a hug, a sigh, crying with
emotion, laughter, whistling or humming a tune; a non-verbal shout, applause,
thumping a table, stamping one’s feet. An artist might draw a picture, and a
musician might compose a tune.
Expressing personality, or ‘pose’
This is another situation where, in many cases, no words at all are used. Senders make
their statement by how they appear, what they wear, or what ‘wheels’ they get
about on.
Examples:
What some of these might mean, from the sender’s viewpoint – and, maybe differently from the receiver’s viewpoint – is a great topic for idle chat.
Expressing wishes or hopes
A message expressing a wish or hope does convey information, although not facts.
Examples: “I wish the neighbours opposite would make less racket”; “I wish I was somewhere warmer”,
“Go the Crows”,
“Maggie Maggie Maggie, out out out”, “Roll on the end of term” or “Goodbye”
(wishing “God be with you” to someone who has already shown that they are leaving you).
Attempting to explain
The sender usually invokes some theory, motivation or causal effect, and tries to
provide some logical reasoning for something that has happened, or will happen.
Examples:“According to biblical prophecies,
(Judgment Day is not very far off)”; “To stop the train, (he pulled the
communication cord)”; “Because the weather was bad, (we didn’t go sailing
today)”; “Because I say so”.
Suggesting a theory
The sender observes a pattern in what he observes, and puts forward a hypothesis.
Examples:“It looks like the longer we leave it, the more difficult it will be to fix it”;
“At the rate this queue is moving, we’ll miss the flight.”
Making a prediction
This is often based on a theory, or on some widely held story or folk tradition. But
it could be just an opinion, either of one person or a group.
Examples: “If astronomers are right, we will next see
Halley’s comet in 2061”;
“Tomorrow we will get scattered showers”; “Rain before seven, fine by eleven”; “The stock market
is sure to rebound soon”; “Opinion polls suggest a landslide Liberal victory in
the next election”; “If you keep driving like this, we will hit something”.
We now look at some types of non-informational message. Quite a few of the messages that we receive come in the form of proposals or suggestions. In many cases, there is some sort of ‘trade’ involved; “If I do A, will you do B?”. A threat may in many cases also be regarded as a proposal.
Examples: “If you sign up now, I’ll give you a 10% discount”; “If I put the bins out, will you put the crocks away?”; “Why don’t we go and see “Red Dog?”; “If you don’t put your toys away now, you’ll go straight to bed without supper”; “If we don’t leave now, we won’t catch the start of the movie”.
In many cases this comes as a polite request, but it might involve ordering other persons to do something – though whether they will obey is not necessarily assured. Often, someone wants our agreement, our vote, or a donation. Some messages trying to sell something may be included here, but others are more appropriately regarded as proposals.
Examples: “Vote for Houseman – your Progressive candidate”; “Send a donation now to Médécins sans Frontières”; “Help!”; “Gentlemen, please lift the seat!”; ‘Hurry up!”; “Slope … arms!”; “Now wash your hands”, “I’d like you to put the bins out” or “Goodbye” to someone you want to persuade to go).
This is the simple case of requesting an answer. Examples: “What’s the time?”; “What do you mean?”; “How do you explain that?”
There are a number of messages which are harder to classify. How, for example, do we interpret a meaning from tennis player Lleyton Hewitt shouting “C’mon!” or a lady player’s aggressive grunt? Or a New Zealand All Blacks haka? Is it a ‘wish’? Or is it a ‘war cry’ to polarize and de-motivate the opponent?
This section focuses on the three ‘layers’ of Coding, Transmission and Channels. We start from the bottom and move upwards.
We can theoretically receive messages via any of the five basic human senses, but usually only three are used for human-to-human communication.
We can receive information via smell or taste, though not usually as a communication from another person.
Of course we often use a combination of our senses to receive a single communication. We can also receive information through action, by the fact that some signals are changing, possibly according to a pattern, as in a piece of music, a film, play or opera, a WW2 air raid siren or just a person waving their arms.
The most traditional channel is ‘face to face’. We can often see or even touch the sender, or at least hear his or her voice directly. If we can’t be ‘face to face’, we may – by using paper as a medium, as we do for letters, newspapers etc) – rely on a postal service, couriers, messengers or home delivery. We can also collect the paper from somewhere like a shop or newspaper vending machine, or our letters from a PO box or poste restante. We can also send small parcels containing computer and other electronic media via postal channels.
If we want to transmit sound over distances, in the form of speech, human or other noises, we can use the telephone – or if the message is to be broadcast, a radio broadcasting network. And if we want to include pictures, we can use Fax, TV or videoconferencing.
Today, a lot of communication uses a computer network as the channel. There can be three (or more) layers of how messages are transmitted, e.g.
Of course however a message is passed, there has to be some medium (or media) to carry it. If communication is face to face, we rely on directly audible sound and visible gestures. Longer-distance ‘inter-visibility’ has been used for things like ships’ signals, lighthouse beams, Red Indian smoke signals and Armada-type beacons.
Once distances get too big, and inter-visibility (or earshot) is lost, we have to use an intermediate medium, which can be sent over some channel. By far the most popular medium over history has been paper; although long before paper, clay tablets were widely used.
As technology became more sophisticated, we came to use magnetic tape for audio messages or music, and videotape for recorded ‘action’. The norm now is to use digital computer files on media like floppy disks, CDs, USB flash drives – and of course the memories of large computer ‘ servers’.
Marshall McLuhan made the famous statement “ The medium is the message” – itself a message whose meaning isn’t obvious. One can see that the fact of which medium is being used certainly carries some meaning. One commentator explains the saying as meaning that “noticing change in our societal or cultural ground conditions indicates the presence of a new message, that is, the effects of a new medium”.
Virtually everything we communicate is coded in some way, even our everyday language. If we don’t have some agreed system about what our vocal sounds, scribbled writings and gestures mean, it is hard – if not impossible – to convey any meaning.
Verbal communication
We use words and sentences, whether spoken or written, in some language – usually
a language that has evolved over time from how particular tribes and nations
communicate within their group.
Specialized language
These languages can be modified for specific purposes.
In Evelyn Waugh’s novel
‘Scoop’ there is the following exchange of
telegrams between an editor and a journalist: “WHY UNNEWS” “UNNEWS GOODNEWS”
and “UNNEWS UNJOB”. We also have the language of mobile phone texting, e.g.
“If I am there b4u r, i w8 4u”.
Abbreviations
Then we use many abbreviations. Some, like ‘e.g.’ and ‘i.e.’, or
‘tds’ on a doctor’s prescription, refer to a different language, usually Latin.
We often ‘speak’ abbreviations, like thousands of names of technical terms like TV,
P/E (price earnings ratio), mph, psi, and
MDF (fibreboard);
and organizations like IBM, ICI, USA
and EDF.
On a message system like ticker tape,
there may be a whole set of abbreviations for the companies whose shares are displayed.
Sometimes we pronounce abbreviations as if they were words, like NATO, UNICEF,
CHOGM,
COBOL, and
SORN
(Statutory Off Road Notice – for a British car unlicensed and off the road).
Sometimes a listener in a conversation can become totally mystified by insiders using
these abbreviations at high speed.
Special characters
In written messages non-alphabetic symbols are often added to words and sentences.
Examples are ! ? # $ % & £ and © - and of course ‘smileys’.
Or, two letters can be joined into a compound character, like the German
‘eszett’ (ß), or printing
ligatures like those for ‘fi’ and ‘fl’.
For speech, older readers may remember Victor
Borge’s Phonetic Punctuation where he
inserted his own special sounds for the special written characters. Some people
indicate when something they say is in double quotes by lifting both arms and
waggling two fingers in each hand.
Codes for particular purposes
Humans have developed many additional coding systems that ‘translate’ to
words and sentences in some spoken or written language. Examples are
Morse code,
naval semaphore,
Pitman shorthand),
computer bit codes like ASCII,
sign language for the deaf
and Braille for the blind. For
Sherlock Holmes fans, there’s the
‘Dancing Men’ code.
Non-verbal communication
There are many examples of non-verbal messages. Some are relatively formal and rely
on some agreed or widely understood coding system; others are more informal,
but still rely on some conventions or ‘common ground’ to make them meaningful
to a receiver.
Conventional signs and symbols
Such signs and symbols do not translate
directly to verbal letters and words, but to whole ideas. One may need to refer
to some guide book to determine what the correct meaning of the signs and
symbols is. Road signs are a prime example – my favourite is the one of a car
about to fall off the edge of the road into a river or dock. Some buildings
have exit signs showing an arrow pointing outside a box. Some toilet doors
carry pictures
indicating which is the Gents’ (figure in trousers) or the Ladies’ (figure in skirt)
– even though trousers are now quite normal for ladies!
Flags are also used as symbols, often to represent a nation or some other organization. Flags can be flown on a ship’s mast to indicate things like “we’re ready to sail” or “we’re in quarantine”. As well as their flags, nations and organizations often identify themselves by other symbols, like a lion, a dragon, a spread eagle, a leek, a thistle, a fleur-de-lis or a group of stars. Religions have crosses, crescents, swastikas and ‘yin-yang’ symbols. Companies and organizations may have non-verbal logos, like the examples shown below. Some of this goes back to the days when many ordinary people could not read or write. In 1580 the Corporation of London ordered “that shopkeepers shall hang out signs at theire shopps”.
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Other examples of symbols and signs occur in subjects like mathematics and formal logic – where symbols may represent mathematical variables or propositions and the relationships between them.
We should probably include here pictogram writing, as used in Chinese writing (and some ancient scripts). Many of these symbols bypass the spoken language form of a message, and just represent an idea. That’s not so different from some road signs. However other symbols in Chinese are used just to represent syllables in normal verbal mode.
Maps and diagrams
This includes geographical maps (both ‘to scale’ and symbolic) and many types of diagrams, such as
flow diagrams,
organization charts,
critical path networks,
chemical structure diagrams,
electrical and electronic wiring diagrams,
technical and
architectural drawings.
These usually follow fairly strict coding conventions; they also usually contain a certain amount of
verbal annotation like place names, road numbers, activities, job positions
(and current holders) and so on. An example that comes to mind is the map in
RL Stevenson’s
‘Treasure Island’
where X marks the location of the treasure.
Non-verbal sounds
Humans can transmit much meaning by making
sounds but without forming any words or formal symbols. One type covers sounds
we emit like grunts, sighs, laughs, whistles, tuneless hums, finger snaps,
cries, belches – and dare one mention it – farts.
Non-verbal sounds are used by many species of animals, such as dogs barking or growling, cats meowing, cattle lowing, sheep bleating, snakes hissing, frogs booming and birds singing or calling. Sonar communication by whales and dolphins can also be observed.
Tone and pace of voice
There can also be a lot of meaning in a speaker’s tone of voice, in putting emphasis on certain words,
or simply in the pace of speaking. Examples include Hitler
or Churchill wartime speeches, or an excited
Italian. These are unlike, for example,
Stephen Hawking talking through his
voice synthesizer, or a
railway station announcement.
One modern author repeatedly
described one of her characters as speaking ‘aridly’. Some speakers over-emphasize
regional or class accents - or deliberately put on ‘funny accents’ – for effect, we presume.
Body language
Tone of voice is complemented on the visual side by body language.
Some examples are gesturing with hands, body posture or eye movement. Examples include
playing with fingers,
winking an eye, licking lips, making faces, scratching head (or other parts), waving arms,
crossing legs, making gestures (rude or otherwise), and shuffling feet. How a
lady holds her fan, or
how a glass is held at a party,
can also have coded meanings. There are many web pages suggesting how to interpret body language,
e.g. this one.
Some body language can involve physical contact, like shaking hands, kisses and hugs when greeting a friend, a sympathetic pat on the shoulder or arm, or a congratulatory pat on the back. Variations in handshaking can be significant, e.g. secret handshakes, like Masonic , fraternity or curling one’s little finger. Over my lifetime I have personally received a number of ‘touching’ experiences, possibly provocative, where I wasn’t altogether sure what the message was!
Of course there is also a lot of communication in body language by animals.
Personal appearance
People often talk about ‘making a statement’ by
how one dresses or has one’s hair. Such an unspoken statement might be “I’ve
put on my best outfit for this occasion”, “I’m trying to impress, to put on a
particular style”, “I’m up with the current fashion” or maybe “I couldn’t care
less”. I once passed a man wearing a full
‘Essendon Bombers’
supporter’s regalia – not in Melbourne, but by the Shakespeare theatre in
Stratford-upon-Avon;
I couldn’t detect any possible message other than “I’m an Australian, are you?” or
“All my other clothes need washing”.
Some people wear T-shirts with written messages, which would seem to count as verbal. But in many cases (e.g. with Asians) the messages make little or no sense!
Gifts and other physical objects
Giving gifts often carries a message too, like “I didn’t forget you while I was away”,
“I really owe you a big thank you and this is a small way to say so”. One special case is the
language of flowers
– in which there are ‘official’ meanings!
Of course, physical objects can be given to us with other messages, like ‘The Five Orange Pips’ (another Sherlock Holmes story) – or thrown at us, like tomatoes, stones or Molotov cocktails.
Decoration
Messages may also be implied by things like
Christmas trees, coloured lights, fireworks, balloons and roadside flowers and
crosses – and, less positively, through graffiti on walls, or deliberate
scratching on a car.
Art
The whole issue of what a work of art – including music - is communicating
(if anything) is fascinating, but well beyond the scope here. What we can
observe is that critics often compete to suggest what the artist is trying to
say, and how the viewer or listener should interpret. But very often the author
disclaims their critics’ interpretation. Viewers or listeners are so different
in ‘where they are coming from’ that critics’ generalities may only apply to
fellow aesthetes with similar inclinations to their own. As to music, I would
always defer to my brother who is currently in process of publishing a book
‘Music’s Meanings’
on this very topic.
Mixed verbal and non-verbal
We have already mentioned this in
maps and diagrams; a mix of verbal and non-verbal, or of different non-verbal cues,
is very much the norm. A few other examples are:
Especially since the advent of electronics, coding can be applied at multiple levels. Diagram 2 (like Diagram 1) is best printed off separately, as the explanations below refer to it in some detail.
The left hand side, where the arrows are coloured black, represents non-verbal communication. 1 is ‘noises’, 2 is gestures, 3 is touching and 4 is gifts.
The purple arrows indicate where coding is done before the message is put on some medium and transmitted through some channel. ‘Coding specific to a purpose’, as well as encryption for ‘secret’ messages, includes things like sign language, Braille – and maybe the language of flowers. Arrow 5 represents the case where a coded message is sent with some physical object, like Braille-encoded paper or other media – or flowers!
