I think a related issue is that one’s signals can be much louder from the inside than they are from the outside.
For example, I tend to have a relatively flat voice. Once—I forget the exact context, but I may have just given a talk—someone gave me the feedback that I should have more emotion in my voice. This came as a surprise to me, because I thought I clearly did have emotion in my voice.
And… I think I probably did have more emotion in my voice than usual. But I’m guessing it was something like, emotion in your voice will register to other people if you have at least +20% of it compared to a flat affect, while I might have had +5% or something. But because I hear my own voice a lot, and because it tends to stay within that 0% to +5% range, my perception of it is calibrated to pick up on that difference and +5% feels like a genuinely large amount. After all, outside extreme situations, it is the literal top of my range. Whereas if my voice was more expressive and more often went up to +20%, then my calibration of how it sounds would better match what other people perceive.
There also seems to be something similar with regard to signals that people want to suppress. I have on occasion felt arrogant or condescending saying something and later apologized for it, only for the other person to say that they didn’t perceive it at all. At other times I’ve been on the same side of the same. Once I was even on both sides at the same time! Someone apologized for having been condescending in a conversation, and I said that I totally didn’t perceive that, but I had felt a little guilty for having been condescending myself, in that same conversation. Which they hadn’t felt me be!
I think a related issue is that one’s signals can be much louder from the inside than they are from the outside.
For example, I tend to have a relatively flat voice. Once—I forget the exact context, but I may have just given a talk—someone gave me the feedback that I should have more emotion in my voice. This came as a surprise to me, because I thought I clearly did have emotion in my voice.
And… I think I probably did have more emotion in my voice than usual. But I’m guessing it was something like, emotion in your voice will register to other people if you have at least +20% of it compared to a flat affect, while I might have had +5% or something. But because I hear my own voice a lot, and because it tends to stay within that 0% to +5% range, my perception of it is calibrated to pick up on that difference and +5% feels like a genuinely large amount. After all, outside extreme situations, it is the literal top of my range. Whereas if my voice was more expressive and more often went up to +20%, then my calibration of how it sounds would better match what other people perceive.
There also seems to be something similar with regard to signals that people want to suppress. I have on occasion felt arrogant or condescending saying something and later apologized for it, only for the other person to say that they didn’t perceive it at all. At other times I’ve been on the same side of the same. Once I was even on both sides at the same time! Someone apologized for having been condescending in a conversation, and I said that I totally didn’t perceive that, but I had felt a little guilty for having been condescending myself, in that same conversation. Which they hadn’t felt me be!