Communication styles

[jay]

I'm a US Southerner, both by nurture and preference in speech patterns. Communicating in Japan, even with few words, often feels more natural somehow than with New Yorkers... the flow and mutual consideration of the former seem intuitive, while the latter often seems brash and noisy and prone to attempts to dominate in conversation.

[minor deviation from current personal experiment]
On top of culture, growing up I was a low-status, weird geeky kid who was the butt of harassment and frequent physical violence from groups of other kids... I learned to try to get my message across conversationally while giving those around me as little excuse as possible to take offense. Anything perceived as assertive on my part would generate teasing and putdowns at best, getting beaten-up or stoned (hit with big rocks, not drugs) again at worst. So on top of the cultural norms, I learned to exceed them...
[end deviation]

So, in person, I'm generally coming from Pleasant, Believed, Understood, Remembered (PBUR) in all person-to-person communications. Understood is in a distant third place. I go to lengths to structure in-person conversation so to minimize the possibility of conflict, or at least to leave a face-saving way out for the other person(s). Maintaining the interpersonal relationship is far more important to me than the passing, temporal content of whatever I happen to be saying at the moment.

For me, speech stressing Understood is limited to lecturing others, as in teaching a class or giving a presentation. Other communication forms, particularly some impersonal, online forms, may also find me in a neutral balance.

Someone in a group using Understood will often come across to me as pushy or blunt, or as attempting to impose their preferences, running over everyone else's... often, I'll get wary or defensive when that form of speech is used. But I'll try to avoid conflict at my annoyance at their use of a direct, aggressive style, instead trying to smile and ignore or placate it.

Comments

[griffen.livejournal.com]

I'm generally coming from Pleasant, Believed, Understood, Remembered

Huh. My preferred style is Understood, Believed, Remembered, Pleasant, with Pleasant being absolutely optional and definitely annoying when coming from other people.

with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

...!

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

What?

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I understand Pleasant being optional, but definitely annoying when coming from other people ?!

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

Pleasant makes people automatically dangerous. What do they want from me? They must want something from me, and I'm never able to figure out what that something is. Pleasant comes across as masky-fake.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Pleasant makes people automatically dangerous.

I think you want to poke hard at that assumption.

I can see that there are incidents that have made this *at the time* the best working assumption for you, but *now*, it creates a situation where you're assigning high threat levels inappropriately.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

It isn't just danger, although that's part of it. The other part is that pleasant people... well, let me put it this way.

The more "pleasant" someone is, the less trustworthy they are to me. I cannot trust them to tell me the truth, say what they mean, or be honest. I can, however, trust them to circumlocute, dodge direct questions, and sacrifice honesty for the sake of "being nice." And that's why it's annoying to me.

I'll take someone blunt, direct, and honest over someone whose first priority is being "pleasant" any day of the week, thanks.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

False dichotomy, but we've been over this before.

(sorry, reposting because I'd gotten logged out without noticing.)

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

In my experience, a person being Pleasant will do everything I listed above to avoid being not-Pleasant. Case in point: Danny's mom. Second case in point: my TA in my Methods class. Third case in point: the classmate I was complaining about the other day in my LJ.

Yes, you can be kind and personable without being Pleasant or masky, but when someone goes out of their way to be Pleasant, it sets off all my internal alarm bells. I hated visiting Alabama, and I'll never travel south of the Mason-Dixon again if I can possibly avoid it. I know plenty of people who can be nice and still be blunt and direct at the same time. Pleasant, by definition, is never blunt or direct, because it might offend someone... and without bluntness and directness, I can't be sure that what I'm being told is the truth.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

I don't generally assume that I'm being told *the truth* in any case -- at best, I'm being told another person's filtered, personally-spun version of what *they perceive* as the truth. To bracket the *truth*, I need several different independent versions and then try to correlate them.

The more blunt and assertive, the more I'm likely to flag that communication as someone trying to push *their particular view* of the truth aggressively, and therefore I will tend to give it *less* weight in averaging.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[cyan-blue.livejournal.com]

As in my other note, I'm not as far over to Griffen's side with this as he is, but levels of pleasantness that are out of proportion to my relationship with someone may make me wary too.

Example: If someone I barely know starts giving me lots of gifts, part of me will wonder what their angle is, and what they are wanting from me, and where is the hidden string. I don't assume that this absolutely will be the case - some people are just generous and that's all - but I'll start keeping an eye on the situation a little more closely.

Likewise, an overabundance of compliments from someone I don't know well will make me uneasy. One or two compliments, fine; more than that and I'll start feeling "buttered up."

Where I come from (NYC), we're trained early not to trust strangers who are overly pleasant to us. In the big city, an unknown adult who offers candy to a kid is assumed to be a dangerous stalker. Wariness means survival. That's not just paranoia; when I was 12 one of my childhood playmates from the next block over was abducted and killed. And we lived in "a nice neighborhood" - pretty houses, trees, no broken glass on the street. Lots of abductors lure kids in by being nice. Hell, the two times I was sexually abused as a child, the perp (one known, one unknown) tried to gain my trust by playing a game with me first. Why would I trust an overly-friendly stranger?

An unknown adult who strikes up a conversation on the subway might be trying to distract me so that their accomplice can rob me, unless it's the day after the Yanks or Mets have won the series and then everyone's family.