In the case of speech, the ‘code’ is a spoken language; for writing, it is phonetic symbols or pictograms in a written language (not necessarily exactly the same as the spoken language) plus a mixture of conventional signs (which might be ‘smileys’ or ‘Clip Art’), diagrams, maps and freehand drawings. If the message includes audiovisual content, this would be encoded in some format on some magnetic media, either in a computer or on memory devices.
The green arrows show cases where an encoded message is in fact ‘packaged’ into a physical object. Paper is the traditional medium for written messages; audio-visual ones might be passed on CD, DVD or magnetic tape.
On the right hand side of the diagram, there are further coding layers, depending on the transmission channels to be used. The red arrows represent analogue channels such as the telephone system (including fax), and analogue TV and radio. The coding process here involves converting sounds and other data into modulations on electromagnetic waves that travel much faster than sound.
The blue arrows apply to digital transmission. In the case of typewritten characters they are encoded into a set of standard bit-patterns known as ‘ASCII’, one 8-bit byte for each character. Chinese characters can be encoded into two bytes. In the case of handwritten or typed characters on paper, scanners and character recognition software may be able to do the encoding without someone having to re-type on a computer keyboard. This is also possible for spoken language, if the computer program is ‘trained’. However spoken language can also be treated just like recorded sound; in this case, and with drawings, pictures and audio-visual material, a binary coding system can be used which is not character-based – a number of standards for this exist.
The orange arrows marked ‘Dial-up formats’ represent a (by now) mainly historical coding stage. Before digital networks were widely and economically available, even digitally encoded data had to be converted to analogue for transmission over telephone lines.
Yet further back into history, before the telephone and computers, Morse code was used for transmission of characters over telegraph wires.
So for example, if both ends of a communication are using some computer program, e.g. in social networking, or a credit card transaction, then there can be as many as four layers of coding, i.e.:
Female C (To clerk at the transfer desk: I want to get to Canberra but can’t risk waiting for the bad weather at Sydney to clear. Can I get on a flight to Melbourne and then from there to Canberra?
Clerk: Let me try. (A couple of minutes pass.) Yes, I can do that for you, if you can pay an extra $200.
Female C: OK, please go ahead. Here’s my credit card.
- - - - - - - -
Female D (Male A’s partner, with a despondent tone of voice): Oh Bruce, I’m really worried – we may miss mother’s birthday party.
Male A (puts arm round her shoulder): I wouldn’t worry, poppet. The storm won’t have got there yet, and it may not be as bad as they think. We’ve got a few hours leeway anyway. Look, I’ve got a map of the airport here. Let’s see if we can find our way to the cactus garden.
- - - - - - - -
Male E (to male F): I think I’ll have to get a message to my father who is due to meet me at Sydney airport. I don’t think my mobile will work from here. I’d better find a phone.
Male F: Why don’t you text him? My mobile’s working.
Male E: He hasn’t got a mobile, only a land line.
Male F: Well, text some other person who has a mobile and ask them to ring your Dad.
Male E: Of course – I’m not thinking clearly. Must be jet lag (he laughs).
The ‘lenses’ and ‘filters’ we are now going to talk about are metaphors for the ways that humans – often unwittingly - apply their preconceptions to distort or limit the messages they send or receive. This is a bit like the lenses and filters a photographer might attach to their camera to – hopefully - improve their photographs.
In any communication, the lenses and filters may be caused by ‘external pressures’ that affect our message sending and receiving capability. Following the same metaphor, photographers need to be receptive to the conditions in which they are trying to take photographs – for a start, they need to be calm enough to hold the camera still!
If we are the receiver of a message, it is probably a delusion to think that we interpret the message just as we receive it. We may have to bend the meaning of the message to fit our own patterns of thought, and we may block some of it out – maybe things we don’t understand, or don’t accept as assumptions. Also, our mood – which may well be influenced by the life pressures we are facing at the time – may also colour the meaning we make of what we hear, see or read.
Of course there are some unavoidable cases of filters, e.g. if someone is deaf, or blind, or colour blind, or if we are talking over the telephone and can’t see the sender of the message.
Strictly speaking, the camera metaphor really applies more to the sender of the message, who bends the message into his or her own way of thinking, and filters out what he or she feels better off not saying. And the sender’s life pressures can also show up in the way the message comes across.
By this we mean whatever influences how we look at things; i.e., our preconceptions and ruts of thinking which affect how we interpret a message (or how we create and transmit one). As well as camera lenses, many people of course see the world through spectacle lenses!
We can think of lenses as being like ‘stories’ that each of us accepts, follows or ‘takes on board’. We may say about a story “That is how I see things in life”, or “That’s what it’s all about”. We may regard religion, science, political philosophies or even Hollywood movie plots as ‘stories’ in this sense.
Another analogy is that each of us has our own ‘model’ – in the sense of a scientific, economic, mathematical or statistical model. Such models are familiar to scientists, engineers and to financial analysts. Newton’s Laws or Einstein’s Relativity are two different models of space, time and mass. Hayek, Keynes and Marx have all offered different economic models.
Four sorts of lenses can colour the meaning of any particular message. These are:
Expectations
It doesn’t matter whether we ourselves have built up our expectations,
or someone else – a friend, advertisements, consultants, lawyers or religious people –
has persuaded us that we should expect certain things. Expectations can distort how we
should act and communicate. When the result appears, we will often be disappointed. The wise
person doesn’t build up their expectations unrealistically, nor should an
‘adviser’ build up his client’s expectations. Usually, it’s better to be
‘pleasantly surprised’.
Being in dispute
The communication may be between two parties that are in an ongoing dispute.
This colours both what people say and how they interpret what the other person says.
For example, the situation may encourage entrenched attitudes, like “I’m not budging”,
“That’s my final offer”. There is also often a temptation for senders to
‘take a swipe’
at their opponents.
Power relationships between sender and receiver
One party may have some hold over the other, e.g. one is the boss and can fire the
other; or one has a gun and can shoot the other.
Almost inevitably, one party will have more experience of the matter in question than the other. This somehow needs to be accepted by both, but without over-emphasizing it if it’s vital for the less experienced party to feel committed to a jointly agreed plan in order to cooperate in making that plan a success.
One particular power relationship can be that of “Who has their hand on the information?”, or “Who knows secrets that they are not allowed to reveal to others”. As with experience, the person ‘in the know’ may still need to get the other person’s willing cooperation.
Understanding of the deeper purpose of the particular conversation
Two parties in a communication may have different ideas of what the purpose
of the whole conversation is.
As a receiver, if we are facing someone who is an agent for an organization, the meaning that we should take from their message may well depend on whether or not they are working on commission. Do they get paid more the more people they can persuade? A good example is ‘investment advisors’ who may be on commission from some investment company.
A telephone cold caller, who asks us if we are prepared to take a questionnaire, knows this isn’t the real purpose. We may possibly take the bait, or just feel like a chat. But even if we have a suspicion, we are at a disadvantage in having to guess what the real purpose of the call is. Is it simply to try and sell us something? Is it an attempt to extract our bank account number, password or PIN number? Some people have been known to get their revenge by leading the caller ‘up the garden path’ and so waste their time.
In lots of situations in everyday life, people often say or write something to another person, but hide their real purpose. This even happens between friends.
As opposed to the lenses discussed above, a second type is more concerned with particular people’s characters, both in surface appearance (or ‘face’), and in underlying psychological traits. We might be talking here about things like ‘gung ho enthusiasm’, ‘lifelong pessimism’, or the proverbial ‘rose tinted spectacles’.
Common ‘stories’
“We versus they”
This is the very common
line that one’s own view (or that of the groups one belongs to) is the right
one, and that others are wrong, or at best haven’t got things quite right – for
example, a different religious sect.
A variant of this is to think that only we are the competent ones, in contrast to “those other idiots” (which could be an opposing political party, another team of specialists, or the managers at your place of work).
Another variant is to think that I (or we) are on the side of the good, and are fighting evil (such as terrorists, security forces, trade unions, employers, the bourgeoisie, the ‘evil empire’, Klingons etc). This ties in neatly with many movie and other fictional plots with heroes and villains.
More mundane examples would be when supporters of one football team are talking about rival teams, or young people are talking about old people (or vice versa).
“We need to apply more control”
This is instanced in sayings like “‘They’ ought to do something about it”,
“There ought to be a law against it” or “We need more police, stronger penalties,
extra taxes etc”
Laissez-faire
This is in total contrast
to the above, as in the lament “Why don’t they leave us alone to get on with
it?” Of course the same speaker may want more control on ‘them’.
Shifting the focus from oneself
Many people are nervous of
giving out too much of their own selves, so their lens shifts their view, a bit
like a periscope, to talking about other people, like family, associates, TV
soap characters or public personalities such as film stars or royalty. Such
people don’t say much about what they do or have done, but often like to talk
about their children’s wonderful achievements, or the disasters of some other
family’s life.
Cultural and conceptual models
Religious doctrine
It’s not so much the minor differences in rituals, emphases and creeds that
create a distorting lens. It’s the way the religion influences behaviour in the
everyday world, like regard (or lack of it) for women as equals, attitude to morals
(should we keep to the “straight and narrow”, or should we
“sin strongly” and confess?),
attitude to personal responsibility for one’s actions and decisions, attitude to
planning for the future, attitude to those with different beliefs. And of course
there is often a big ‘we versus they’ factor.
One manifestation is a form of fatalism, the idea that we should “submit to God’s will” – even if that means in practice submitting to the interpretation of a conservative priestly caste.
Political doctrine
The radical side of
politics has the model that things are unsatisfactory and have to be changed,
even if this causes upset. In the extreme, fundamental Marxists may believe in
the ‘infallible direction of history’, and that the end (i.e. a utopian
society) justifies the means (e.g. repression of anyone who disagrees with our
way ‘forward’). On the conservative side is the view that what we need most is
a structure of stable authority that only changes slowly.
Management culture
In business, government,
or any organization where there is a group who oversee things, one sometimes
hears the slogan “management must have the right to manage”. This is often used
to justify very arbitrary decisions with limited – or no – participation from
those involved in making things actually happen. A word that reveals the same
culture is ‘imperatives’ – i.e., “Whatever the arguments and possible
downsides, I say we have to do these things”. Of course, many organizations
have moved on from this army-style management culture and do consult. But
problems may arise if two people in a conversation come from different cultures.
Scientific rationality
In the extreme, this says
that if you can’t do a repeatable experiment to prove something, then it’s a
woolly concept and not worth considering. I would argue, however that this is a
‘crude’ view of science. A thoughtful scientist would probably say that we can
never absolutely prove anything – although we may be able to discount something
because it leads to a contradiction. Scientific theories are always
‘provisional’ until something better comes along – although some basic theories
do now have pretty wide consensus from those who have examined things carefully.
Accountants can also suffer from a similar distorted view – if it can’t be reduced to money, it doesn’t matter.
Ontology
I’m including this as it was one of my hot research topics when I worked
at a university until my recent retirement.
Ontology
is the study of what is our structure of meaning. How do we divide the world up?
What relates to what? What is the nature of the relationships involved?
If we are talking about physical matter, including living things, there is a high consensus among educated people as we enter the 21st century. The US Department of Defence has a very comprehensive standard ontology covering most aspects of its work; the idea is that different people can, by using it, resolve the meaning of terms they use in communications.
But such a consensus is much weaker in areas like psychology and sociology – and, of course, in religion; and it’s almost impossible when we consider still more abstract concepts, many of which have been created by academics for a variety of motives.
Upbringing
National and family traditions
We are usually brought up
to be patriotic, to respect our country’s flag and its interests, maybe even
its rulers. We also stick up for members of our family, and maybe also our work
group, our drinking mates, our favourite football team.
Conventions, politeness, etiquette
Almost all cultures have things which it is OK to say and others which are
definitely not acceptable. As an example, in most countries, it’s not considered
good form to suggest “that a lot of suffering and pain (as in a war)
was all for nought”
(
Nancy Bonvillain).
Education
What affects our lenses is
not so much the book learning we have, but whether or not we have learned to
think - and organize what we know so that our memory works well.
Practical experience of life
It makes a difference
whether or not we are the sort of people who get out and about and ‘have a go’,
who have tried or done lots of things, and have learnt from those experiences.
If not, we may be people who prefer to stay at home, and keep aloof from the
challenges of everyday life.
Social stratification
This means awareness of
our position in society generally and the people we are communicating with.
This could be in terms of gender, age, class (or caste) or our relative
position within a family or other small group – and our acceptance or rejection
of the implications of those relationships.
Personal habits
We may acquire or develop
habits which interfere with our attitude to communicating with others – and in
fact doing things in life generally. Examples include sleeping very late, not
managing body odour, over-directness in speech, and not caring about anyone else.
Attitude to authority
Some people are quite
happy as followers – maybe they even support their leader or boss. Others are
surly and resent anyone who tries to tell them what to do.
Attitude to personal responsibility
Among all the distorting ‘lenses’, this is my personal number one concern.
It seems to be becoming more and more common for people to find some reason
why they are not responsible for what they do or say. Examples are: “God told me to do it”,
“I was only following orders”, “The drink made me do it”, “I did it because I was so angry
– so would you have been”, “It was due to a computer error”, “We have
procedures in place” - or as reports on road accidents in New Zealand say “His
car failed to take a bend”.
The speaker or writer seems to hope that other people will always accept their excuses, however feeble.
Individual psychological traits
However we have been brought up, we all evolve certain individual psychological
characteristics – which are often hard to change once we become adults.
Examples are the tendency of some people to be
control freaks,
or to be generally fearful of things and to need some
sort of ‘security blanket’. Added to this are some
recognized illnesses like schizophrenia,
obsessive-compulsive disorder,
inferiority complexes and
grand delusions.
As receivers, we often filter out some aspects of a message, either because they are uncomfortable to our preconceived way of thinking, or because we don’t understand what the sender is getting at. For example, we may feel that we don’t want to hear such things as biblical quotes, criticism of ‘our’ party, arguments we have already heard and dismissed, or risqué jokes.
Similarly, senders of messages often limit, deliberately or accidentally, what they say or write.
Sender’s level of ability to express what they mean
Even if a sender is familiar with the language being used, he or she may suffer from
lack of confidence and ability to create a meaningful message. Key information
may get lost. This is more common with spoken messages than with written ones.
Sender’s façade
The sender may feel the need to maintain his/her own personal image or ‘face’. The
most common filtering effect of this is excessive reluctance to admit that they
got something wrong, or indeed have ever got anything wrong.
Especially when listening to people being interviewed on radio or TV, it seems that the speaker is under instructions from their boss or client to limit the information they give, as well as not to admit any shortcomings. This may be partly down to the ‘litigious society’ we live in – “If at first you don’t succeed, sue somebody”. Law firms may be partly to blame for this – they want business, and they want cases for their trainees to cut their teeth on.
