I’ve been thinking lately about why, in debates (usually) about highly emotional topics, so many people seem unable to acknowledge even minor wrongdoings or mistakes from “their” side, even when doing so wouldn’t necessarily undermine their broader position.

I’m not here to rehash any particular political event or take sides - I’m more interested in the psychological mechanisms behind this behavior.

For example, it feels like many people bind their identity to a cause so tightly that admitting any fault feels like a betrayal of the whole. I’ve also noticed that criticism toward one side is often immediately interpreted as support for the “other” side, leading to tribal reactions rather than nuanced thinking.

I’d love to hear thoughts on the psychological underpinnings of this. Why do you think it’s so hard for people to “give an inch” even when it wouldn’t really cost them anything in principle?

  • SparrowHawk@feddit.itEnglish
    24·
    1 day ago

    I think we have an ecolutionary predisposition to be very defensive when we feel threatened. Add that to a social environment where we are CONSTANTLY and artificially condititioned to be threatened, considering that emotional intelligence and the ability to articolate and understand your own thoughts (let alone other’s) are virtually never taught if not en passant and indirectly (and often the wrong this are taught) and you have the perfect recipe for the Tower of Babel.

    Humankind’s inherent incommunicability of internal thought is paired with an artificial and political cooptation of our survival instincts, the ones we evolved to defend ourselves from the people that a re manipulating us right now. That’s the reason antiauthoritarian thought is often patologized. They name the cure a sickness so that we keep ourselves under the Veil

    • jaycifer@lemmy.world
      1·
      19 hours ago

      I think I see what you’re trying to say, and I don’t necessarily disagree with everything, but based entirely on this one comment (which may not be indicative of how you generally communicate) I have to wonder if the communication issues you see stem at least partially from your own over-articulation of thoughts and use of “fluffy” language.

      I think this bit highlights what I’m trying to say best:

      are virtually never taught if not en passant and indirectly This statement feels like it’s saying the same proposition three times, but if I dig into it it is saying three things, but in a confusing manner. I think it would have been better served by replacing “if not” with something simpler like “or taught” to more easily connect the first idea with the other two in the reader’s mind. I probably would have replaced it all with “are taught incidentally at best,” which I think captures the meaning you are trying to convey in terms that are easier for anyone to understand.

      I don’t say this to try to bring you down. I just find beauty in seeing a concept existing in one’s mind, unbounded by the world, given a vessel structured by the words of language not to constrain or limit that idea, but to focus it into something that can be shared and understood with others. The vast majority of the time I see that vessel be too loose without giving proper shape to the idea it wants to convey. Yours is one of the very few internet comments I see that does the opposite, where it feels forced into a shape that’s too rigid. That makes me want to say something, because the mind that does that is a mind I think could learn from stepping back a little, rather than being told to force itself forward.

      This is as much me challenging myself to understand what bugged me about your comment as it is a comment on your comment, and for talking about giving shape to thoughts I don’t think I did a super job of it.

      I do think that humans are one of the only creatures capable of overcoming the difficulty in communication between minds because we are one of the only creatures capable of complex language to do that stuff I said earlier. But it is a skill that is difficult and requires a lot of time and effort to learn or teach. I do think communication is highly valued, or at least a lot of frustration espoused about a lack of communication, but modern society does make it difficult to work up the effort and acquire the resources to develop that skill.