Defensiveness and Beliefs

Watching what's going on on Twitter right now and having been on these forums for a long time defensiveness seems to be the key piece that underlies all disagreements.

Whether it's politics, religion, ethics, gender, etc. people seem to fall to vitriol and anger, no matter the side they represent, as a way to defend who they are and what they believe. Whether it's 'I'm being ignored, not represented, or misrepresented' or 'they believe something different from me and are in effect saying I'm wrong' or any other form of it defensiveness seems to be at the crux of this internet drama, at least from what I can tell.

So what do you all suggest could be done to lessen these defensive responses?

Here's my take. As a therapist who works with other therapist, my skills, decisions, and therapeutic relationships I foster are open to questioning. Because as good as I might think I am I can still make mistakes (hard to believe right?) and my colleagues keep me honest. When they do, it at first would hurt my feelings and pride. I felt they were telling me I was no good. But the fact is is that they wanted me to live up to my potential and thought that maybe I was considering a factor that was limiting that. They would ask me about these things because they wanted to help me.

On twitter, forums, wherever I believe that the majority of people, regardless of a side of an issue they take, mean no real harm. They don't hate people. They just want to be represented fairly and have their views respected. There are exceptions (like the people who threaten and harass others) but they prove the rule.

But defensiveness spoils good intentions. I think that when we all need to consider the intentions of others, try to assume the best, and if we are confused ask in a polite, respectful manner for verification. Assuming the worst and guessing at intentions never leads to anything if value. Intent will be lost as will the meaning of messages.

So that's my take. What about the rest of you?

I think you are way too goddamn rational for your own good.

I can't disagree with the post. It's pretty much what I and several other people in the journalism thread have been calling for. There's a discussion to be had, but it's constantly being derailed by people who either want you to focus on what a crime harassment is (and it absolutely is), and other people derailing it by saying "but that's not ALL of us! I'm not harassing anybody!" and soon enough it's a shitty shit show where nobody is actually talking about the issue that should be discussed.

Sometimes I wonder if people just fall into these arguments because it's easier. I mean, it is definitely easier to generalize and paint your "opposition" with a broad brush. It's easier to think all gamers are misogynerds or that all games writers are corrupt PR shills. It's easy to miss the nuance, the shades of grey, because thinking about said nuance requires a degree of empathy and a familiarity with adjusting your point of view. I'm wondering if it's because they're afraid of actually understanding where the other side is coming from that makes everyone so blind. Or maybe everyone is just so narcissistic that they believe what they say is right, 100%, and to question them is to launch a personal attack on their integrity.

Anyway way this banana bread is delicious, and that is really nice.

Intent is everything. For example, there is leagues of a difference between a joke related to race, and a racist joke. Or portraying sexiness (which there is nothing wrong with), and sexism.

But, trying to stop people cherry picking a single aspect of something to get offended by and ignoring the whole is an impossible endeavor.

Welcome to the Internet. Because of this style of communication too many people who haven't trained or bothered to think about discussion or rhetoric for whatever reasons believes that if you disagree you hate them when it turns out that neither are related. Its fine to listen to someone and disagree and not have any opinion about that person but participants in the argument often can't figure that out and gets violently upset as if you attacked the very essence of their character.

Have you listened to talk radio or watched any of the talking heads "news" shows? Its all about whoever can talk the loudest and longest. Sadly, civil debate and discourse is a thing of the past.

It is if we let it. I don't think civil debate is over so long as there are reasonable people who can disassociate a speaker from the speaker's opinion and the discussion at hand. While it's easy to look at the Internet and say "everyone is awful!" I don't think that's the case. Giant Bomb may not be perfect, and I sure as hell don't agree with everyone who posts regularly on these forums, but I do know that I'm more likely than not to find reasonable people willing to engage the discussion at hand. Certainly more so than any other site I've been to, anyway.

The internet has ruined everything, while simultaneously pushing us forward by light years as a society. It's a give and take.

Yeah, the level of defensiveness is super bizarre to me. Like it's really strange when I see someone (like Alex on Twitter today, for instance) lamenting the horrifying levels of harassment that are driving people like Jenn Frank out of the industry, and then other people come along and say "Yeah but I'm not harassing anyone!" Okay, so? If that's the case, why get defensive at all? I literally don't understand this sort of response.

At this point I could write a book trying to explore this incredibly complex human dilemma that destroys progress and discourse at every turn... but I have a chicken to get roasting, so I'll just post some food for thought as it relates to the OP:

"[Hazel Crosby's] obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows - and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:

If you wish to study a granfalloon

Just remove the skin of a toy balloon."

- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

source

Can only speak for myself.. But I can empathize with those who see every confrontation or discussion as a personal attack (often because discussions are laden with abuse, but even if it isn't, I feel like I'm being attacked, cause I'm crazy and whatnot, as is everyone else, it seems...) which can get tiresome..