Lack of understanding of possible receiver reaction
A sender may decide not to say something (which may be needed to give the rest of
the message meaning) because he or she is afraid that someone else may become offended.
Sometimes, a message can act like “a red rag to a bull” for receivers. In such a case, if the receiver doesn’t simply ‘turn off’, it may lead to unpleasant name-calling and an irreparable loss of value or meaning in the conversation, if not the whole personal relationship.
However for situations where ‘offence’ is part of the game, see Comedy Central Roasts or Japanese bars where the businessman customers are happy to be insulted (as a change from all that politeness)!
Slow information processing speed generally
We all vary in our ability to process information. The message we receive may come
too fast for us to digest. This might be because the sender speaks too fast, or
throws in so many difficult words or thoughts that we don’t have time to make
sense of it before they go on to something new.
Inability to recognize and distinguish concepts
Especially if a conversation gets abstract, we may not know enough about the subject to
recognize subtle differences between concepts. For example we may struggle with
the difference between ‘fiscal’ and ‘monetary’ measures, or between ‘cause’ and
‘correlation’.
Inability to read between the lines
We may suffer from inability to spot where a conversation is leading. There may be
too much meaning that we need to fill in ourselves and which the sender didn’t
mention, and may miss some key points.
Discomfort with the sender’s style, or assumptions
If a speaker or writer irritates us, we often just ‘turn off’. We think of
something else, and maybe start looking at anything we can set our eyes on. If
it’s a written message we may start skipping lines and paragraphs, maybe just
searching for the next interesting word that might recapture our interest.
Simple ‘not wanting to hear’
This is sometimes referred to as “being in denial”. It’s the situation where someone
thinks “I refuse to believe that”.
A person who takes strictly and literally the Bible story of creation in Genesis, and insists on a literal 6-day creation in 4004 BC, is going to have problems listening to talk about evolution and geological fossil sequences in strata.
Some mothers of children reported for serious misbehaviour at school say “My Johnny would never do anything like that”. I once met a dog owner who said “My Rover has never bitten anyone” – just after Rover had bitten my little brother.
As individuals, we often repress unhappy memories – even unhappy recent events. Important people who get interviewed on TV or Radio often say things like “I do not recollect anything like that” or “No such information has reached my office”. (The person probably told his underlings not to send him anything on that topic).
Ex US vice-president Al Gore’s film on the environment was called ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. It is indeed inconvenient to both industry and individuals in the West to learn that we may have to cut down on emissions (and hence increase costs) to avoid major deterioration in the world’s climate.
A slogan of some senior managers in recent decades was “Don’t tell me about problems, tell me about solutions”.
During World War 2, the Canadian-born newspaper owner (and sometime UK government minister) Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken) famously said “I don’t want to hear about any good Germans”.
Lack of interest in further communication along these lines
We may decide that we have ‘heard enough’, but that the sender is still carrying on
transmitting. So we ‘turn off’.
Language familiarity
Filtering by both sender and receiver may occur due to unfamiliarity with the language
(or coding system) being used for the messages. Senders may have problems with
not having enough vocabulary to express what they want to say. Then they may
struggle with word order, or use of compound words. For receivers the main
problem is often their slow speed of interpretation – they may have to
translate what is said into their own ‘first’ language.
Mood
Mood can obviously affect whether a receiver seriously engages with – or discounts -
a sender’s message. If we as receivers are elated, happy or neutral, no filtering
may happen; but if we feel disappointed, resentful or put upon, we may ‘turn
off’, at least partially. Much the same can affect whether a speaker or writer
sends all the information that the receivers need, or assumes that the
receivers will accept all their assumptions and unspoken or unwritten clues.
Level of personal self-knowledge
Part of the problem of filtering may arise because participants in a conversation,
whether senders and receivers, haven’t learnt to look at themselves from
outside, to think “What does the other guy think of me?” or “Do I really know
as much and I make out?”, or “Am I as absolutely confident as I am pretending?”
This section looks in a bit more detail at the external pressures, and personal motivations (both explicit and implicit) that cause senders to bend or limit their messages, and receivers to bend or limit what they can make of the messages they receive.
Need to maintain personal relationships
When we belong to groups, we are often under pressure to go along with the crowd,
and not to upset the feeling of ‘mateship’.
Some groups can carry prejudices,
e.g. tribal, racial, class, social or religious ones. Our desire to belong to
the group can limit how we feel we can talk or react. A close friend may say or
write something that we don’t like, and we may not want to lose that friend.
Perceived threats and dangers
We may be facing threats and dangers, whether to life and limb, livelihood,
lifestyle, status, position, job, ‘face’, self-respect - or the pose we are
trying to maintain.
Worries (justified or otherwise)
We may be worried by externally imposed deadlines; botheration, hustle or
non-physical persecution; health; finances; domestic situation; or upcoming
critical decisions. Someone may also be experiencing deep sympathy for troubles
of their family members, their friends, their neighbours, and their colleagues.
Mental state
Either we, or another person we are communicating with, may be alert, nervy, anxious,
short of confidence, tired, depressed, angry, resentful, frantic, unstable or
suffering feelings of loss, grief or regret. These may all make a difference to
our lenses and filters.
Physical state
Our communication may also be affected by the fact that we are hungry, thirsty,
ill, drunk, drugged or simply exhausted.
Every person participating in a conversation has a number of motives. Maybe one motive is paramount at the time, but there are usually traces of others. They can all affect our lenses or filters.
Conscious desires
One set of motives arises from conscious desires – things we have thought about and
have decided that we want to go for. In this category we would include
purposes, plans, agendas, priorities, inclinations and expectations.
Human nature
Another set arises from human nature, things we all want, more of some maybe, but less
of others. Examples are stability, simplicity, sociality, adventure,
excitement, heights of physical pleasure, people to admire or idolize, and
maintenance of our self-esteem.
Animal instincts
Thirdly there are some basic animal instincts, which many creatures besides humans also
have, like self preservation, avoidance of pain, reproduction and herd or pack
instincts.
Female E (reading a magazine, to female F sitting nearby): This latest child abuse case is really shocking, don’t you think?
Female F: I agree, but there seems to be so much that you almost come to expect it these days. I think it’s because the priests aren’t allowed to marry. They have urges like anyone else. I expect it always went on, but victims didn’t complain. They probably thought no-one would take their word against a priest’s.
Female E: But surely there should be more control to stop it happening?
Female F: That’s probably too difficult. The church probably can’t afford to lose too many priests. Maybe we should just let the kids all have mobile phones with built in GPS?
Female E: All this technology does worry me though. Where’s it all going? My son who is 10 knows more than I do. He loves gadgets.
Female F: My daughter who is 14 seems to have a totally different outlook on life to me. We were brought up with respect for our parents and those in authority, and we learnt to be polite. Raelene doesn’t give a damn for anyone except her school friends. She ignores large parts of what I say to her. She’s into all the popular music trends and apes the behaviour of all the pop current stars. She says the word ‘like’ 2 or 3 times every sentence. One thing I agree with her about though – the boys of her age are pretty pathetic.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MaleM: Do you mind if I sit here?
Male N: No problem.
Male M: are you on the Sydney flight?
Male N: Yes.
Male M: Have you flown a long way already?
Male N: Not so far – just from Islamabad. I am visiting relatives. How about you?
Male M: I’ve come from Kathmandu. I’ve been travelling about for a while.
Male N: So, did you visit Pakistan?
Male M: Yes, although I started in India, did Srinagar and Amritsar, then crossed over to Lahore and Rawalpindi. From there I took a bus to China over the mountains and came back via Tibet to Kathmandu. It was interesting but hard going – I think I’ll be glad to get back to normal life in Australia. You live in Sydney?
Male N: Yes, I’m student at UTS.
Male M: How do you find it?
Male N: The Uni is pretty good. But I don’t think I fit into the Sydney lifestyle.
Male M: I think I can guess what you mean. That’s why I went on my trip. I was missing something. Sydney is all very matter-of-fact – there’s not much spirit – not like in the pioneer days.
Male N: What I feel is that there isn’t any order, any authority. Anything goes, and you have to grab what you can. It doesn’t seem like what a Christian country is meant to be.
Male M: But is Pakistan like a Moslem country ought to be? There seems to be quite a lot of violence, more than in Australia. And you’ve had a woman Prime Minister – even if she did get assassinated.
Male N: I think it will get better. Quite a lot of people think it will be better with Sharia law.
Male M: You mean like cutting off hands and 90 lashes for women drivers? Sorry if I’m coming on a bit strong.
Male N: That may happen in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran, but not Pakistan. But, where does your country get its laws – and a sense of right and wrong – from, if not from God? We Moslems believe that the Koran is the direct word of God, so we don’t have a need to argue over our laws.
Male M: But I’ve read the Koran and a lot of that stuff isn’t mentioned at all.
Male N: So we have to follow the tradition, and the reported sayings of the Prophet himself. Doesn’t the Christian religion depend equally on tradition and a legitimate succession of leaders?
Male M: That’s the Catholics. I was brought up a Protestant, where the Bible is the authority. But laws in Australia and other Christian countries evolve to meet the needs of the times.
Male N: But then they aren’t God’s laws.
Male M: But is that as important as leading a peaceful life with consideration for others? The happiest people I met on my trip were the Buddhists, who don’t have a God as such.
Male N: They may be happy in this world, but not in the afterlife, which is much more important since it will last much longer.
Male M: I think they put more emphasis on re-incarnation rather than heaven and hell. That’s unless they achieve Nirvana!
This chapter is about recognizing the ‘game’ in which a particular communication is part. What sort of ‘play’ are we actors in? And who started the game?
There is often some goal that at least one party wants to achieve. If this is the case, it can be quite important for us to spot it.
The sender’s purpose is often to sell us something – not just some product, but it could be an idea, a contract, a regular membership – or some form of ongoing commitment. The sender may need our money, our vote, our support, or our good will. A ‘deal’ or bargain may be involved, where it is proposed that both parties give a little and take (hopefully) a bit more. Negotiation may be a drawn out affair, not achievable in just one conversation.
This assumes that the sender (and possibly we, as well) are on one side of some competitive situation; some other persons or groups are on the other. Competition is often over power or limited resources. A simple example is a sporting contest, whether between individuals, pairs (including ‘jockey and horse’) or teams. The struggle may be a long-running one; it may be due to individuals holding on to past grudges. Between groups it could be vendettas or ‘bad blood’, or wars.
It may also be of interest to recognise whether a battle is a ‘play fight’, when the opponents are just jockeying for bargaining position, or a ‘fight to the death’, where the opposition wants to wipe the other side out.
So much of the human motivation we can observe these days is not geared to get things to happen, but to minimize risks - to oneself as an individual, or to some group or organization. Synonyms for this include ‘butt covering’, and ‘buck passing’. This strategy usually involves going to great lengths to deny personal responsibility. The ‘litigious society’ many of us live in nowadays – where people are almost encouraged to go to the law – seems partly responsible for this.
The game may be just to show off – to make others feel small and inadequate, or to make them depressed and feeling like failures. Hopefully they will then be less keen to oppose or compete with the sender of the message. It’s a case of “Look how smart I am”, or the adult equivalent of the children’s game “I’m the king of the castle”. Common topics for ‘show-off’ messages include our house, our car, our cooking knowledge, our overseas holidays, or our children’s achievements.
A strategy not unrelated to the above is ‘martyrdom’. Some people frequently push the story that they are suffering undeserved problems, are unlucky, are hard done by or are ‘put upon’. The aim may be to get the rest of us to focus our attention on the martyr and his or her misfortunes, or to tolerate things they might do which we would not normally approve of.
It is often too naïve to think that people working in an organisation are primarily there to do the job for which they are employed or to which they are assigned. Employees may put higher priority on ensuring keeping their job, lifestyle and social status, than on their proper role. It may not be to their advantage to complete a job efficiently or quickly. For example, they may fear being made redundant due to automation, centralization or other trends.
Ambitious individuals may be more concerned about their future advancement than with actually doing their job. They are pre-occupied with acquiring things they can put on their CV, whether with a view to promotion with their current employer, or to seek a better position elsewhere.
Those who stay with an organization may also become pre-occupied with ‘empire building’ – the enlargement of their sphere of control. This can lead to a sort of ‘civil war’ between departments of the same organisation, and hence to deterioration in outcomes. We as receivers need to spot this, whether as fellow-employees or as customers of the organization. Some organizations do not rate the opinion of their customers as highly as their own internal performance measures. And when they do recognize that customers are unhappy, they may only indulge in goodwill advertising to try and ‘correct’ customer opinions.
Of course it may well be that there are no ‘ulterior’ motives in a conversation other than mutual socialization, passing the time happily together. However even in some such situations, games may be being played. There’s a book about these – ‘Games People Play’ by Eric Berne.
From my own experience, I would pick out two particular games. One is gossip about people not present. These could be mutual friends or associates, or public personalities). Possible motives of this game motives may be 1) to impress others in the conversation with how up-to-date one is, or one’s inside track to secrets; 2) to impress others as being of more insightful judgment; or 3) in the case of friends not present, in advancing one’s own status compared with the absentees.
The other game is general moan. This is similar to Berne’s ‘Ain’t It Awful’. This often indicates an undercurrent of resignation to things. There may also be an element of selection in the topics moaned about, concentrating on those that support the speakers’ own preferences or prejudices, or again to shift the focus of conversation towards themselves. There seems to be no thought of what they might do to improve some of the situations.
The tactics discussed here are ways in which senders may deliberately ‘bend’ a communication in an attempt to further their campaigns and strategies.
Emotions that message senders may appeal to include greed, envy, outrage, pity, sympathy and mating instincts. Advertisers tap into children’s “I want” emotions, and their desire not to be different from their schoolmates. Advertising using sexy females may get some men to forget reason for a while. It certainly grabs my attention, but when it’s finished, I’ve usually forgotten what it was they were advertising.
Advertisements using pathetic dogs and cute children may have similar effects. This reminds me of a childhood memory of old men coming to our front door and telling me long stories about what they had suffered in the First World War. It turned out that they were inmates of a local geriatric hospital where they were well looked after – all they probably wanted was a bit of extra beer money.
Marketing experience suggests that if people stop to think too long, they will be less likely to do what the advertisers want. They do not want us reflecting for a moment and thinking “do I really need this?” Hence we see frantic delivery of the message, fast-changing pictures, a gang of trendy friends, jazzy sounds and bright lights. Adverts for Pepsi or Coke, for example, suggest you will immediately acquire a really satisfying social life with a gang of totally devoted mates of both sexes, with the implied message “This is what you are missing”.
