I think an important obstacle to “I’ll apologize if they’ll apologize” situations is that people often have very specific needs for the traits of an apology they’re receiving, doing it correctly without instructions is a very important signal of being on the same page about what went wrong, and incorrect apologies can be downright insulting (such as “I’m sorry you feel that way”, a classic, or, “I’m sorry about X” “this whole time you thought I was mad about X??? I don’t give a crap about X!”) The existence of a hypothetical apology doesn’t serve the same purposes as a fully featured one.
(this comment let me through a chain of thoughts culminating in “reciprocity.io, except instead of ‘I’d like to date or something’ you check boxes for ‘I’m secretly mad but want you to apologize first.’”)
’I didn’t get into some of the messy implementation details here because it was hard to come up with good-but-hypothetical-examples. But, I do think it’s pretty key that often the steps along an iterated trust kickstarter are pretty oddly specific, and yeah it’s often important to do without spelling out the particular thing you want someone to do.
A sort of generic version of a message I might send, if I were in some situations like this is “hey, I’m pretty mad. I see you are pretty mad. I’d be willing to invest effort trying to empathize with you and figure out where you’re coming from if you were willing to invest effort trying to empathize with me and figure out where I’m coming from.”
(where, something is lost here from Bob not figuring out on his own what exactly Alice is mad about and revealing himself to already be on the same page. But, I’m assuming by the time you get to consider an ITK type solution, its already revealed that you’re not in the nicest of worlds where that was an option)
((also: an okay outcome is that Alice wanted to check if Bob was on the same page, and then if bob reveals himself to not be on the same page, the ITK truncates, hopefully as gracefully as possible))
I think an important obstacle to “I’ll apologize if they’ll apologize” situations is that people often have very specific needs for the traits of an apology they’re receiving, doing it correctly without instructions is a very important signal of being on the same page about what went wrong, and incorrect apologies can be downright insulting (such as “I’m sorry you feel that way”, a classic, or, “I’m sorry about X” “this whole time you thought I was mad about X??? I don’t give a crap about X!”) The existence of a hypothetical apology doesn’t serve the same purposes as a fully featured one.
(this comment let me through a chain of thoughts culminating in “reciprocity.io, except instead of ‘I’d like to date or something’ you check boxes for ‘I’m secretly mad but want you to apologize first.’”)
Yeah.
’I didn’t get into some of the messy implementation details here because it was hard to come up with good-but-hypothetical-examples. But, I do think it’s pretty key that often the steps along an iterated trust kickstarter are pretty oddly specific, and yeah it’s often important to do without spelling out the particular thing you want someone to do.
A sort of generic version of a message I might send, if I were in some situations like this is “hey, I’m pretty mad. I see you are pretty mad. I’d be willing to invest effort trying to empathize with you and figure out where you’re coming from if you were willing to invest effort trying to empathize with me and figure out where I’m coming from.”
(where, something is lost here from Bob not figuring out on his own what exactly Alice is mad about and revealing himself to already be on the same page. But, I’m assuming by the time you get to consider an ITK type solution, its already revealed that you’re not in the nicest of worlds where that was an option)
((also: an okay outcome is that Alice wanted to check if Bob was on the same page, and then if bob reveals himself to not be on the same page, the ITK truncates, hopefully as gracefully as possible))