The only cure is basically to leave your fucking ego behind. It serves you no real purpose, and it tends to close you off to other people's opinions. This gets far worse with age, especially for loners who often become more and more untethered as time passes, just because no exposure to other people tends to give people the freedom to make up their own world.. That's pretty bad, and once you've made your own world, everyone else is attacking it, cause the world you've made is in conflict with the actual world... Being wrong sometimes hurts like a motherfucker, but doubling down on stupid will ALWAYS bite you in the ass.

Check your egos at the door if you want to not get laughed out of discussions.
Source: I've been wrong enough times to realize that people are TOO FUCKING SURE OF THEMSELVES.. Because as often as I'm wrong, most people are wrong more often.. And I don't feel particularly great about my accuracy as far as predicting the future goes, so most people should feel way fucking less confident when fronting opinions. I mean there are truthers of all kinds out there, it's not like idiocy is rare. I am not excluded, neither is anyone else.

That's my experience. There's a reasonable chance that all I wrote here is nonsense, and that goes for all posts done by everyone ever. It's good to remember that.
You're an idiot. (If your tummy hurt a bit from that "insult", that's bad. Work on that..)

@jasonr86: If I remember my few years in University, I would suggest Rational Emotive Therapy (is it even still called that?!). Take a step back and think about what you're feeling, why you are feeling this and whether this really, really, really is worth getting riled up about.

I said this in the comments on Patrick's Q&A, but I'm with you on this one. If people feel defensive enough to make it a point to separate themselves from the harassment, then why do they continue to use the hashtag? It is the thing that makes people associate them with the harassment and horrible actions people have been doing.

Now, admittedly, I don't use Twitter. I created one to enter a drawing for some hockey swag (Go Pens!), but that's all I've ever used it for. How hard would it be for the people who are trying to actually trying to have a civil conversation to just unify under a new hashtag? If you don't want to be included in the gamergate backlash then why in the hell would you keep using the tag? Sure there is always the chance the new tag would just get overrun by crazies eventually (it is the internet after all), but the effort to have civil discussion is the thing that people viewing the whole gamergate thing from the outside aren't seeing. If there are really people trying to have that discussion then they need to separate themselves from the hashtag so they can even be heard over the hyperbole and shouting.

Too many people seem to believe things operate in absolutes. Black/White. Right/Wrong. There is no in between in some peoples mind. Sadly it seems the internet brings the worst out in many people. They pick a horse and defend it to the death. Heaven forbid you take a moderate stance or use rationality because then you risk attack from both sides. It really is a societal issue and not just a games media issue if you ask me. Much like the OP said, this pattern repeats over and over in politics, religion, race, gender, etc...

It's sad, but if rational discussion can't find a way to rise through the noise, then things may not change.

When people say something well-considered and moderate, they get replies in kind. The "exceptions" as you put it (I assume rightly) are the ones who get dozens of people replying to them angrily and thereby drive the tone of the conversation. I don't think the problem lies in incorrectly ascribing malicious motives to those who have good intentions so much as in identifying those posters to whom replying would lead to productive discourse and those who are stirring up shit. Things would be a lot better if people could turn the other cheek by choosing not to reply to the latter.

This is a really well reasoned thread and I think it's a discussion that is really beneficial. As @junpei has stated comments are typically a binary black/white, love/hate statement.

My personal feelings on it come down to the nature of internet communication, it's about people stating their opinion directly and addressing points on a, well, point by point nature. It's a factor of the communication from forums to Facebook posts to Twitter replies to anything really. I feel this is one facet of the issue in that people feel the need to address all points of contention in a single reply, there is no discourse, discussion or time to consider. It's easy to take a single point or quote and focus on that for a reply without any immediate discourse. There is no real back and forth to facilitate a rational discussion in this regard.

This in itself can be dealt with and isn't necessarily a stopping block for reasoned debate but the nature of such an echo chamber has almost necessitated a desire to be heard and thus the loudest or most noticeable voices get traction, and as is the way, the louder and more virulent voices obtain the focus.

I'm not really sure what can be done to curtail the trend of social feedback, but I don't think a change will come easily. It will be painful and jarring. I sincerely hope we're on the first step of this cultural change right now.

I agree. These days, though, people assume if you disagree you're trolling.

Another common issue on forums/comments/whatever is people not knowing reading comprehension so they don't even understand what they are reading and reacting, basically, to their own misunderstanding of a topic or comment.

Something that seems to aggravate situations like the whole gamergate thing is that on the internet, and ESPECIALLY on the parts of the internet devoted to games, it's easy for the conversation to be dominated by kids with too much free time and the veil of anonymity to hide their age.

When you're younger (or just emotionally immature) it's very easy to think that you're just toodamn smart to be biased and that your worldview is inherently superior to all others. In "nerd" spaces particularly, I feel that a lot of people are quite intellectually insecure and have an incredibly negative reaction to anything that threatens their own self-image as an intellectual. It's also why people in these spaces seem so quick to call things "pretentious." It's easier to imagine up a conspiracy where all the critics who love a piece of art are just lying to look smart than it is to accept the reality that maybe it just went over your head.

Even in the best of times, it's difficult to get through to people who are behaving in this way, but across the impersonal internet, it's borderline impossible.