Some people work by deliberately polarizing opinions. The idea is to pull the moderates and ‘don’t knows’ onto our side, and push any opposition into a defensive corner. This tactic is regularly used by radio ‘shock jocks’. They say something fairly outrageous – maybe in the hope of getting incensed listeners to phone in and start a lively – but probably sterile - debate. An alternative motivation may be simply to gain publicity for the shock jocks themselves.
Just as it’s a fairly natural human need to have heroes, many of us also need someone or something to hate. We can hate either individual people (my grandmother’s bête noire was ‘The Kaiser’), or a group. Groups to hate or disrespect are those that think, behave or look differently to ‘us’. Liberal westerners usually at least hate racists. Socialists hate capitalists and the bourgeoisie. Conservatives hate politically correct or woolly liberals. Islamic fundamentalists hate Israelis and their supporters, and probably all ‘unbelievers’. We probably all hate someone; it is a powerful (but dangerous) emotion. For people with an agenda, it can be an effective tool, not just for agitators but for those who simply want to push their opinion.
Related to hate is the ‘blame game’. We seem to have a great desire to find someone to fix the blame on, even in cases where a genuine accident happened, or some failings have been shown by multiple individuals or groups involved. In the 1930s the Nazis picked on the Jews; since 2008 many people blame the greed of banks and ‘prima donna’ investment gurus.
Associated with this is the tactic of imputing motives to the other side – claiming that ‘our’ view of why they acted as they did is the only correct one – usually without much justification.
The well-known game of ‘chicken’ is used to imply that if we don’t go along with a proposal, it’s because we are too scared to commit ourselves, or to take the risk, as in “’Ave a go, ya wimp!”
The urge not to be seen as a wimp leads to what I call ‘ramps’. We feel that we are somehow obliged to outdo – or at least equal - what has been done, said or written previously. It would be considered wimpish to follow up with something that is lower-key, more moderate, or restrained. This happens in many situations, from Puritanism and fundamentalism in religious movements to telling tall stories in casual conversation. A classic example is the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch.
In contrast to the tactics above, some speakers have realized that the only tactic to get what we want is to bring together two individuals or groups – who may have somewhat differing agendas and expectations - in order to get enough impetus to make things happen. This can be paraphrased as “You want X, and I want Y. How can we get to a plan that we can both support?” An old cliché along these lines is to talk about getting to a ‘win-win situation’.
Another common tactic is to make an appeal to the receiver’s sense of belonging to ‘our’ group, of accepting ‘our’ stories. In this way a sender is applying cultural pressure on the receiver not to distance themselves from the group, and therefore to agree, conform or act as requested.
The appeal may be to a current consensus, or to shared traditions - including religion. A prospective US republican presidential nominee recently suggested that prayer was all that was needed to check the USA’s economic and other woes. He assumed his audience would not dare contradict his preference for Jesus to be ruling the country to humans thinking they could do so alone. UK Premier Margaret Thatcher argued for a return to ‘Victorian values’ – appealing to traditionalist common views. And indeed, we probably wouldn’t want a ‘value-free’ society. In the other side of politics, a far left trade union leader might appeal to his members by using Marxist slogans.
A related technique is often used in the field of fashion. For example, “Hemlines will be a little higher this year” may threaten with ridicule any lady who doesn’t conform.
The tactic may involve working up some potential mutual danger, like Islamist terrorism, ‘Reds under the beds’, the ‘yellow peril’ or - if you are the Catholic church – ‘secularism’.
A dangerous variation is to appeal to our pack instincts. But while mass movements and ‘team spirit’ can sometimes bring good results, they can also bring looting, vandalism, lynch mobs, and practices like those in Abu Ghraib.
Our moods, and our general attitude to life, are often influenced by whether whatever happens meets our expectations – rather than by whatever happens considered independently. So another tactic is to ‘engineer’ other people’s expectations, either down or up.
The point of playing down expectations is that we won’t be so disappointed if things don’t go well for us. The snag is that we may become too pessimistic and lose motivation to try to succeed – even when in fact we do have a good chance if we show enough resolve. A good example is a football team near the bottom of a league having to play a team near the top; what should the coach say to them?
The game of raising expectations works more or less in the opposite way. We may be encouraged that we can – or even will – succeed. And because we may be setting ourselves up for a big fall, we may have additional motivation not to let the high expectations and hopes be dashed. Hopefully, both the sender of such messages, and we as receivers, will keep in mind a ‘Plan B’ for how we will act when things don’t go as hoped. Most football coaches, faced with a game against a superior rival team, often say “We can still win this one” – Hitler was still saying it in 1945.
A related tactic in the commercial world is ‘Goodwill’advertising. The game is not to get us to act in some way - or to buy something – now, but to get us to feel positive about the advertiser’s brands, organization and staff. The pitch may involve stories about an organisation’s contributions to charities, the helpfulness and ‘niceness’ of its employees, or the reputation of its brands or products and services as a whole. The idea is then that we will have expectations of getting a good deal from this organization at some time in the future when we need what they offer.
A tactic that may work with some people who are currently reasonably well off is to overemphasize the risks of changing anything. A slogan might be “Why change a winning team?” The problem is, of course, that not everyone is winning
But even movements, which advocate radical changes to our society, often scorn deviation or ‘revisionism’ (see the hilarious Wikipedia page!). The official line is - of course - the only right one, the historical consequences are ‘inevitable’, so we must all toe the line.
It is common in hierarchical organizations, and in broadcast interviews as well, for speakers to ‘pull rank’ to claim that their own view is right - just because of their higher status. Giveaway spoken words are ‘You must realize’ and ‘Look …’. It may be implied that thinking any other way is stupid. Threats may even be made, like “This organization doesn’t have room for people who don’t follow our leadership’s thinking”.
Academics may pull rank because of their professorial status, but also by referring to what they regard as authoritative literature – which, if we haven’t read it, or don’t agree with it, means our opinion counts for less than theirs (even if ours is based on actual experience). Of course literature is often deliberately selected to support an academic’s own opinion.
Religion is a very fertile field for ‘authority’ based tactics. But what exactly is ‘God’s Word’ or ‘God’s Law’ in a particular modern day situation? Some claim that literal interpretation of sacred books is the ultimate authority; some give the highest respect to ‘traditions’; others respect the judgment of a living patriarch, e.g. the pope; and yet others give priority to considered interpretations of all preceding thought by theologians and philosophers.
Personal flattery may make some of us more favourably inclined to agree with the sender’s proposals. Some advertisements include phrases like “A discerning person like yourself …”. However we will usually ‘smell a rat’ if the flattery is too obvious.
This is a very obvious but common tactic. The inducements could be prizes, free offers, discounts – or just ‘a warm welcome from our group’. A ‘prize’ may only mean a 0.001% chance of a prize - if you have the lucky entry. If everyone is guaranteed a prize, the standard gift is pretty small.
This is a subtle manoeuvre in which the sender offers a number of alternatives that the receiver can agree to. The sender then discusses the disadvantages of all except one, leaving the receiver to (hopefully) accept whatever remains. Of course there will usually be other alternatives – including “I don’t want to have anything to do with this at all”, but they are carefully not mentioned by the sender of the message.
There is a classic tactic which some salesmen use to force the issue; they offer two alternatives, both of which involve the receiver accepting the proposal. Example: “Would you like it in red or blue?”
Humour and wit (including puns, irony, sarcasm and ridicule) is often a good tactic, to make receivers of the message happier – and hopefully more receptive to the sender’s opinion or sales pitch. However humour can often misfire, or offend some receivers, for example if the jokes are smutty. I recently saw a message in a pub’s gents’ toilet on a vending machine selling glowing ‘rings’ which read: “To boldly glow where no man has glowed before” (misquoted from Star Trek).
Finally, it is often a good tactic for a message sender to indulge in trivial chat with us for a while, to get us into a receptive mood for when they come to the real point of their ‘pitch’. What is actually being said may not matter that much - the aim is just to get some ‘oil’ into the communication process. In Australia, calling people repeatedly by their first name seems to be part of this tactic – but it usually gets me thinking “What are they selling?”
A related tactic, for example when both parties are organizations, is to have a friendly preliminary conversation on how the ‘serious’ talking is going to proceed. This is sometimes been called ‘talks about talks’.
Tactics is one thing; delivery of the message is another. The clever speaker or writer has a whole tool box (or if you prefer filing cabinet, or wardrobe) full of techniques.
It makes sense to use examples to support one’s case. But some examples may be open to the retort “that’s unrealistic”, “that’s not at all like the case we are discussing”. For example, when arguing against ‘The Enlightenment’ – as some philosophers seriously do – a speaker or writer could say “Look where that has got us – colonialism, two world wars, Hiroshima and the Holocaust”. This view, in any case, ignores what has been gained, and other contributing factors to the disasters quoted.
As well as examples, senders draw parallels to help support their points. They may say “It’s like XXX”, “I suppose that’s similar to the situation in which YYY”, or “That reminds me of ZZZ”. For example, some people in Australia say that boat people are queue jumpers in the refugee queue.
Metaphors are a bit more subtle; they often verge on the poetic, and are geared to ‘inspiring’, especially in spoken messages. The example we were given at school was “the ship of state”, but other examples include ‘the Iron Curtain”, “the birds have flown”, stock market “bulls and bears”, “flying a kite”, “hung parliament” or “juggernaut” this last one meaning any unstoppable force or movement. For more examples see the book ‘I is an Other’ by James Geary.
Unless the message is very simple, it often helps the receiver to understand – and remember - if it can be divided up into simpler parts. It is sometimes done just for rhetorical effect, especially using three parts (see below).
The dividing up can be chosen in such a way as to support the sender’s particular view on the topic of discussion. If that is immigration to Australia, one speaker might be interested in ‘humanitarian concerns’, ‘current manpower shortages’ and ‘integration of different cultures’. A speaker from a different party might make their three points ‘border protection, ‘priority compared with legitimate refugees’ and ‘undercutting Australian wage rates’.
As to how many parts there should be, three seems the most popular. Think, for example, of ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’ or ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’. Other popular numbers are 4 (Freedoms, Noble Truths, Horsemen of the Apocalypse), 7 (Deadly Sins, Dwarfs) and 8 (Buddhist Path).
If senders are unsure what reaction they will get to their message, they may insert phrases to slightly distance themselves from the definitive point they are about to make. One of our college professors used to preface many of his opinions with “For my part, all things being considered, and with due respect to those who take a different opinion, etc …”.
If there are sensitive issues involved, speakers or writers may need to avoid a brutal frontal attack; they may prefer to say things like “I know this is a sensitive issue for some of you, but we should look at all sides, and one possible approach is XXX”.
In everyday speech, circumlocution is most often used when asking someone else to do something. Phrases like “Would you mind if …?”, “I think XXX needs doing” could be used. My grandmother used to say “Oh dear, I’ve left my pills upstairs” – a classic ‘broad hint’.
Sometimes the same phrases are used as ‘thinking time gainers’ – to give a speaker time to work out what to say next. Otherwise the speaker has to resort to ‘ums’ and ‘ers’, which suggests lack of confidence. A (slightly) more confident way to start goes something like “One of the things which I think is very important is …”.
An extreme form of circumlocution is filibustering, the aim of which is to reduce (or eliminate) the time any other speaker has left to make their point, before some time limit, adjournment or ‘guillotine’ is applied to the discussion. Of course one needs skill as a non-stop speaker to do this.
This is much used by speakers in TV advertisements. It emphasizes the new, the trendy and the fashionable – which, the advertisers hope, we in the audience will all therefore assume must be good. Suitable words to use here are ‘buzz’, ‘high-speed’, ‘streetwise’ and ‘vibrant’.
A frantic style of delivery seems to be popular with all the competitors on Australia’s ABC’s ‘Strictly Speaking’ TV program.
Clever delivery of a message owes almost as much to what the sender leaves out as to what he or she puts in. It obviously makes sense to leave out uncomfortable aspects and inconvenient truths, and to stick only to what is the speaker’s strong ground. If challenged, the speaker can always stall for time and say “I’m glad you asked that question”.
This approach goes well with a tactic we discussed earlier, that of offering only alternatives that are tantamount to agreeing with the speaker.
This is a device often used with the ‘appeal to authority’ tactic. Listeners and readers may not feel confident enough to ask a speaker questions like “What do you mean by ‘entropy’?” In academia, people write papers and give talks where they use words which they have either invented themselves or are using in quite a different way to how they are used in normal conversation. The academics don’t seem to worry if we haven’t got the same familiarity with those words or meanings. The authors themselves have probably been cogitating over them for years. It may suit their purpose to be a bit obscure – the rest of us might be impressed or even intimidated.
A device that is often effective is to keep repeating a phrase, in the hope that it will get taken on board by readers and listeners, sometimes as shorthand for some quite subtle thought that lies behind the phrase. Examples could be “Deutschland, erwache”, “Read my lips, no new taxes” or “Stop the boats”. Such phrases do have some initial effect, but often descend into clichés (see next entry).
To try and gain more effect, people commonly add superfluous adjectives or adverbs to their main words – in most cases adding little or no real information. Examples include “carefully blended”, “exhaustive survey”, “serious consideration”, “succulent steaks”, or “garden peas” (they are probably from a large farm).
The adjectives that get added in this way can in fact say more about the speaker or writer’s biases than anything else. E.g. the same city may be to some ‘vibrant’, but to others ‘noisy’, ‘frantic’ and ‘crowded’; a follower of a religion may be ‘devout’ or ‘strict’ as well as ‘fanatical’ or ‘puritanical’; a solution to a problem may be ‘far sighted’ as well as ‘vague’.
This leads to the use of different descriptions of the same thing that depend on whether it is ‘ours’, ‘yours’ or ‘theirs’. A classic example goes: “We are steadfast, you are obstinate, they are pig-headed”; another goes “We are making the necessary adjustments, you are forced to make radical changes, they are indulging in opportunist shilly-shallying”. Likewise, one person’s ‘terrorists’ are another person’s ‘freedom fighters’ or ‘soldiers of God’; and one regime’s ‘security forces’ are another regime’s ‘brutal Gestapo-like goons’. Our arguments are ‘to the point’, but our opponents’ are ‘irrelevant’.
‘Euphemistic’ spin
A speaker or writer often has to make a bad
situation or result sound not quite so bad. Coaches of football teams have to
do it much of the time. Favourite phrases after their team has lost include “we
learnt some valuable lessons” and “we took a lot of positives out of that
match”. Politicians defeated in an election talk about a “setback” rather than
a “disaster”, and if the opinion polls are against them they pass it off as “a
temporary blip” or “unrepresentative”.
If interviewed after some bad piece of news, spokespersons resort to various devices. They may say that “things are still better than under the previous government”, or that “on the whole, things are still on a path to improvement”. Of course “procedures are in place” to correct any of these unfortunate events, which are often “isolated incidents”.
