The reciprocity illusion
No, other people don't think just like you
From time to time, I make errors that I subsequently recognize as rooted in an illusion: I imagine that other people have thoughts, values and preferences that match my own. Much like the joke about how a person with a Ph.D. can explain anything in the world in terms of their dissertation, I apparently process the world in terms of my egocentricity. I’m not sure whether I am any worse at this than anyone else, nor do I know whether I make this kind of error more often than others. I just know that I make this error more often than I would like to.
Why can’t you be more like me?
One common form of this illusion arises when I find myself thinking or saying some version of “I do X, why don't you do X too?” Of course, I’m not the only person prey to this error. Sometimes, someone else is saying to me that since they behave in “reasonable way Y,” that I should behave in “reasonable way Y” as well.
There are two fundamental problems with such an expectation of reciprocity. The first is the idea that the other party sees the situation in the same way that I do. All too often, the other party has a completely different understanding of the situation. Before pursuing any concerns about what one or both parties might do, we have to fix any mismatch of key history or facts and achieve some shared understanding of the situation.
Unfortunately, I either don’t realize that there is a mismatch of understanding (simply assuming, again, that the world is as I perceive it) or I think that any minor glitches in shared understanding are secondary to pursuing my brilliant preferred solution. On the occasions where there is an opportunity to learn how the other party sees the world, I am often surprised by how many differences there are in both facts and emphasis, even for events that are recognizably shared. You might think that such repeated experiences would be sufficient to convince me of the importance of re-establishing a shared understanding whenever there is a discussion of importance, but that is not the case. Apparently, my ego makes me a very slow learner!
The second problem is that it's simply a bad style of interpersonal relationship to condition one's own proper behavior on someone else's proper behavior. This is true regardless of whether there is a mismatch about the history and facts (the first problem mentioned). Over time, I have become clearer in my own mind that I have standards and values, and my job is to align my choices with those standards and values regardless of what other parties do. Accordingly, if someone is treating me badly, that may well be a problem to address; however, their bad behavior is not an excuse for me to behave badly as well.
There are certain, very narrow, circumstances in which it can be helpful to get someone's attention by matching their level and intensity. However, my experience suggests that even that kind of situation is tricky to handle as a confrontation. For example, suppose that someone has become exasperated enough with me that they are shouting at me (not, perhaps, as rare as you might think… since I can be pretty exasperating). I might briefly shout back, intentionally matching their behavior in a possibly surprising way and with the goal of causing us both to return to normal voices. Sometimes that has the intended effect, sometimes it doesn’t. Of course, if it doesn’t work as I intend, I have indisputably shouted – which might well become the new subject of dispute. Overall, I find that I'm happier when I can look back on a dispute and feel comfortable that I was well behaved, no matter what the other party did. (You will likely not be surprised to hear that achieving such a state is not easy.)
Parking versus what-about
Closely related to the reciprocity illusion is what-about-ism, about which I’ve written previously. Whereas reciprocity works on the basis that you should do what I do, what-about-ism says that that each of my faults can be matched by one of yours.
All too often, a specific present concern is connected (in an unhelpful way) to a specific past concern: I may be asking you not to leave dirty dishes in the sink, which then prompts you to point out a previous occasion on which I left dirty dishes in the sink, or perhaps did some other comparably thoughtless behavior like failing to start the washer.
The key discipline at the “what-about moment” is to recognize that while the previous difficulty may be a legitimate complaint, it has nothing to do with the current concern. It is effectively a deflection, a what-about, an attempt to established that there is a second wrong. But, as the saying goes, “two wrongs don't make a right.” It's OK to acknowledge that there is a past problem that is coming to mind, but the past problem should be parked. It has nothing to do with the current dispute, it deserves its own conversation.
Parking (with subsequent revisiting) is probably the right solution, but that’s not always what happens. There are two ways that this can go wrong: one of them is that parking isn’t attempted by either party, or the attempt fails. The new item (which is actually old) can then become the new focus of dispute, either at the level of disagreeing about what actually happened previously, or disagreeing about its significance, meaning, or connection to the previous dispute. Particularly if the what-about behavior is mutual, it’s easy to wind up arguing about something that has nothing to do with the original concern. It’s sometimes tricky to unwind all the intermediate conflicts.
The other potential problem is that parking the item can be perceived by the party who brought it up as suppressing them. It's important that everyone understand that a parked topic is not dismissed, is legitimate and important, and is genuinely returned to within some reasonable span of time. The trouble with making a statement like that is that we have returned to the earlier-noted problem of having a shared model of the world: arguably, if we could reliably establish shared understandings, we wouldn’t be in this kind of conflict in the first place.
Self-esteem
It often seems that people expect their loved ones and coworkers to be more like them than they really are. This could well be rooted in a healthy sense of self-esteem: one believes oneself to be correct, rather than immediately assuming that one is incorrect. Unfortunately, that healthy sense of self-esteem often tips over into unwise approaches to conflict: the other party should behave in the way that we expect, or they should be “fixed” if they are not sufficiently like us. The overall line of thinking that says if the other person were simply more reasonable, more like me, the dispute would go away.
That way of thinking almost invariably leads in the wrong direction. To a first approximation, we never get to change how someone else thinks or feels. Even if it looks like we are succeeding, the chance is excellent that we're simply setting up a pretense that may later be discarded, possibly with considerable emotional energy attached to it. Instead, difficult as it sounds, the only way to proceed is to find ways to reform ourselves. It can be very simple to see how the other person should change; it can be equally simple to articulate how the other person should change. Unfortunately, both of those forms of simplicity are misleading. The task of changing the other party is somewhere between difficult and impossible.
The task of changing ourselves is the mirror image of changing others: it can be quite hard to see how we should change, and it can be equally hard to articulate how we should change. However, actually changing ourselves is much more readily accomplished than changing another person.
Whenever I find myself tempted to think in terms of reciprocity, I try to catch myself and think, “no, the purpose here is to figure out what my standards are, what my goals are, what my values are, and to behave accordingly. My task is not to change or fix other people.” I can still make information available to people who might be helped by it. But I must first ask myself whether my offer comes from a spirit of genuine understanding and compassion, and not from a place of irritation, annoyance, or perceived superiority.