Chicken's almost done, time for dinner, but here's a few of my favorite pearls of wisdom to (hopefully) add to the conversation.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen."

- Winston Churchill

In answer to your question about what can be done, my (somewhat depressing) response is "not much," beyond maybe attempting to ignore them as much as possible. That's because I view defensiveness as being only half of the problem. The other half is a lack of self-awareness people have about when their being defensive.

Look, everyone gets defensive at some point - it's a natural emotion, particularly when the topic touches on the subject of a closely held belief. And it's fine to feel defensive, so long as you aren't taking action purely based off that defensiveness. The problem is that stopping yourself from acting out of defensiveness requires a certain self-awareness that lets you realize you are feeling defensive to begin with. In that sense, you can really divide the internet into two classes of people - those who have a moment of introspection before they post and those who don't.

Those who stop to reflect are - when they read something provoking a strong reaction - going to take a moment and think about what provoked that reaction to begin with. In other words, they will realize when they are being overly defensive. That might result in them acknowledging the other posters point and writing a reasoned response, or, if they feel the other person cannot be reasoned with at all, simply declining to respond altogether and thus avoiding the stress that comes with an inevitable flame war.

On the other hand, those lacking that self-awareness are more likely to just go post whatever it is in their head at the current moment, which may not be very pretty. Unfortunately, the same lack of self-awareness that prevents those people from recognizing they are being defensive also tends to prevent them from realizing they might be happier without as much online interaction in their life.

The problem is that, as the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. The needed self-awareness I'm talking about isn't something that you can give to other people. You can't even really teach it to someone else. You only get it through life experience and reflection. As you said in your original post, you used to get hurt when your colleagues made suggestions before you realized that they were really only trying to help you.

Most definitely a communication issue. Folks seem to have trouble either extrapolating tone in text, or expressing themselves in anything other than absolutes. Alongside misconceptions about how the business, development, and coverage aspects of the industry work have led to one misinterpreted gate after the other.

You wouldn't think the focal point of the arguments being had were "Can the industry step it's game up on aspects of itself?" A few decades of being defensive about the hobby on a cultural level probably didn't lead to cooler heads either.

@joshwent said:

I love these quotes so much.

I have some pretty strong feelings on gamergate, but I'm always willing to listen to the other side. I have a background in journalism, so that kind of objectivity was beat into me early on. That said, the "not me!" rhetoric from those upset about industry articles on the situation has done much to derail discussion.

There's no calm rational discussion to be had when one side won't let the other even get their words out before condemning them. On ANY side.

Disagreement is not a bad thing, guys, there's no reason to get heated.

But defensiveness spoils good intentions....well said

The fact that the term Gamer is being debated seems so silly to me. Like, of all the issues that we could theoretically be tackling...Gamer. It blows my mind.

You have a wonderful, open minded, reasonable approach to life if your OP is as you have said. You have also posed a question I wish more people would ask. "So what do you all suggest could be done to lessen these defensive responses?"

Man, this is a tricky one. First, know the difference between think and believe. When someone thinks something their mind can be changed. If you believe something to be true, no amount of empirical evidence I bring you can change your mind. You can not argue with the irrational. I have found it best to just avoid the topics where the crux of the argument is think vs. believe. The debate will not bear fruit.

Second, ask yourself why you want the debate. The only real reason that I have found acceptable is to change someones mind and at the same time be open to have yours changed. I have been guilty many times of jumping in just to educate. Then when I run into a thick wall of resistance I let my passion to educate get in the way clouding my judgement leading to a stronger response than I wanted to give. You need good introspective if you want the amount of times you enter an argument for the right reasons to far outweigh the times you entered one for the wrong ones.

This is the really tricky part. When an argument has went bad fast, there are always two groups of people involved. You have people on one side saying inflammatory and derogative things. Then you have the white knights on the other side fueling it by egging them on. This produces a chemical explosion in the brain in the same way those who are into reality tv gets their fix. These people are here to be entertained by the hostility. It is a drug to them and they WILL show up eventually in these arguments. For them, this is not losing their head in a moment of passion in the argument. They come looking for this. For that reason, I think the way Giant Bomb deals with these issues by not talking about them while they are hot button issues is the best we can do right now. I like how Patrick on the morning show just mentions the horror that has taken place and then turns his back and ignores it. Not feeding the trolls is the only way as of now. Like keeping bears from your campsite. Chin up JasonR86. Society is changing before our very eyes. It is just slow.

Buddy, you have no idea.

@jasonr86:

On twitter, forums, wherever I believe that the majority of people, regardless of a side of an issue they take, mean no real harm. They don't hate people. They just want to be represented fairly and have their views respected.

I think that it is more than having their views respected. Most of the agression comes from trying to convince others and ourselves (the agressor) that what we say is the truth. And the shock value is used to appall and overcome reason, just by the sake of the emotional message sent and received, and the emotional response solicited and enacted, that being mainly shock and compliance. And the fiercer the agression, the more insecure the agressor feels about his version of the truth.