If a commercial product is missing some features, the vendor sometimes makes a positive point out of this, by saying something like “This gives users the ability to choose how to (add on the missing functions that they need)”.
‘Derogatory’ spin
Critics and opposing spokespersons, of course,
paint the opposite picture. Any bad news, however trivial, is indicative of the
‘incompetence’ of those in charge. A small setback is a ‘disaster’ for them and
their ideas. Critics have the advantage over defenders in that the media
(newspapers, magazines, television, radio, blogs) get more readers (and hence
more advertising revenue) by playing up the ‘shock horror crisis’ line than by
saying “it’s not all that bad”. There is a limit though – if the public feels
really worried by a crisis it might stop buying things and spending money.
Cliché
Most senders of messages have a
great tendency to overuse clichés, e.g. travel agents advertise
‘a holiday of a lifetime’
- I think I have been on 10 or more of these. Politicians talk of the ‘march of progress’
(presumably only in their preferred direction), and ‘turning the clock back’
(even if maybe the older way did have some value that we have lost), and ‘let
the market decide’ (only if it is likely to decide to the speaker’s benefit).
Many messages are in fact a combination of several of the above. It is as if (and here’s an analogy) the underlying message is wrapped in several layers of wrapping paper. As with many gifts, the outside wrapping is sometimes more exciting than what’s inside – we need to be motivated to open it. I once received a mini-stapler in a quite fantastic Christmas wrapping.
Back at Singapore’s Changi airport, some passengers on the Sydney flight are getting restless.
Male G: What gets my goat is that the airline spends so much money advertising how wonderful it is. And I wonder how worthwhile their frequent flyer program really is. Maybe it’s just to brainwash us against defecting to other airlines?
Male H: I think it overplays the ‘nostalgia’ card – we are meant to ‘fly the flag’, and feel glad that we live in God’s own country.
Male G: Not like those devious Asians in their crowded cities and tiny flats, eh?
Male H: But those cities are buzzing with excitement; and what about all that exotic food?
Male G: Talking of which, I’m getting really cheesed off with all these cooking programmes on TV.
Male H: What would you like instead – wall-to-wall sport, talent competitions, and Big Brother? Or ‘almost the same as each other’ American sitcoms?
Male G: I think it’s just a strategy to get us to pay for what we really want to watch, by putting the good things on Pay TV.
- - - - - - -
Male AA: That looks like some Australian news on the TV over there – shall we drift over?
Female BB: OK – goodness knows what might have been happening while we’ve been away.
Newsreader: Tensions are running high over the application by mining giant Urexco to prospect in the Coonawagga ranges 500 km west of Alice Springs. Our reporter Dianne Quest asked Craig Breakworth, Federal Minister for Mines and Energy, what he was doing to bring the warring factions together.
Minister: Our government is fully cognisant of all the issues involved in this project. That’s why we have set up a procedure for any objectors to register their concerns, which will be carefully looked into by an independent tribunal.
Newsreader: But Greens spokeswoman Brenda Greengrass, took a different view. She told our reporter …
Greens lady: This is just another short-term attempt to pay for the government’s financial mismanagement. And the real sufferers will be the threatened flora and fauna of this precious region, not to mention the likely damage to this pristine landscape.
Newsreader: Meanwhile, Urexco chief Conrad Pitts put his company’s view when he addressed a consultative committee last Friday.
Pitts: We’ve looked very closely at the possible environmental impact, with the help of Biology experts from the University of Northwest Australia. We have satisfied ourselves that there will be no significant loss of habitat for native species. And our company is well recognized as a strong supporter of conservation projects.
Newsreader: Finally, our reporter caught up with Aboriginal activist Herman Cockatoo-Williams, who with a small group was protesting with placards outside Urexco’s headquarters in Perth (cut to banner-waving demonstrators).
Activist: This land has been the ancestral home of our people since the dreamtime. We have the right to claim it as our homeland. Why should our people have to keep on suffering poor health and living conditions by living in camps outside the towns?
Male AA: That news item was a total beat up. I happen to know a bit of the background, as I’ve been involved in relations with international customers for Australian uranium. For a start, that last chap isn’t the main representative of the local Aboriginals – the elders most involved are all members of the consultative committee. Only the Greens aren’t represented, and that’s because they refused to participate on principle. Mind you, the company’s record on the environment isn’t all that flash. The government feels a bit under pressure, not just because of its budget troubles, but because many of its supporters are pushing it to encourage big carbon emitters like China, Japan and India to move to more atomic power generation.
Many of the messages we receive come from organizations rather than other individuals. An organization behaves like another human in some ways, but there are differences.
Earlier, we discussed the issue of relative power in individual human relationships, as it influences the ‘bargaining position’. Organisations often write or speak to us as if they are always the more powerful, but that may not be a correct assumption – they may need us more than we need them.
The organisation may initiate the game (e.g. by sending a letter or email, or by a representative phoning us), but often, they are strongly dependent on our interest and cooperation. Unless we really are looking to take up what they are offering, we can probably play ‘hard to get’, and we certainly don’t need to put up with any bullying or arm twisting.
Most organizations will go to great lengths to avoid admitting to any failings, either present or past. The threat of legal action seems to be the ultimate bugbear for organizations. They hope that the costs we outsiders might face if we threaten legal action against them will deter us from taking the risk. Their ability to pay lawyers will always be greater. It is much better to threaten taking the story to a newspaper; but even then, if the organization places advertisements with the paper, the paper’s management may bend to the organization’s requests to stop any unfavourable publicity.
One shouldn’t expect to get a straight answer from an employee of an organization. That’s because they are duty bound to follow the party line, and not to say anything that commits the organization, or might open it up to legal proceedings. One often finds that an organization’s procedures are causing ridiculous results, but pointing this out will make no difference – the employee will probably say something like “I’m sorry you feel that way”. They are probably also under instructions not to call their own boss to resolve such idiocies. They probably hope we will lose heart, shut up and go away.
The ultimate curse inflicted by organizations on their customers is the telephone call centre, especially one that is operated in an overseas country. It is difficult not to have the utmost contempt for this practice, and to avoid taking one’s frustration out on the poor individual who has to deal with your call. The temptation to look for an alternative supplier who gives passable customer service is very strong. Call centre workers have been trained to stick to their scripts – they are trained to seek our friendship by calling us by first name – but none of this is their choice. Personally, I’d rather converse with a machine.
It doesn’t happen to everyone, but we may find yourself facing a ‘team’ of organization men (or women). A common tactic is to have two people, one who takes a tough line, and the other who acts in a more friendly way, hoping we will accept the organization’s deal from the ‘soft’ person as a relief from the ‘hard’ person. Somehow, we need to detach ourselves from the drama and focus on what the actual offer is, and whether we really need it or not.
There are a number of non-human creatures with which we can have a meaningful two-way communication.
Many of us have experience of a conversation with a dog, cat or bird. They can get meaning from our tone of voice and body language, if not from our speech. They can respond in their own way and we can learn to interpret their messages to some extent.
Two-way conversation with animals extends to some domesticated animals. Good examples are cows in for milking, or a shepherd with his sheep, and sometimes with ducks and geese. At one house my wife and I rented in the countryside, we inherited our landlord’s pet calf, which received its water in a bucket fed by a pipe from the house and controlled by a stop cock. When the system failed, Buck would let us know by kicking and tossing his bucket round the field.
Crocodile Dundee showed us how with the buffalo in the film. There are also snake charmers. On a walk one day my wife surprised a deadly snake (and herself). They each looked at the other and both fortunately realized that it would be best if they went their separate ways.
Unlike the sort of animal communication discussed above, most messages we can pick up from nature, and meaning we can try implying, is one way. We can talk to the trees, but they don’t give us any specific reaction.
Whenever there is a major disaster, we often ask “What does it mean?” In ancient times, earthquakes, tornados, floods, fires, famines and plagues might all have been put down to the anger of some god, like Vulcan, Neptune or Jupiter. In the Middle Ages, churchmen used to say that we were being punished for our sins, although there was no detectable correlation between plagues and general sinfulness. Even today, some people say similar things about HIV/AIDS. And after the 9/11 bombings in New York, Jerry Falwell claimed that “the carnage was an expression of God’s wrath at (the radicals and libertarians) who try to secularize America”, thus taking a similar line to some Moslem clerics, who said that it was the work of Allah, not of any human terrorists. It seems that the meaning to be taken from such events is whatever supports your existing agenda. The suffering of individuals is irrelevant.
Major wars are somewhat similar, although both camps often claim that God is on their side. However if one can manage to take a view from outside, one wonders what it means that a war has actually broken out. Of course there have been many opportunist and aggressive wars, more commonly in past history, where one side has simply sought to grab land and resources for the profit of the aggressor nation or its leaders. However more recently, when there has been every opportunity to negotiate a solution that would avoid war, a war still happened. A possible interpretation is that the parties over-committed themselves to a stance from which they could not bear to back down. Such a commitment was either from a country’s leaders to its people, or from one country’s leaders to those of another country to support them if they were attacked. In any case, there has been a failure, and a preference to saving face over the slaughter of thousands or millions of humans, both combatants and civilians.
Accidents, whether or not someone was clearly ‘to blame’, can bring trauma and suffering to those involved, both directly or indirectly. But can one say that they ‘mean’ anything? Might it not be better to take the view that they are random occurrences, involving the interaction of atoms and molecules, rather than saying that there is some purpose behind them? Major delays, such as the one around which the illustrative conversations in this work revolve, are similar. Causes can be proposed, but rarely can one do anything at the time – remembering that such delays can happen in future similar occasions may be all one can achieve. And the same goes for illnesses of individual humans.
At a still more trivial level, lots of things in normal life ‘don’t go quite right’. Local transport is late, things get dropped or snagged, other people’s actions irritate us, we have to wait for someone to attend to our requests, and so on. I really think we are best not trying to impute meaning to these happenings. Some of us older folks put it down to ‘seniors moments’ or failing memory or coordination, but as a friend remarked recently, we were probably always subject to such annoyances but have become less tolerant or more anxious.
We can probably get plenty of ‘meaning’ from a whole lot of things in nature, in our social life, and in cultural things. There are views of sunsets, flowers, trees, rivers, lakes and mountains; we can experience quiet and noise, the presence of friends, botheration, and loneliness; and feeling well or ill. Admiring art, sculpture, music, poetry and so on can all evoke meaning for us. Inanimate things – both natural, like rocks and stones; or constructed, like buildings and monuments - can be treated as if they ‘speak to us for themselves’.
Back at Singapore’s Changi airport, two ladies are discussing how they feel about the delay.
Female GG: What annoys me is that no-one from the airline has offered us any apology
Female HH: Well, they don’t like to admit there’s any fault on their part, as someone might sue and claim that they had admitted liability. Anyhow, have they anything to apologize for? They are looking after our safety.
Female GG: They could at least have sympathized! And how about an apology for the lack of any further information?
Female HH: Maybe let’s just ask the lady at the desk. Excuse me, don’t you think your company could be giving us a bit more information?
Clerk: I’ve been on to them every 15 minutes, and I’m sure they are making every effort to find out what the situation is. But safety is our airline’s paramount consideration, and you know that there have been some very bad storms on the east coast of Australia in recent months.
Female GG: I do hate “until further notice”, or “wait for a further announcement” though. It sounds to me like they are saying to us. “Don’t bug us”
Female HH: They may indeed be thinking that, but they are trying to be polite, while discouraging us from bothering them – which may prevent them from doing other important things.
Female GG: Sometimes I think it’s easier talking to dogs – they don’t have hidden motives.
Female HH: I suppose we all get too worked up about minor irritations like this. They don’t have any underlying meaning – there’s no conspiracy – people may not all be competent or good communicators, they’re just doing their best as they see it.
Female GG: But I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a trend to more and more things going wrong. We seem to get more and more hold-ups – if it isn’t the weather, it’s a strike, an epidemic, a burst water main, flood damage, bush fire or “health and safety concerns”. Is our civilization going down the gurgler?
Female HH: I’m not sure there’s any meaning at all in these events – from our point of view, they are just random events.
Female GG: But surely, in some cases (like a strike), if we were more closely involved we’d know more about what was going on, like outsourcing maintenance to offshore. In the case of the floods and fires – maybe climate change is a factor, and maybe human activity has some effect on climate change. Even epidemics might mean something – too much human movement, crowded cities, too much specialization or cost-cutting. I’m sure we can find reasons for wars too, although everyone might have a different interpretation.
Female HH: But can we do anything about most of these things?
Female GG: Not as individuals maybe, but isn’t that what governments are for?
Female HH: Some of these problems are international and we don’t have a world government!
In my view, there are three main routes to improving our ability to detect meanings in what people say or write. These are:
We look at each of these in the sections below, and then describe some common ‘meaning traps’ – i.e., forms of message where it is easy to be misled.
The way I like to view things is described in Diagram 3. This is another one to print separately and have close by to refer to as you read this section.
Since the European renaissance, several famous philosophers have addressed the question “What is the nature of what we call ‘Reality’?”. People blandly use phrases that include the word ‘real’, implying that this is in contrast to some fanciful idea that someone else is putting forward. Here are some examples.
Personally, I am immediately suspicious when people talk like this, or when they say things like “you can’t argue with facts”.
The top half of diagram 3 shows a photograph (it’s of my wife at a spot on the west coast of the south island of New Zealand. The photograph is just one view, taken with my old camera on slide film, then scanned and copied. It is not exactly the same as what I saw on that day. Firstly I have two working eyes and so have stereoscopic vision. Secondly, my colour sensing ability is not exactly the same as my camera’s. And thirdly the grain size of the camera film is not the same as that of my eyes. Also, my view will not be exactly the same as my wife’s, as she is standing in a different spot. And this is without mentioning all the other people who have passed this way, some of them maybe colour blind - and some on rainy, overcast or misty days, or in a different season of the year.
This is why I’ve marked the photograph as an example of ‘The world of appearances’. This is the sum total of what we can see, observe or otherwise physically experience. And we have to consider animals’ experience too; dogs, for example, can detect sound at a frequency outside the audible range of humans; some snakes have heat-detecting organs. Of course humans can indirectly detect a lot more than we can experience directly through our five senses, by using instruments. But are we sure what we are actually ‘seeing’ through a radio telescope, for example?
Some philosophers, for example Kant, have talked about a world of ‘Things-in-themselves’, a unique objective truth that lies behind all the appearances. But it is questionable whether we can actually ‘know’ anything in that world; two different possible ‘stories’ are as follows.
In the first possible ‘story’, the world of ‘things-in-themselves’ is what God created, and we living creatures have been given the power to view it. Our view is, however, only partial.