On the subway where we're squished up against each others' bodies like sardines in a can, the only privacy we have is to not make eye contact, and it's considered really intrusive if you keep looking at someone, even with a smile. Especially with a smile, 'cause that's definite attention, whereas a simple stare might just mean that your eyes happen to be resting in that direction.

A Nebraska friend once left his car engine idling outside my house to warm it up on a snowy day. When I realized that he left his key in the ignition and the door unlocked, I made him run right out to watch it so that it didn't get stolen. Had he left it out long enough, it would have been. My family has had more cars stolen and broken into than I can count.

My friend from Ottawa, Canada was once visiting and someone knocked on my door. I leaped to block the door when it was clear that she was about to open it. "Who is it?" I asked through the door. "We want to talk to you about a cable TV offer," the man said. "Not interested," I replied. My friend thought I was rude for not opening the door. I thought she was risking her life by even thinking of opening the door.

So this is why "pleasant = dangerous" makes sense in some cultures.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I can see "inappropriately pleasant can be seen as a danger marker", but that's not quite what Griff said.

I *do* see that being unable to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate pleasantness can lead to a feeling that it's safer to default to assuming it's inappropriate, but I think that's better dealt with by using methods from Gavin de Becker's "Gift of Fear".

I like NYC, and find it comfortable. Urban spaces make more sense to me than rural ones, but that's because I'm more familiar with urban cultures. (I come from generations of city/suburban folk. My father's mother grew up on a farm, but that's not something she shared with me.)

When I was in high school in Colorado, I was surrounded by ranchers' kids who'd never been in a big city, and were doing things like counting their money on the sidewalk, and failing to take note of the relative security of their handbags. I get the urban wariness, and that doesn't make me nervous the way Griff's stated preference does.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

The more pleasant someone is to me, the harder it's going to be for me to get to know them, Trinker.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

I don't get the feeling that it's strangers that Griff is talking about. The people he mention above as being not trustworthy because they are pleasant are not strangers -- they are people he is familiar with. That's different than maintaining safe distance towards strangers, especially in an urban setting.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

But the point is something that cyan_blue got, and you and Trinker don't seem to get yet, which is that if someone's Pleasant to me I'm going to have a harder time becoming familiar with them. And in fact, until they stop being Pleasant, I will find it impossible to feel like I'm "familiar" with them. They remain strangers with familiar faces and voices until the barrier of Pleasant goes away.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Interesting. While I've had to work to not automatically process a direct, Understood-oriented approach as aggressive, and indicating either overt hostility or an assertion of higher social status.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

What's more important to you: being liked, or getting correct information? As I said to Danny and Joyce last night after my first response to this post, "I don't care if I'm believed as long as I'm understood. I don't care if I'm remembered as long as I'm believed. And as long as I'm remembered, I couldn't care fuck-all whether I'm liked or not."

I feel the same way about incoming communication. Someone being "pleasant" obscures the things about communication that are most important to me - it's more important, to me, to understand someone than to like them, and in fact I'll probably like them better if they make themselves very plainly understandable than if they try to be "nice" to me.

That's why it took me forever to trust Danny's mom. She's automatically Pleasant, and that's a huge turn-off for me in terms of relating to another person. I had to hold her at arm's length for a *long* time. If she'd been less Pleasant, it would not have taken me nearly as long to warm up to her.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[(Anonymous)]

Whereas I see "not Pleasant" as an indication of "not wanting to engage with me, dealing with me as if wearing rubber gloves", IOW dealing with me with disgust/disdain.

I *don't* see "Pleasant" as an indication of deep friendliness, however.

We're seeing "understandable" as being based on different things.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

That we are. For the sake of Brian's LJ, I've reposted most of my comments as a post in my own LJ so that we don't take over his LJ with the ongoing noodle.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

To a first order, in conversation, being liked is more important to me than the accuracy of the information. There are exceptions to this, usually involving asking strangers for directions...

A second-order effect is that in the long term, intentionally inaccurate information will lead me to feel unsafe around that individual, so lying or persistent ignorance will eventually come to overshadow or poison otherwise-pleasant interactions.

accuracy and being liked

[griffen.livejournal.com]

For me, the two things are inseparable. Someone being inaccurate, intentionally or otherwise, will make me dislike them.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Whereas I see "not Pleasant" as an indication of "not wanting to engage with me, dealing with me as if wearing rubber gloves", IOW dealing with me with disgust/disdain.

I *don't* see "Pleasant" as an indication of deep friendliness, however.

We're seeing "understandable" as being based on different things.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

Also, you say:

I go to lengths to structure in-person conversation so to minimize the possibility of conflict, or at least to leave a face-saving way out for the other person(s). Maintaining the interpersonal relationship is far more important to me than the passing, temporal content of whatever I happen to be saying at the moment.

The going-to-lengths thing is something that always strikes me as inherently dishonest (not just from you, but from anyone whose default mode is Pleasant). And for me, the content of whatever I happen to be saying *is* the maintenance of the interpersonal relationship - because if that content isn't honest and direct, then I can't maintain the relationship.

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

(nods) we apparently view conversation quite differently...

Re: with Pleasant being[...]definitely annoying when coming from other people.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

That we do.

I've taken the liberty of moving my part of this discussion to my own journal so that trinker and I don't totally take over yours with our ongoing noodles at each other.