Thanks for the read (honestly, noticed some very interesting points IMO) but I kind of fail to understand what exactly is your claim about the method you introduced.
Are you saying that it is a good model representation of social interaction? If so I would partially agree. Its cool that the model captures all the mental steps all the participants are making (if you bother to completely unroll everything), but it’s not computationally superior to saying that: things like calling someone “a downer” are general beliefs that rely on a varying empirical basis, and should be checked for their verity.
In other words—instead of saying that “Bailey is a downer” means “Alex felt it was bad that Alex felt that Bailey felt that Alex doing X was bad, for multiple values of X” you can say that it means “Alex believes he observed Bailey to act as ‘a downer’ a sufficient amount of times” and unroll that (ask Alex why does he think Bailey’s a downer, what does being a downer mean or what does he base her being one on) only if necessary. Most people would understand this explanation more intuitively, in my experience. Some might even find it trivial, cause, for example, if you call someone irresponsible more than once, most of the times you are aware that you think he has acted “irresponsibly” a sufficient amount of times, even if you don’t phrase it that exact way. And this explanation is not inferior to yours in the theoretical sense, it doesn’t supply less data, and it does seem a little more cost effective, explanation-wise.
Are you saying that it is a good method for practical conflict resolution? It very well may be, but your experience only teaches us that after engaging in a cooperative activity with Alex for a while, he understood that he felt judged and was more inclined to believe you weren’t judging him. Psychologically, engaging in a safe activity with someone, even your captor in a hypothetical hostage situation, will diffuse tension and humanize conflicting parties in each other’s eyes. It could be that you could have played a short card game with Alex and he would have been more cooperative afterwards all the same.
Even if we claim that analyzing the problem is emotionally helpful in itself, the analysis doesn’t have to be all that rigorous, coherent and complete. Many conflict resolution therapy methods focus on giving all parties in a conflict the opportunity to feel heard, which makes it easier to reach emotional catharsis, and therefore agreement. But feeling heard is only a equal to or lesser amount of understanding than being completely, logically understood. Therapy methods such as these may (or may not) be more effective in achieving results, or may be just less effort-demanding.
In order to establish that this method is particularly effective, we either have to get some experimental data showing it gets better outcomes in some criteria, or explain what it has going for it that other methods unequivocally don’t.
Anyway, I enjoyed reading this and would be glad if you posted some of your refined conclusions in the future :)
Thanks for the read (honestly, noticed some very interesting points IMO) but I kind of fail to understand what exactly is your claim about the method you introduced.
Are you saying that it is a good model representation of social interaction? If so I would partially agree. Its cool that the model captures all the mental steps all the participants are making (if you bother to completely unroll everything), but it’s not computationally superior to saying that: things like calling someone “a downer” are general beliefs that rely on a varying empirical basis, and should be checked for their verity.
In other words—instead of saying that “Bailey is a downer” means “Alex felt it was bad that Alex felt that Bailey felt that Alex doing X was bad, for multiple values of X” you can say that it means “Alex believes he observed Bailey to act as ‘a downer’ a sufficient amount of times” and unroll that (ask Alex why does he think Bailey’s a downer, what does being a downer mean or what does he base her being one on) only if necessary. Most people would understand this explanation more intuitively, in my experience. Some might even find it trivial, cause, for example, if you call someone irresponsible more than once, most of the times you are aware that you think he has acted “irresponsibly” a sufficient amount of times, even if you don’t phrase it that exact way. And this explanation is not inferior to yours in the theoretical sense, it doesn’t supply less data, and it does seem a little more cost effective, explanation-wise.
Are you saying that it is a good method for practical conflict resolution? It very well may be, but your experience only teaches us that after engaging in a cooperative activity with Alex for a while, he understood that he felt judged and was more inclined to believe you weren’t judging him. Psychologically, engaging in a safe activity with someone, even your captor in a hypothetical hostage situation, will diffuse tension and humanize conflicting parties in each other’s eyes. It could be that you could have played a short card game with Alex and he would have been more cooperative afterwards all the same.
Even if we claim that analyzing the problem is emotionally helpful in itself, the analysis doesn’t have to be all that rigorous, coherent and complete. Many conflict resolution therapy methods focus on giving all parties in a conflict the opportunity to feel heard, which makes it easier to reach emotional catharsis, and therefore agreement. But feeling heard is only a equal to or lesser amount of understanding than being completely, logically understood. Therapy methods such as these may (or may not) be more effective in achieving results, or may be just less effort-demanding.
In order to establish that this method is particularly effective, we either have to get some experimental data showing it gets better outcomes in some criteria, or explain what it has going for it that other methods unequivocally don’t.
Anyway, I enjoyed reading this and would be glad if you posted some of your refined conclusions in the future :)