In the second, we can certainly talk about ‘things-in-themselves’, but this depends on us having a ‘consensus’ about their structure and inter-relationships. It is quite possible that I, my wife, you the reader, the group of ‘other people’ in the ‘clip art’ on the far right of the diagram and the ‘thinking person’ in the middle - will all see in much the same way, not only that New Zealand coastal scene but also a lot of other things in the world, both concrete and abstract.
One way of saying the same thing is that “reality is socially constructed”. But in this case, we can only talk about such a reality as belonging to a particular ‘culture’. And a ‘culture’ never means a homogeneous consensus about everything. There are lots of piecemeal consensuses within any one ‘culture’; and these consensuses come and go.
Among humans, even today, there are a number of cultures that have quite different views of reality from those we may regard as the ‘mainstream’. One different view is typical of religious fundamentalists, who may see everything as God’s Will. Another is that of primitive tribes, for example the African Azande tribe (as described by researchers such as Evans-Pritchard and Winch). And we should not forget that horses, dogs and many animals will also have their views of reality.
By a ‘thinking person’ I mean anyone who is not afraid to question the assumptions they have been brought up with - or those they have developed as they have experienced life.
Whether ‘thinking’ or not, I envisage every human as having a metaphorical ‘mental desk’, as shown at the bottom left of the diagram. (The metaphor doesn’t have to be a desk, it could just as well be a wardrobe, a toolbox, a garden shed or a set of kitchen cupboards!)
The right hand ‘leg’ of the desk represents ‘human nature’ – the pattern of organs and neural wiring that characterizes the human species in the chain of evolution. The left hand leg represents skills - partly mental, partly physical – that we have not just ‘learnt’ as ‘book learning’, but have adopted into our sub-conscious – possibly into so-called ‘muscle memory’. This last term means that our muscles and other organs effectively operate ‘automatically’, and can incorporate the use of familiar tools like spoons, screwdrivers, hammers, brushes and car driving controls.
The front of our desk has two long flat drawers. The lower one contains all the memories of what we have personally seen, observed or experienced; the higher one contains the ‘stories’ we have been told; these include other people’s experiences, book learning and fiction (what ‘might have happened’ according to someone’s imagination or invention).
On the surface of the desk are the tools which we can consciously apply. ‘Imagination’ means envisaging what might happen in future. We often do better at this if we can envisage several possibilities, rather than think that only one chain of events is possible. Personally, I always like to have a ‘Plan B’. ‘Reflection’ means thinking about what did happen, why it happened, what might have been done differently, and how one might do better in future. It might involve thinking how someone else might see the same situation.
‘Acquired conceptual models’ is a bit of a mouthful. An alternative name could be ‘thinking patterns’. We all have a number of these, although university professors may carry around a lot more than the rest of us. The idea of these models is probably best illustrated by listing a few of the most common ones; each of us can decide whether we personally have such a model, and if so, do we use it?
We usually start off by accepting other people’s models, based on what our parents, schools and religion have taught us. However we may, after reflection, be dissatisfied with them and try to develop our own variations.
In my view, it can help us all interpret meaning if we are aware of our mental desk or toolkit. This toolkit may be good, but it may well be missing some useful features – or we may simply not have thought about it. If we can assess our own toolkit, we can then be more objective in identifying the lenses and filters of both other people and ourselves.
As a result of working many years in the field of information and computers, I found that I became dissatisfied with the tools I had, especially for looking at the relationships between one thing (or idea) and another. People in my field love to draw hierarchies , particularly diagrams showing what things can be classified as sub-types or ‘specializations’ of other things, as ‘humans’ are a sub-type of ‘mammals’. At the same time engineers may also draw hierarchies – but these relate mechanical or electrical parts or ‘assemblies’ as components of products like airplanes, cars or other machines – or of larger assemblies. Meanwhile in human resources, people draw hierarchical organization charts. So each specialist draws hierarchies, but the meaning isn’t the same.
Electrical and mechanical engineers also draw diagrams of the connections of one part to another, while computer scientists draw diagrams showing which pieces of software trigger other software. But again the meaning of the connection lines is not quite the same.
When looking at what someone has said, we sometimes need to think of what relationships they are claiming (or questioning) between the things they are talking about. Sometimes the relationships can become confused. So I have developed a system called Frolio – which is just another example of a set of categories mentioned above, but applying to relationships rather than to things or ideas.
Frolio proposes 12 major types of relationship, which are listed below. Each major type has several sub types, and there are further sub-divisions within these. The full list is available on my website.
Arrangement, “is in some order with”
There are four cases of ‘arrangement’ in Frolio: arrangement in space,
physical connection, arrangement in time (e.g. before and after),
and arrangement in conceptual structure. Examples of the last are next logically,
organizational relationship, allocation and ownership.
Classification, “is a”
Something X could be an instance of a class A; Class A may be a sub type
(or super type) of class B; or classes A and
B could share some instances in common.
Distinguishing, “is different from”
Covers things like same as, different from, seems like, better/worse than.
Interaction, “communicates with”
Four main sub types are cooperation, (including communication, transaction, trust),
speech acts, (including requests, proposes, promises, agrees, rejects),
influence, (including advises, threatens, challenges), and
contention, (including competition, opposition, resistance).
Logic, “is deduction from”
Some examples are deduction, explanation, prediction, solution, insight,
justification and summarization.
Motivation, “is motivated by”
Apart form straight motivation, this covers triggering, purpose, and commitment.
Partitioning, “is a part of”
This covers not only physical components, but also aspects of a concept,
factors within an issue, sections within a written work, tasks within a project
and so on. It also includes membership within a collection.
Representation, “represents”
This very wide group includes names or identification, representatives, agents,
descriptions, expressions, spin, measurement, recordings and models
(of which of course Frolio itself is an example).
Sensation, “is experienced by”
Most examples of this category of relationship are emotional reactions,
like feeling and seeming; as well as these, observation
through our five senses are included.
Transformation, “is changed from”
Five sub types are included here: creation and manufacture, reproduction,
modification, destruction and consumption and transfer
Utilisation, “is useful for”
Examples are: useful for, capable, designed for, used for, substitute for,
opportunity for, is a habit and is frequented by.
Volition, “is wanted by”
This includes desired, required, pleased by, imagined, feared, and anticipated
Sometimes subtle differences can arise, in what people say or write, particularly between the Interaction, Sensation, Utilisation and Volition types of relationship. Are they relating an actual experience? What about the other people involved? What goals are stated or implied? And what ‘means’ are being advocated, and are they appropriate?
Sometimes senders may be unclear (accidentally or deliberately) about what they are claiming to be true, or to be a fact. The clues that can reveal the substance of their claims are sometimes difficult to pick out – and they may have been deliberately glossed over. We may need to challenge their claims. Here are some examples.
Is what we are being told claimed as an undisputable objective or universal truth, or is it based on a
theory that could be tested by a repeatable experiment?
Most philosophers would, I think, say that for something to be indisputably true,
it is probably ‘true by definition’, like “2 plus 2 equals 4”. (Mind you, a
mathematician would say that if our numbering system had the base 3 instead of
10, 2+2 would equal 11 – one 3 plus 1.) We might agree that it’s also true that
“I will die some day” (forgetting any quibbles about what we mean by ‘die’,
religious doctrine about ‘eternal life’ or possible future medical advances
enabling one ‘person’ to live indefinitely through organ replacement). “God
loves us” may be believed to be an absolute truth by some, but what
if our religion doesn’t have a Supreme Being? In any case, it’s not something that can be tested.
However many statements rely on some man-made theory, like Newton’s laws of motion, Einstein’s theory of relativity, the second law of thermodynamics, Keynsian economics or Marx’s theory of class revolution. All such theories can be tested and potentially disproved, although they may still then (like Newton’s) still be good enough for most purposes.
Is the future being presented to us a detailed plan or model, or is it more
like ‘wishful thinking’?
A financier interviewed on TV recently said: “Stock markets will probably recover
within 2 years”. He didn’t give any reasons for this belief. So we tend to think this is
wishful thinking.
Another case arises when activists and politicians propose laws to fix some problem
in society, like ageism or vandalism. They predict that their new law will fix the problem,
but we see so many laws that did not have the effect predicted, so we might be justifiably
sceptical.
Are the forecasts definite predictions, or are they a set of possible
outcomes with estimated probabilities?
We would often like to have definite
predictions about the future. So there is a market for prophets, oracles and
astrologers. Despite their technology – and maybe understanding of statistics,
Australian weather forecasters still say things like: “Tomorrow will be fine,
with tops around 25 degrees”. But surely there is at least some chance that
things might be different. On days where ‘scattered showers’ are forecast, we
sometimes get no rain at all, and other times we get continuous rain for much
of the day. Some weather forecasts do at least give a percentage chance of rain
– I don’t see why this isn’t universal.
Is the story presented to us based on a set of documented results,
or is it just a set of anecdotes, or maybe stories for illustrative purposes?
In scientific research, people do try to be specific about how they have reached their conclusions.
And, as in the case of the researchers who discovered
neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light,
scientists are always prepared to consider the possibility of experimental or
measurement error. But in everyday speech – and often in politics too –
speakers and writers use a few selected anecdotes as if they were an equally
conclusive basis for whatever viewpoint they want to push. It would be more
honest to present these stories as illustrations of what can happen, rather than
using them as a serious argument.
Is history being referred to as if it is unquestionable fact,
with only one viewpoint being possible?
We like to have history that we can point to
and say “X definitely happened”. This is very often reasonably safe. But we
have to realize that the history we can access has normally been written under
the direction of the ruling clique, or by the winners of any conflict, or by
authors with a particular agenda. Examples include
Xenophon,
Julius Caesar and
Winston Churchill.
And of course history can be ‘re-written’ after a change of regime. The ‘facts’ of history may be shaky
enough, but any interpretation of it is in great danger of being subjective.
Even consensus does not mean accuracy, although how we can ever prove what
really happened and why, I have no idea.
Is the judgment being expounded to us based on reasonable justification,
or is it just a gut feeling?
Although the rationale behind some judgments (e.g. a judge’s sentence,
Tony Blair’s
decision to join the war against
Saddam Hussein) is often explained to us,
we often suspect we haven’t been told the whole story. However there are cases,
especially in business, where directors admit that they are going on ‘gut feeling’.
This might sometimes be just as reliable as trying to balance a large number of
conflicting and incompletely understood factors.
Are we receiving ‘poetry’ or ‘matter-of-fact prose’?
Some writers - Michael Polanyi
is an example - give the impression that they think
there is more truth and meaning in metaphor – including poetry and modern art –
than in a prosaic factual explanation of things. It seems true that we can be
inspired by art that is rich in metaphor. But the question then is: Is the
speaker or writer trying to inspire us, or to convey some meaning which is more
to do with our everyday activities, and with what we can observe? In such cases
‘poetry’ may not be a reliable source on which to base our decisions.
An example of what poetry is appropriate for is perhaps illustrated by Longfellow’s poem ‘Excelsior’, which starts with the line “The shades of night were falling fast”. The story line is fairly thin, but the poem is all about conjuring up images in our mind. Overall, I personally prefer Housman’s spoof version. And, further down the same web page, Ogden Nash’s ‘Very like a Whale’ is an amusing comment on “too much metaphor”.
‘Is-a’ versus ‘Part-of’ versus ‘Is’
A music journalist was once quoted as saying
“Irving Berlin doesn’t just have a place in American music,
he is American music”. This pattern seems to have become popular – if overworked - in
recent decades. But I think we have to judge that particular statement as ‘poetical’. What about
Gershwin,
Ellington,
Leonard Bernstein or
Aaron Copland?
Prosaically speaking, Irving Berlin ‘is a’ American composer,
and Irving Berlin’s music is ‘part of’ American music.
For an explanation of this difference, see the Frolio relationship types Classification, Distinguishing and Partitioning earlier in this chapter.
Representation versus ‘what is represented’
The picture or representation of something, even if it has acquired consensual
acceptance, may not be an accurate view of the thing itself. An example is England’s
king Richard III – who is portrayed by Shakespeare as a devious hunchback.
Shakespeare’s source was a Tudor historian who had some motives for running
down the last member of the previous dynasty from which the Tudors took over;
see this website.
The same problem arises in distinguishing between the ‘spin’ and an accurate assessment of a political situation. The Frolio relationship type Representation explains this point.
Nature versus Nurture
In arguments
about whether people’s behaviour can be changed, some people tend to say
“It’s all in the genes”, while others say “It’s all in the upbringing”.
“You can’t change human nature” is a common cry. The truth is almost always
somewhere in between – “It’s a mixture”.
Short-term versus Long-term
Writers or speakers often filter out one or the
other of these to some extent. One needs to look at the whole period affected
by the decisions being made or proposed. There may well be one or more ‘medium
terms’ in between.
Theory versus Practice
It’s a classic Aunt Sally
tactic to overdo this contrast. Often, what is asserted as
the ‘theory’ is a particularly bad theory that doesn’t take a lot of things
into account. There usually isn’t just one theory anyhow. And predictions of
what will work ‘in practice’ are themselves theories. Even past performance is
no sure-fire indicator – many environmental factors may have changed.
Appearance versus Content
It may be unclear whether a speaker or writer
is suggesting that ‘appearance’ or ‘content’ is the more important
consideration, when judging both past and proposed actions. It seems clear that
neither aspect should be ignored, but what balance is to be struck, and why? A
brilliant plan may fail if a lot of people perceive it as offensive to the
immediate senses or cultural norms; while a beautifully presented plan may be
full of inconsistencies and wishful thinking.
Faith versus Works
By analogy with the previous meaning trap,
religion is extremely prone to people trying to out-do others in appearances,
e.g. observance and ritual, than doing what is useful, pragmatic and needed for
‘The Good’ or ‘Love’ to work its way in our lives. But some sects also make
‘Faith’ a superior virtue to ‘Works’. While having faith is surely a good
thing, it can also be hijacked to imply that we should surrender to the
teaching given by a self-perpetuating oligarchy of priests.
Efficiency versus Effectiveness
It may not be good enough just to do something
efficiently, if it isn’t the right thing to be doing. The end purpose – “what
are we trying to achieve?” always has to be considered. However it still makes
no sense to do it wastefully. As with most of he points above, we need a
mixture of both implied extremes.
At Singapore’s Changi airport, male AA and female BB, together with male CC and female DD, are discussing the news item about the uranium plan for the Coonawagga ranges.
Male CC: I thought that the minister’s stuff about procedures and consultation was just a sop. They’ve probably all decided to go ahead anyhow. And I always suspect “independent” committees – they probably aren’t. I always assume that the main goal of a government is to do what it takes to hang on to power at the next election.
Male AA: Surely the Greens lady was guilty of completely ignoring the fossil fuels and carbon emissions issue. She seemed to be trying to bypass reason by appealing to our sympathy for animals. And she was surely imputing motives to the government, to suit her argument.
Female BB: Maybe she did say more later, but we only got a very short sound byte. Anyhow, the company spokesman wasn’t much better. He tried to blind us with both science – Uni biologists – and authority – “we know best”. He dismissed environmental concerns as “not significant” and tried the “safe in our hands” trick when he talked about “very careful” assessment of the environmental impact.
Female DD: The aboriginal activist annoyed me most, with that romantic stuff about “ancestors” and “dreamtime”. Also, that stuff about poor health and living in camps on the edges of towns may be true, but it wasn’t really relevant. They might be even worse off in the Coonawaggas. Anyway, where are those guys living now, and why did they quit their homelands?
Male AA: I’d like to put the boot into the TV news editor. We didn’t see him, and the newsreader is left to carry the can. The game seemed to be to beat up more of a crisis than there is. The sound bites were for too short. They didn’t interview any elders who were involved in the consultation. And they didn’t put any challenging questions.
In a conversation, if we are quick enough, we can try saying say “I paraphrase that to mean …” An excellent example of this is Nigel Molesworth’s paraphrases - which he calls ‘reel thorts’ - of the St Custard’s school headmaster’s speech in the book ‘Down with Skool’ (see this web page). Or, we could roughly analyse the communication situation and say “I see where you are coming from” – which implies it’s not the same ‘place’ as for you.
In a conversation, we sometimes frequently nod, or otherwise indicate that we are ‘all ears’. Asking questions is often a good form of positive reinforcement, and at least it shows we are listening. However as the conversation proceeds, we might want to switch to more challenging questions, in order to get the full un-filtered story, with – hopefully - the other person’s ‘deliberate amnesia’ removed.
If it’s a written communication, then I doubt if we can do any better than sending an early holding reply, by letter, email or text message. We could say “Got your interesting message. It might take me a while to digest it, but I’ll get back to you when I’ve thought a bit about it”.
Many of us have favourite tactics for letting someone know that you don’t really like what they have said or written, or that you don’t wish to hear any more.
Listen patiently and decline further communication politely
One policy is to pointedly refuse to offer any
form of reaction, and just wait until the speaker runs out of steam. One of my
colleagues used to wait like this and then come back with the question “Do you
really think so?”
Interrupt and bring communication to an end
If we can get a word in (and I try to do this
with cold callers over the telephone) we can try saying the following: “Before
you go on too much further, I need to let you know something” and then give a
strong reason why you are not interested. The reason had better be strong as
many salespersons have been trained in how to overcome the most common
objections. If this fails, we can try “I don’t need it - it is a long way down
my wish list.” A possible dodge is get someone else to ring our mobile or other
phone and then say “something important has come up, I must leave it there,
thanks”. Finally, of course, we can simply put down the receiver, but many of
us don’t feel comfortable with doing this.
Some people with a lot of time to spare rise to the challenge of deliberately keeping the caller busy for no purpose - until they realize they are wasting their time and they hang up on you.
Use sarcasm
We can use words like “That really is absolutely fascinating … but …”
or “That should go down well with those who …” (think totally differently from myself.)”
In written communication
If we are solicited by letter or email to do
something we don’t really want to do, it’s better to simply not reply than send
a note disagreeing or declining. If it’s an email communication, we can always
put the sender into your ‘Junk email senders’ list.
Unless I want to start an argument which gets emotional, I prefer to make it clear that I disagree, but that I am not saying that the other person is wrong. One of my old work colleagues used to use the phrase “I hear what you say”. However I eventually took this to mean something like “That’s bollocks”! Other possible phrases are “That’s certainly one point of view”, or “I have a different view on that, but I guess we are all entitled to our opinions”.
Someone may be basing their argument on a story that we don’t personally go along with (e.g. a religious or political doctrine). But this may not be the time or place to attack that story frontally. And it may not be a bad thing if other people prefer to stick to their existing stories, otherwise they may become disorientated and may resent our argumentative style. We might have to make our position explicit, or say how far we can go along with the other person’s story.
The same goes if we don’t go along with someone else’s peculiar habits or routine. Their routine may help the other person live an efficient and effective life.
A good question to ask ourselves is “How important is it for me to register my point of view?” Before deciding to stay mum, however, we need to consider whether in fact it would be inconvenient if the other parties were misled into thinking that we do agree. Only a few people seem to have taken aboard the adage that “silence does not imply agreement”.
Many of us like to agree with other people – we are naturally ‘agreeable’. However there are usually ways to extract ourselves if, on reflection, we are not so sure that we should have agreed. Many countries’ laws allow a ‘cooling off period’ where you can escape from a too hasty commitment to buy something or enter into a contract.
Personally, I think it’s usually rash to agree totally with another person ‘on the spot’ – I like to have a chance to mull it over, for example by taking a walk, a bath, a shower or an overnight sleep. I certainly never agree with anyone over the telephone or at my doorstep.
At Singapore’s Changi airport, passengers EE and FF are discussing the service they get from their banks.
Male EE: My bank, the ISB, must be spending millions on advertising, but all they say is how “flexible” they are and how “friendly” their staff members are.
Male FF: So, what do you reckon they want to achieve? I don’t suppose their tellers and call centre staff are significantly – if at all - more friendly than my bank’s. They must think that either they can attract some dissatisfied customers from other banks, or they can buy loyalty from their own customers, to discourage them from moving their accounts. They are just trying to convey a warm, fuzzy feeling.
Male EE: ISB is full of bright ideas, but if you try to use them it can get really painful, especially as the new deals involve using telephone or internet banking rather than talking to humans. Their call centre system is extremely irritating. First you have to listen to several long recorded messages before you key in a response. You can speak a word saying what you want to do, but I find that the system rarely recognizes my voice. If you opt to wait to speak to a human, you usually wait at least 10 minutes. Then they ask you questions to identify yourself, and if you get anything wrong they refuse to speak any further.
Male FF: I don’t think ISB is alone in this. I think they are all shit scared of major fraud, or of lawsuits.
Male EE: When I complain, they just say “We’re sorry you feel that way”.
Male FF: Well, they’re not going to admit that they are anything less than perfect. If they say sorry, someone might sue them as they have then admitted fault.
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Female JJ: I got two missionaries from some religious sect come round to my house the other week. They were trying to get me to go to one of their services, as they were having a ‘Back to Church’ campaign. I wasn’t terribly interested, but they didn’t seem to want to take “no” for an answer. In the end, I was saved when I had to go and answer a phone call.
Female KK: I had a similar visit about a year ago. But having been to a convent school, I could more than match them for knowing biblical texts. I think they assumed I was already associated with some fairly serious sect myself.
Female LL: It happened to me too, but I managed to quickly say that I didn’t discuss things at the doorstep, as I felt threatened and on the defensive. But I invited them to send me some literature – which they never did.
In some people’s view, the only true sense of the term ‘meaning’ is as it is used in the phrase ‘The Meaning of Life’. This limits the significance of anything we say or hear, read or write, signal or react to, in terms of how it fits into ‘the higher scheme of things’.
In this respect, Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage”, and others have used similar metaphors. Walter Raleigh said that our life is “a play of passion”, Karl Popper called it an opera buffa and I personally like to think of human life as “a long-running soap”.
Many of us would like more concrete answers – to questions like “Why are we here?”, “What’s the purpose of our life, the world as a whole and indeed the universe?” But I think it’s safe to say that there can be no single ‘objective’ answer that would satisfy people in all different ages, cultures and situations. Even if we look to religion for answers, there are different answers depending on which religion we follow.
In my personal view, however, there are a number of things that many educated and thoughtful people might agree on, such as:
We can also observe that, on average, doing ‘good’ and being aware of ‘value’ not only brings more ‘happiness’, but enhances the prevailing direction of development of humans, and of all life.
It’s not so long ago that humans have emerged from closed, tribal societies into residents of the ‘global village’ – and some have yet to emerge. It’s not so surprising that many humans have yet to acquire the vision to appreciate abstract concepts like ‘good’, ‘quality’ and ‘value’. We want stories, with heroes and villains – and we often want magic, mystery and supernatural powers as well. Storytellers have been filling this need since Homer, and probably long before him.
Even we moderns often need a spiritual ‘prop’ – some structure of meaning that helps us see our life as something with purpose rather than just being a ‘lottery’ of random happenings.
Traditionally, tribes have developed myths that explain creation of their world: human birth, reproduction and death - and what happens after we have gone. Religion derives from these myths, providing two advantages:
Pure ‘reason’, as an ideal, has failed to supersede religion. It can’t of itself provide the sort of meaning we are looking for. It doesn’t address the “Why?” questions. Science can provide useful models of how things happen, enabling us to predict and plan things better, but again doesn’t address the overall meaning of things. And both reason and science can be manipulated by humans against the good.
However the notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing super-human – some people’s idea of God – has lost power as a model for many modern people. It is difficult for many modern humans to see the events of the world as part of some divine plan. But what alternative is there? One suggestion is ‘Existentialism’ – the belief that there is no ‘given’ meaning and it is up to us to make our own. But this is maybe too difficult for many people.
One idea that may appeal to some, at least in traditionally Christian countries, is to give more importance to the third ‘person’ of the Christian Trinity, namely the Holy Spirit or ‘Holy Ghost’. If human knowledge is outgrowing dependence on an authoritarian father-figure (or worse, a remote dictator), and if many of us prefer to look on the founders of religions as great human examples, rather than divine beings, it might be best to promote the spirit of Good, as a force that inspires us to do good things and work in tune with the ongoing direction of the human race, the planet and the universe.
The Alpha course, which has the slogan “Is there more to life than this?” devotes three out of its 15 talks to the Holy Spirit, but still wants attendees to adhere to the traditional Father and Son aspects as well. Although somewhat charismatic in style, it is at least non-denominational. But all this only covers Christianity.
A few of the delayed group have decided that some of the conversation has got rather boring, and they have taken off to another bar up some stairs.
Female Q: I think all this worrying by most of our fellow passengers is wrong. We should regard the delay as God’s Will, so we must live with it. If we pray, Jesus will give us guidance. After all, if we are bent on getting to Sydney on time at all costs, then we might be putting ourselves and our loved ones at risk, especially if the plane crashes due to the bad weather.
Male R: I think she’s got a point, although I see the reasons differently. In the words of a well-known, if coarse, cliché, “shit happens”. And if we can’t face things when it does happen, we’re not up to scratch as humans.
Female S: But how can we all keep up our morale if we take such a cynical viewpoint? Don’t we need some confidence in a power above ourselves that ensures the best outcome?
Female T: But sometimes, even for believers, the worst – rather than the best – happens. Remember those Christians slaughtered in Pakistan and Egypt, and Sunni and Shia attacking each other in Iraq?
Male R: I think there’s no better way of keeping morale up than we all support each other, be nice to each other, give some encouragement for those who feel knocked down the most.
Female U (American, quiet up to now): I’ve got a suggestion for doing just that, though I’ll admit to some private motive. The reason for my trip to Sydney is to participate in a ‘ Festival of Dangerous Ideas’. I’m not saying I’m short of such ideas myself, but I’d be interested to hear what thought each of us finds most disturbing at the present time. I don’t know if any of you read a book that came out of the US in 2006 called ‘What is Your Dangerous Idea’?
Male V: Yes, I read it. I particularly liked the guy who said that schools are a waste of time, and that it would be better to close them all and re-open them as recreation centres. Then organisers could respond to what the kids showed interest in finding out. With the current system, a majority of kids are actually turned off by their school experience and become anti any sort of learning later.
Female S: Well, I’m a kindy teacher, and that sounds very much like what we do in my kindy now. So, does this mean ‘kindy for teenagers’?
Female U: I think if we’re going to let everyone have a say, we ought to limit ourselves to just one question for each dangerous idea. So I’m going to suggest we move on. Who’s next?
Female W: OK, I’ve got one. The Pope has announced a re-evangelization campaign to fight secularism in western countries. Does this stand any chance at all of success – at least, in the way the Pope wants to see?
Male V: Well, I’m a Catholic by upbringing and I’d like to see it succeed. But I’m really doubtful for one main reason. I don’t think the church’s leaders have got the right mindset. They are too concerned with preserving their authority and ‘the business’, and not enough with what ordinary people think. A couple of examples – one is the latest changes in the words of the Mass. We now have to stop replying “And also with you” and change to “And with thy spirit” because it’s a more literal translation. Other examples are the cover-ups over priests who have molested children, and the arguments over the abortion of a 9-year old rape victim in Brazil.
Male X: My turn now – that last argument could get us too worked up. I also read the dangerous idea book and the one I liked was about ‘super-individualism’, which I’m sure the Pope is against. What the author said, I think, was that there’s a tendency among humans today for every ‘bee in the hive’ to think they should be the queen. We’re the ‘Me’ generation! No one is prepared just to find a role that fits in with what society needs and be happy doing it. Will this tendency lead to a decline in our society?
Female Y (after a silence): Well, no-one seems to have any comments on that one – maybe we all agree. Anyhow, here’s mine. Which do we think is more dangerous, the idea that male and female minds are essentially the same, or the idea that they are fundamentally different, like ‘men from Mars, women from Venus’?
Female U: I reckon all we can say is that both extremes are just as dangerous, but it all depends on what you mean by ‘essentially’? Does that mean from puberty, from birth, or from Adam and Eve – or even the first conscious living things that had separate genders?
Male Z: I’d like to raise a related topic covered by several authors in the dangerous idea book. The gist is that so-called ‘free will’ isn’t as important in our conscious minds as it is in our subconscious. The conscious mind really only acts as an approval committee over what our subconscious wants. Apparently we’ve no better insight into our own subconscious than into anyone else’s. Where does this leave personal responsibility?
Male R: I guess all we can say is, it ought to be part of our upbringing to develop our ‘control mechanism’ – and maybe our conscience. Anyhow, I haven’t had a go yet. So my idea is a question – what are the motives of a suicide bomber?
Female T: I would say that someone has ‘got at’ their subconscious enough to make the urge to kill others and themselves stronger than not just their conscious control – but also their natural self-preservation interests. It’s brainwashing, like a lot of advertising and political speeches is. And someone will always find a rationalization to fit what they have done afterwards, like “God told me to do it” or “I had to have this stuff”.
Female S: I’m still left to go, so my point is, don’t the media give us the impression that there’s far more controversy out there than there really is? I suppose a news article that tells about people agreeing with each other isn’t news. But it might mean that what is a really important issue gets drowned by the noise of all the hyped-up crises and disagreements.
Female W: I agree absolutely, but what can we do about it? I doubt if we want state-control of the media that ensures the right balance. Maybe all we can do is to point out bad media practice and force it out of business like with the News of the World, and only buy good newspapers ourselves.
Female Q: I wonder which we prefer, a world that’s ‘under control’ by human laws or effort, or one where we ‘let it be’, we accept things, and we enjoy surprises.
Male X: I think that’s a good one. We don’t want a nanny state, but yet we are troubled by stories of terrible struggle and misfortune. I’m not sure how we can get a balance.
Female T: As a scientist, I’d have to be the one to raise the delicate issue of science and religion. However I’m not sure it’s a matter of “science versus religion” as much as “isn’t science just another religion, or ‘story’?” Religion has historically been a process of finding out the truth about our existence. Newer religions have superseded old religions, often keeping many of their values. Why can’t we do the same with science?
Male Z: I’d say that the ‘versus’ arises because we’re in a transitional stage of history. People aren’t quite ready to make the jump away from traditional, supernatural ‘God the Father’ thinking, and the authorities of the traditional religions aren’t going to go quietly – remember the slogan “Great is Diana of the Ephesians”. And we haven’t yet got a new consensus that enough people can go along with. Anyhow, what about the kind lady who started this all off? What have you got for us?
Female U: I’m going really futuristic and am asking “where will things stand in a few million years’ time?” I recently read a book about the Atlantic Ocean by Simon Winchester. Near the beginning he shows a map of the world 250 million years ago - before, according to geologists, the Atlantic opened up. Near the end he has a map of how it might look in 250 million years time. For a start, I wonder if the human race will still be around then.
Female Y: I guess I’m due to make a comment. 250 million years is a long time when humans have only been going for one or two million years, so we might expect totally new species by then. But even 2 million years might see a new post-human species, just as we took over from the Neanderthals. A crazy idea I have is that we might become like Daleks – very limited as physical bodies but incredibly extended in both our own brain power and add-on electronics. But it’s rather an unsettling thought, that humanity might be superseded, and I’ve no idea where this all leaves some religious doctrines – according to some of which, ‘judgement day’ is not far off – in years or decades rather than centuries.
A more immediate judgement day was then announced over the PA system. The Sydney flight would now be departing in 3 hours time.
Someone rings up wanting to fix something in your Microsoft Windows operating system. The numbers 1 to 10 correspond roughly to those in the list above above.
There is a risk if all of us become smarter at detecting meaning in what people say or write. It may in fact encourage an ‘arms race’. The advertisers, smartarses and bullshitters will no doubt try to raise their own game, and find better stories and tactics with which to pull the wool over our eyes!
Absolutely: Do you mean ‘In all respects’, or just ‘I like it’? Often just a cliché for ‘Yes’, but adding a certain amount of enthusiasm.
Appropriate: In what respects? A long word which sounds learned, but often disguises an arbitrary view of what is ‘suitable’ in a situation. Inappropriate: On what counts?
Because: That’s only one contributing factor. What about …? People like simple answers to ‘Why?’ questions – but simple answers can often be pure matters of opinion, arbitrary fixing on one single cause; or they may simply not be possible due to shortcomings in our knowledge. Because I say so: What are you threatening otherwise?
Clearly: I’m not sure I follow your logic when you say ‘clearly’. What are your assumptions? The sender usually just means “for reasons which I am not going into”, and hopes that readers or listeners will obviously agree with their reasoning (which may or may not be the case). But it may mean that he or she doesn’t want to get sidetracked by receivers not agreeing with the assumptions.
Conditions: Do you mean the ‘ifs’, or some state of affairs now or in future? In the phrase ‘under these conditions’, it may imply terms of some proposed transaction.
Culture: Do you mean things like art, drama and music – or things like religion, social norms and tribal practices? Multiculturalism: Do you mean tolerance within one society, or multiple cultural ghettoes? Do we want enclaves within a society to be able to apply their own rules of justice, e.g. in Australia, Aboriginal-controlled community justice or Sharia law?
Democracy: Do you essentially mean electing our leaders and being able to vote them out of power? That’s on the whole better than being stuck with undesirable leaders that we can’t get rid of without mass demonstrations, armed uprisings and civil wars. But the majority isn’t always right, and people who have good understanding of the issues can get outvoted by those who don’t, or who don’t care, or just want what suits them materially in the short term. But people who say “democracy isn’t for us” are more likely thinking about preserving their own unelected oligarchy.
Facts: Where are these facts documented? Or are these just anecdotes? There may be other relevant facts that have not been mentioned. Suitable facts can usually be selected to support any argument. “You can’t argue with facts” is a tactic to claim that certain selected facts inevitably support the sender’s argument. The cliché “The fact of the matter is …” is often just a time-buying device.
Fair: Fair for whom? What about fair for anyone else? ‘Fair’ is usually a matter of opinion. People might only agree that some attempt has been made to share benefits or disadvantages. People who say “It isn’t fair” mean “I don’t like this deal”.
Freedom: Freedom of what, to do what, or from what? And are you saying with no limits?
As regards “of what”, FD Roosevelt in his Four Freedoms suggested “of speech and expression” and “of worship”. There are plenty of places and situations where these don’t apply at present, and where, on the whole, it might be better if they did. But when some people say “It’s a free country”, they are often thinking “to do anything we like, or for our own gain”. But what this forgets is that almost everything we do has some effect on other people. Unless everyone in the world is universally considerate, it seems we must have some restrictions, usually through laws, to ensure that people don’t excessively do things to other peoples’ disadvantage. A question that leaves us with is “What about commercial exploitation - can this in fact deny us some freedom?”
As regards the “from what” part, we might agree that freedom (of a people) from foreign rule is certainly a good thing, but what if the country is a confederation and a state within it only has a fraction of the total influence? And can we realistically expect total “Freedom from Want” and “Freedom from Fear”? Freedom from terrible hunger or fear of a repressive, arbitrary dictatorship sounds a good idea, but we can’t stop occasional crop failures or fear-making events like earthquakes or epidemics.
Imperative: Who says? What if I think differently? The word is often used in a slightly bullying way in organizations, to imply that we must do something, like it or not, to support the sender’s plan - or be regarded as insubordinate.
Important: Important to whom? Aren’t there some other equally important aspects? Probably means “important to me (or us)”.
In theory: Why select that particular theory? This phrase is used as if there is only one theory being proposed, one that can be fairly easily ridiculed. So it’s a sort of ‘Aunt Sally’ argument.
Justice: Do you mean what the current laws say, or how they are applied? Or do you mean what you think is fair? These correspond to the terms de jure, de facto and ‘natural’ justice. There’s also justice of the ‘might is right’ type, which may either mean de facto or the ‘law of the jungle’.
Liberal: Do you mean ‘generous’, ‘tolerant within limits’, or ‘anything goes’? Or is it being used in the Australian political sense, i.e. ‘not socialist’?
Mean(s): Do you mean ‘translates to’, ‘mean by it’, ‘mean to do something’, ‘has some relevance’ or ‘inspires’? Or maybe it is being used in a totally unrelated sense.
Plausible: Do you mean ‘genuinely possible’ or ‘probably unlikely’? It usually implies grudging acceptance of a possibility that the speaker or writer would prefer not to consider.
Quite: Do you mean ‘I agree exactly’ or ‘I suppose so’? As an adverb, it usually means ‘moderately’ – except in the phrase “Quite a few”, where it means “more than a few” – or even “not a few”.
Radical: Do you mean ‘root and branch change’, ‘novel’ or just ‘really great’? Literally, this means “getting down to the root of things”, so radical change would involve throwing out most of the current status quo. Such a policy is likely to be more ‘machismo’ than sensible.
Rational: Do you mean ‘you can deduce it logically’, or ‘not hampered by superstition’ or just ‘it’s common sense’? The literal meaning is the first one. To say that an opponent’s argument is ‘not rational’ is probably just derogatory spin, unless a justification is given.
Reasonable: Do you mean literally, that it ‘can be reasoned’, or ‘moderate’ – or that you agree ‘more or less’? Spoken with a certain tone of voice, it suggests that a speaker doesn’t agree totally.
Reification: What do you actually mean in everyday language? Wikipedia lists 7 possible meanings, all related to “treating an abstract notion like a more concrete thing”. It’s similar to ‘objectification’, except that this latter word can be used to mean “treating a human as if they are a thing to be used”. Very often, the word is used to “blind us with science”.
Statistics: Where do these statistics come from? Are you sure you haven’t just selected the ones that suit your argument? As the saying goes, “There’s lies, damned lies and statistics”.
Unsustainable: What do you say is going to stop it continuing? It’s an impressive-sounding put-down, implying “this may be working now, but I think it will cease to work before too long”. It involves some contrast between short-term and long-term, but often ignores the dynamics of any change.
Many Irish people seem to be well versed in the art of conversation, which they probably learn early through their families and cultural traditions. But can one be trained in the art of conversation? A lot of us don’t have the ‘Blarney’ or ‘Gift of the Gab’ – is there no hope for us?
My own parents would hardly have been described as chatty, although there were a few particular people with whom my father could chat quite naturally. However if I was present, most of the conversation used to go way over my head. I was probably thinking about sillier things. So I didn’t really learn the art, and have probably been ‘on the back foot’ ever since.
My wife once attended an evening class called ‘Poise and Speech’, although this was partly directed at shy people who needed to be able to say things to a group but were often too nervous.
We often need to start with friendly, trivial exchanges (called ‘phatic’ by sociologists) to get a conversation off to a good start. And often, there is no desire to go beyond the relatively trivial and the gossip. Things may go better if people feel at ease, and are not challenged too brazenly. Then, if necessary, one can gently ease into any difficult issues.
If no ‘big issue’ is at stake, then there are things that still need watching out for as the conversation proceeds. It isn’t good if someone hogs the conversation, or tries to lecture others. We should avoid embarking on specialist subjects that leave out part of the group. Of course there are men’s subjects and women’s subjects, but if one is in a mixed group it seems better not to cause the conversation to split into two or more separate conversations.
If there is some issue on which there isn’t agreement, we ought to ask what the purpose is of having an argument at all. We might think that the goal is to ‘win’ the argument. (A UK political party leader, after losing an election, once said “We won the argument”!) If it is possible for one side to win, then the topic under debate is either ‘one-dimensional’ (e.g. it all comes down to one thing, like cost, profit, enjoyment or whatever) - or it is a combination of very few such dimensions.
Usually, there are many dimensions to an issue, and advantages in some dimensions have to be traded off against disadvantages in other dimensions. But then, how does one decide which dimensions have the priority?
If an issue has not yet been well aired, then the purpose of an argument may be primarily to find out what people’s different interests are, how badly certain decisions might affect them, and what their own goals – and determination to follow them – are.
In the longer run, the purpose may be to find a solution that all involved can agree to go along with, if only for the time being – without sabotaging that solution.
If several rival views are on the table, then people often resort to bargaining tactics. This technique is like haggling over the price of something in a bazaar – which may be done politely over a glass of tea. The buyer’s threat is to walk away and look for a better deal, while the seller can refuse to negotiate any lower price.
When we are bargaining over ideas and plans, it isn’t always clear how realistic the participants’ bargaining positions are. Selfish children can sometimes get what they want with a howling fit. And a classic schoolboy joke goes “If I’m not captain, I won’t play”.
Sides in an argument that box themselves into an uncompromising position may risk an even worse outcome than otherwise. However on all too many occasions there may be a high cost to everyone of the matter being unresolved. Some people think that limiting carbon emissions is like that.
One possible way out is for someone – an arbitrator or facilitator – to present the problem to all sides in a ‘Games Theory’ format. A famous example of this is known as ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’. If neither prisoner A nor B agrees to rat on the other, both get say one month in jail. If only one rats, that prisoner goes free and the other gets 12 months. If both confess, they each get 3 months. They are not allowed to communicate, so what should they decide?
When translated into a normal argument, the options are: 1) we compromise; 2) one or other party gets its way; and 3) no agreement is reached and the issue remains unresolved. The facilitator’s job is to show the parties to the argument how much not coming to an agreement will cost, as well as the other options.
A problem in politics is that politicians aren’t usually the ones to suffer when there is a stalemate and issues aren’t resolved. But people at large do suffer, and so may people in the future.
The biggest challenge in conversation comes when you don’t agree with what someone else is saying, or you feel a need to raise some topic that you suspect will cause others pain or anger.
It’s probably best to avoid wading in with one-sided comments on current affairs, religion or politics, or anything that might divide people. It’s usually better to start with safe subjects, e.g. with men, football or cars; with women, household management and families.
If you find yourself straying into contentious territory, we should maybe try and find some points of agreement first. And if you hear things back that you don’t like, think of some good questions you can come back with, but not ones that are too directly challenging or ‘in your face’.
Besides her course on ‘Poise and Speech’, my wife also once attended a course on ‘Assertiveness’. This covered how to politely disagree, without causing ructions or general embarrassment - instead of saying nothing and regretting it afterwards.
What should we say if we really object to what someone has just said, or disagree totally? Of course, we may get carried away by our anger, but that may play into our opponent’s hands. Some typical responses might be:
In my experience, many conversations can go quickly downhill. A difference of opinion can become a personal wrestling match. A good skill is to be able to step in and cool things down, or to stop one person going on too long. This is easier if you are the ‘chairman’; otherwise the warring parties may round on you and tell you to shut up. So again, one needs to find a good question with which to butt in, if a lengthy diatribe needs to be curtailed or diverted.
We often debate whether we should ever prohibit anyone from saying what they think, or how they feel. Some of us feel that certain opinions are so inflammatory - or even ‘politically incorrect’ – that there should be laws and penalties to discourage their being aired. Examples are racial vilification, or holocaust denial. Of course laws of libel and slander restrict what one can say about an individual person, unless they can be proved to be true.
One proposal to address this would be to have a ‘Right to Challenge’. Offended parties would be able to appeal to an ‘Abuse of Free Speech’ Ombudsman, who would decide whether a challenge justified following up. If so, the person challenged would be required to face a group of questioners including representatives of any group that they had offended. The session would be video-recorded and made publicly accessible – maybe even screened on some TV channel. No lawyers would be allowed to be involved. Costs would be payable, and there would be penalties for failing to meet a challenge.
Some people would say that the best response to offensive opinions is to ignore them, and starve them of publicity. But the offenders would then still be free to run their own newspapers, magazines, TV channels and websites.
Possibly the only legitimate justification for restricting free speech, is when it is advocating hate.
A good conversationalist shows that he or she has some consciousness of him- or herself, but not an obsession. A question to ask might be “Am I boring everyone?”
Many humans carry round a lot of hang-ups. This may show up in both aggressiveness and excessive reticence. Which of these predominates may depend who else is in the conversation (e.g. family, friends, strangers, gorgeous women). All of us probably have some hang-ups, but we can try to downplay or cover them. And that’s maybe why we get a lot of ‘posing’ in conversations.
Do:
Don’t:
