Defensiveness does not equal guilt
I often see people treating defensiveness as proof of guilt. The thought seems to go that if someone is defensive, it’s because they know they’ve done something wrong. There are even proverbs around this, such as “a hit dog will holler” or “the lady doth protest too much”.
This has always felt false to me.
Now, it’s certainly true that having done something wrong can be the cause of defensiveness. But that’s just one out of many options!
Some situations that have made me defensive include times when someone has…
… had a negative stereotype of some group that I belong to, and said something derogatory about it.
… acted judgmentally about my choices without understanding my situation or wanting to hear my explanation.
… dismissively rejected my input about a decision that I felt was important.
In none of these situations did I feel guilty. I may have felt offended, stereotyped, mistreated, unheard, or belittled. But I didn’t feel guilty.
Defensiveness is exactly that—it’s a way of trying to defend yourself. You might want to defend yourself because you’ve done something bad and people are judging you for it, but you might also want to defend yourself because you’re being unfairly judged.
Another way of putting this is that for someone to become defensive, it’s enough for them to be afraid that others might believe them guilty.
I once saw a case where somebody’s organization had been publicly accused of abusing their employees, with a forum discussion that had hundreds of comments dissecting everything about it. When the organization published a response to the allegations, some of the comments said something along the lines of “Your response reads to me as somewhat defensive, which makes me unhappy and suspicious about it”.
I was somewhat flabbergasted to read this (though, to my slight shame, did not get involved in the discussion and respond to them) - the whole professional reputation and livelihood of the organization’s founders was at stake, with dozens of previous comments where people talked about them in a hostile tone. And some commenters felt that it was suspicious or even morally questionable that the response to the allegations was tinged with some defensiveness! I think that some defensiveness in that kind of situation is a completely human response, entirely regardless of one’s guilt.
Furthermore, even if one does act defensive because they feel guilty… that doesn’t mean that they’ve done anything wrong either! People feel guilty for things that are not their fault all the time!
A friend of mine was once denied the social security benefits she’d been expecting to get, and was left in a position where she would be unable to pay her rent. The thought of letting that happen made me feel guilty, so I felt compelled to loan her money, even though I had absolutely nothing to do with her problem.
A meditation teacher I know tells the story of a student on a retreat who had the major breakthrough of realizing that climate change was not his fault. It took an extended retreat to make the person get that he was not personally responsible for global warming being a thing. More generally, many people feel guilty about all kinds of natural disasters and wars that have nothing to do with them.
In his book Lapsuuden kehityksellinen trauma, the psychotherapist Juha Klaavu uses the term “magical guilt” to describe an experience that some people have, where they feel guilty about just about everything. A description that he offers for this is that “when I’m in a park and witness a dog I don’t know biting a person I don’t know, even this seems to somehow be my fault”.
A related emotional belief is that “I am bad and defective, and therefore everything that I do is also bad and defective”. Klaavu tells the example of one of his clients who had been traveling with some of his college buddies. They were in a country where the tap water was not good to drink, and one evening they returned to their hotel so late that they couldn’t buy any. The next day, it turned out that somebody had broken into the hotel’s kiosk during the night and stolen a couple of bottles of water.
Even though the client had nothing to do with the theft, he was immediately struck by an intense sense of guilt. It was so obvious that the hotel owner came to him and started angrily berating him. The client felt such deep emotional conviction that this was his fault that he couldn’t speak or say anything to defend himself. Fortunately, upon witnessing this, the person who had actually done the break-in confessed and offered to pay for the damages, and the matter was settled.
In this case, the person suffering from the magical guilt wasn’t even defensive—he felt too guilty to do even that. But it’s easy to imagine that if that guilt had been just a little more manageable, he could have gotten very defensive while trying to keep it at bay.
I think more accurate than “defensiveness is a sign of guilt” is that defensiveness is a sign of insecurity. If a young child thinks that I’m dumb for not knowing all the characters in the cartoon series they’re obsessed with, I don’t get defensive because this doesn’t threaten me in any way.
But if something makes me feel insecure in my position or worth, then I will feel a need to defend myself. That insecurity might come from a sense of guilt (justified or not) - or it might come from something else.
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One potential mechanism for magical guilt: “I’m a good person” → “There is a world in which I would have made a difference in this situation” → “I observe I’m not currently in that world” → “The gap between this world and that world is because of my lack of {awareness, action, ambition, energy, etc...}”
The epistemic failure occurring either at step (2) or (4). Either there is no world where you can make a meaningful difference, or the thing that limited your ability to make a difference is entirely out of your control.
When you say defensiveness, does that include something like “act as though you’ve been attacked viciously by a person who is biased against you because they’re bad”? Because that, to me, is the defensiveness behavior I’d find the most suspicious (other facets of defensiveness less so).
The problem with the “immediately focus on maximally discrediting the accusers” is that is that it is awfully close to the tactic that actually guilty people might want to use to discredit or intimidate their accusers (or, in movies, discredit law enforcement that has good reasons for asking questions/being suspicious).
Of course, in complex interpersonal contexts, it’s often the case that accusers are in fact the troublemakers (and maybe every once in a blue moon, law enforcement asking what they say are “standard” questions might be part of a conspiracy to frame you), so the behavior is only suspicious when there’s a perfectly valid explanation as to why people are pointing at you, and you not only do not see it from that perspective (or acknowledge that you’re seeing it), but you then put on behavior designed to make onlookers believe that something incredibly outrageous has just happened to you.
One admittedly confounding factor is “honor culture”—not a big thing in LW circles, but if we’re thinking of movies where they arrest or ask accusing questions to people in regions or cultures where one’s reputation is really important, and being accused of something is seen as a massive insult, then I can understand that this is a strong confounding factor (to actually being guilty).
I mean, suppose I belong to ideology A, and someone from rival ideology B accuses me of something we both agree is bad, but I do not believe I have done.
Given our relative positions and probably pre-existing animosity and mistrust, it’s entirely possible for me to genuinely believe “he is a B, therefore his being <long list of ideological grievances I have with Bs that make me believe their epistemics and/or morals are bad> makes him more likely to accuse me of random stuff just because I’m an A”, and say so. Meanwhile the B may as well have had the same kind of bias in deciding that I could probably be guilty of the thing he accused me of. If that is the case, we could both be in good faith and thinking the other is in bad faith, both biased, and the situation be perfectly symmetrical. But if you look with suspicion at defensiveness you give by default the advantage to whoever strikes first, which creates also a nasty incentive to do so. And in fact we do see this happening a lot in public discourse.
Yeah.
Agree. But it’s also a strategy that innocent people might want to use to show that the people accusing them don’t have clean motives, or just something that they do automatically to defend themselves because they’re under stress and it does work as a general-purpose defense strategy. So it doesn’t seem like clear Bayesian evidence one way or the other?
I haven’t thought this through in detail but my first thought would be to suspect that this is a strategy that weakly favors people who are actually innocent, assuming that the audience is reasonably discerning and it doesn’t just degenerate into a popularity contest. In that while you can of course dig up dirt on anyone, being able to find accusation-relevant dirt (“this police accusing me has been known to take bribes and accuse innocent people before”) seems more likely to happen in cases where you are in fact falsely accused.
Of course, if that’s the only defense they offer and they don’t bother refuting any of the actual accusations in any substantial way, that’s certainly very suspicious. But then the suspicious thing is more the lack of an object-level response rather than the presence of a defensive response.
Yeah, I’m starting with this part of your response because I agree and think it is good to have clear messaging on the most unambiguously one-directional (“guilty or not”) pieces of evidence. Nothing comes close to having persuasive responses to the most load-bearing accusations.
“It’s fine to be outraged/go on the counterattack, but it becomes suspicious if you use this to deflect from engaging with the evidence against you” seems like a good takeaway.
What shouldn’t happen is that onlookers give someone a pass because of reasoning that goes as follows: “They seem to struggle with insecurity, and getting accused is hard, so it’s okay that they’re deeming it all so outrageous that it’s beneath them to engage more on the object-level.” Or, with less explicit reasoning, but still equally suboptimal, would be an onlooker reaction of, “This is just how this person responds to accusations; I will treat this as a fact of the world,” combined with the onlookers leaving it at that and not flagging it as unfortunate (and suspiciously convenient) that the accused will now not do their best to gather information they can voluntarily disclose to immediately shed more light on their innocence.
Basically, the asymmetry is that innocent people can often (though not always) disclose information voluntarily that makes their innocence more clear/likely. That’s the best strategy if it is available to you. It is never available to guilty people, but sometimes available to innocent people.
(In fact, this trope is overused in the show “Elementary” and once I realized it, it became hard to enjoy watching the show because it’s usually the same formula for the short self-contained episodes: The initial one, two, or three suspects will almost always be red herrings, and this will become clear quickly enough because they will admit to minor crimes that make clear that they would have lacked the motive for the more serious crime, or they would admit something surprising or embarrassing that is verifiable and gives them an alibi, etc.)
So, anything that deflects from this is a bit suspicious! Justifiably accused “problem people” will almost always attempt counterattacks in one form or another (if not calling into question the accuser’s character, then at least their mental health and sanity) because this has a chance of successful deflection.
The following paragraph is less important to get to the bottom of because I’m sure we both agree that the evidence is weak at best no matter what direction it goes in, but I still want to flag that I have opposite intuitions from you about the direction of evidence.
My sense is still that the strategy “act as though you’ve been attacked viciously by a person who is biased against you because they’re bad” does weakly (or maybe even moderately, but with important exceptions) correlate with people being actually guilty. That said, that’s importantly different from your example of “being able to dig up accusation-relavant dirt”. I mean, it depends what we’re picturing… I agree that “this police accusing me has been known to take bribes and accuse innocent people before” is quite relevant and concerning. By contrast, something that would seem a lot less relevant (and therefore go in the other direction, evidence-wise), would be things like, “the person who accused me of bad behavior had too much to drink on the night in question.” Even if true, that’s quite irrelevant because problem people may sometimes pick out victims precisely because they are drunk (or otherwise vulnerable) and also because “having too much to drink” doesn’t usually turn reliable narrators into liars, so the fact that someone being drunk is the worst that can be said about them is not all that incriminating.
That’s a cool conversational move! Appreciate it.
Agree. When I wrote the post, I was thinking more of a case where someone does respond to the object-level claims but in a defensive way or with non-object-level arguments mixed in, not of a case where they entirely fail to present object-level-arguments.
I suspect we might disagree on exactly how frequently this strategy is available to innocent people. I do agree that it is sometimes available to innocent people, but there are also lots of situations where e.g. the innocent person can’t offer any solid evidence that their version of the story is the correct one, or where they have some other reason not to share the full truth (e.g. protecting someone else’s privacy or truth-telling requiring them to reveal something unrelated that they are embarrassed by or have a legal obligation not to reveal), or where the truth is complicated or unusual enough that third parties might not believe it, etc.
Also, as long as the innocents are not fully convincing, many people might go “I can’t tell who is telling the truth here so just out of caution I’ll distrust everyone involved”, which gives even innocent people a motive to leverage whatever extra weapons they have to increase the chances of being believed (or equivalently, the accuser not being believed).
Agree. But a relevant question is, do innocent people attempt counterattacks at a significantly lower rate? If both innocent and guilty people are roughly equally likely to attempt counterattacks, then just the presence of a counterattack isn’t strong evidence. And as long as a counterattack is not less effective for an innocent person, you’d expect both innocent and guilty people to have a similar incentive to launch them.
WRT your last paragraph, I agree with your examples and think the difference probably comes from us thinking about different kinds of examples.
In movies and series it happens a bunch that people find themselves accused of something due to silly coincidences, as this ramps up the drama. In real life, such coincidences or huge misunderstandings presumably happen very infrequently, so when someone in real life gets accused of serious wrongdoing, it is usually the case that either they are guilty, or their accusers have a biased agenda.
This logic would suggest that you’re right about counterattacks being ~equally frequent.
Perhaps once we go from being accused of serious wrongdoing to something more like “being accused of being a kind of bad manager,” misunderstandings, such as that the “accuser” just happened to see you on a bad day, become more plausible. In that case, operating from a perspective of “the accuser is reasonable and this can be cleared up with a conversation rather than by counterattacking them” is something we should expect to see more often from actually “innocent” managers. (Of course, unlike with serious transgressions/wrongdoing, being a “kind of bad” manager is more of a spectrum, and part of being a good manager is being open to feedback and willingness to work on improving onself, etc., so these situations are also more disanalogous for additional reasons.)
Defensiveness is a signal that you’re not confident in your innocence because you feel the need to defend it, thus there might be some question as to whether you’re guilty, thus it’s evidence that raises the odds that you are guilty. After all, if you weren’t guilty, you wouldn’t need to defend yourself, so defending yourself must make it more likely that you are guilty, even if you aren’t. I think this is just normal conservation of evidence, even if it doesn’t logically follow that defending oneself implies guilt.
This seems wrong to me? If someone says “X abused me” and X says nothing to defend themselves or refute it, people are likely to take the lack of a defense as an admission of guilt.
Defensiveness isn’t proof that someone isn’t confidence in their innocence, because as you say, “it’s enough for them to be afraid that others might believe them guilty”. At the same time, what justifies that fear?
Say you bump into someone in public and they act like you’re a jerk for it. You could react defensively and say “I’m not a jerk, YOU are a jerk you jerk!”. Or you could just say “I’m sorry about that. Are you okay? I screwed up by looking the other way because I heard someone call my name, and I hadn’t seen you there. I guess I need to stop before looking in the future, even if the path looks clear.”
The latter isn’t “defensive” and also does nothing to defend against the accusations directly. But by owning up to everything you can find that you did wrong, you’re demonstrating that you’re not a jerk. And in the process of doing that, it necessarily comes out that “everything you did wrong” isn’t much, and that the other fool walked in front of you without looking himself. So now he looks like a jerk, and you look innocent. Which obviously was what was going to happen, since we knew from the start that you’re not a jerk so of course that’s what the evidence is going to point to. The difference is between “Don’t listen to that! The evidence will mislead you!” and “The totality evidence can’t make me look bad unless I am bad, so lets look at the evidence”.
When someone is showing you a fear that looking at the evidence will leave you thinking they’re bad, this implies a belief that they are indeed bad—at least by your interpretation, which is obviously the one that matters to you.
This belief isn’t necessarily reflectively coherent, and people often flinch out of insecurity even when their beliefs would predictably cohere to “innocent”, but it’s also not crazy to see someone implying that you might think they’re guilty if you were to look at the evidence, and take this as (imperfect) evidence of guilt. Because the only way that fear can be reflectively stable is if they are guilty. It just depends on the extent to which you can expect the person to have noticed the problems with their own belief structure and have brought them back into coherence, if innocent.
I think this is assuming that the people looking at the evidence can be trusted to make a fair and impartial assessment of it and not jump to any unjustified conclusions?
I do agree that if someone has strong reasons to believe that, and to believe that nobody will be motivated to take any of the information out of context and paint them in a bad light later, etc., then hiding information only makes sense if you are in fact guilty.
But it’s very often the case that people don’t have reason to feel that secure, and have cause to believe that at least part of their audience will jump to conclusions, have all kinds of hostile motives, be inclined to treat one party’s word as intrinsically more trustworthy than the other’s, not have the time or interest to really think it through, etc..
In the kinds of examples that I gave in the original post where I’d gotten defensive despite not feeling guilty, it was exactly because the other party gave signs that they were not inclined to consider the evidence in a balanced way—if they wanted to listen to it at all.
Even if a person I’m talking to trusts me to fairly consider the evidence, if there are any other people witnessing the conversation, those others might still have hostile motives, making my interlocutor defensive. So it’s not even the case that they necessarily expect the evidence to make them look bad by my interpretation, they can expect it to make them look bad by someone else’s interpretation.
Not so much “assuming” as “working to make sure”.
For example, imagine some cookies go missing from the cookie jar, and you immediately jump to the unjustified conclusion that it’s *me* that took the cookies. Maybe because you already dislike me for being too messy of a roommate or something. This doesn’t force me to respond defensively, and I still have the option of responding with genuine curiosity “Wait, what? What leads you to think it was me?”.
What’s your response? Not “I have security camera footage proving it”. Maybe “It’s just the kind of thing you’d do. You’re the one here who doesn’t respect rules”. But I can keep chasing this down, so long as I’m curious: “I don’t follow. Why is this something you think I’d do? What rules?”. Maybe from there to “Wait, you thought that was a *rule*, not a *request* to be less messy?”, which gets quite a bit harder for you to hold onto if indeed there never was any rule. Maybe “Do you actually think that messiness is correlated with thievery, even after conditioning on honesty? Do you think you have reason to believe I’m dishonest?”.
So long as I’m genuinely trying to understand your perspective and not trying to make you look stupid and not credible, it’s hard to avoid getting into why you believe what you believe, and learning whether your initial conclusions were fair, impartial, and justified. Basically, by maintaining strict openness to the evidence, it takes away any motivation and justification you might have had for being unfair to me.
Yes, this is often the case, and it does make navigating these things securely quite difficult at times. This complicates things, but I don’t think it changes the conclusion at all.
I think the first thing to note here is that the bar isn’t “Is there zero chance of secure response failing to exonerate me?” but “Is the secure response less likely to exonerate me?”. Because you can’t ever guarantee zero chance of anything, and the question you actually have to decide on is “Which is my better option here?”.
And when you judge by that bar, defensive insecurity doesn’t come out looking too hot. Because none of those additional difficulties go away just because you flinch defensively. If you proclaim “I didn’t do it! Don’t believe him!” to a hostile audience, for example, that’s not going to automatically cause your audience’s hostile motives to melt away and think “Ah, he didn’t do it!”. In addition to all their other ammunition, now they have “See, he’s getting defensive about it. Guilty conscience!”.
Beyond that, we’d have to get into what’s driving this hostility and these unfair jumps to conclusions—because it’s something. Returning to the cookie jar hypothetical, maybe if I would have been more clearly open to your upset about the mess, it never would have gotten to where you were accusing me of taking cookies from the cookie jar in the first place.
Quoting my previous conclusion here, I don’t think you can actually expect people to notice and fully cohere their belief structures, in general. It’s really hard, and a lot of work, so the default expectation is that there will be quite a lot of ultimately unfounded insecurity driving defensiveness over true innocence.
At the same time, the end of the road of reflection is still security and openness about the evidence when truly innocent and well intentioned. And that matters both because it’s the trail sign to follow when we find ourselves innocent and insecure, and because it’s the trail to help others down when we suspect they are.
Am I missing some context here? Let’s look at this hypothetical conversation, which seems pretty darn plausible to me:
“Wait, you thought that was a rule, not a request to be less messy?”
“What the hell kind of nitpick is that? Stop arguing stupid semantics! Since when should I even have to ask Your Highness for basic decency?”
“Do you actually think that messiness is correlated with thievery, even after conditioning on honesty?”
“What are you even talking about now? Some math shit? That’s what’s really important to you, huh, rather than being a good person who knows when to clean up? Grow up or go live on the street. And don’t take any more of my cookies.”
This is admittedly a strained use of the specific quotations, but I think the directional picture should be clear. Extrapolate to your (least) favorite contested-valence social markers to taste.
Surely this depends on your surroundings?
What is the “secure response”? One where you try outwardly to retain a certain kind of dignity? When you don’t actually have the status security in local social reality, you can’t necessarily get away with that. In the inconvenient world that I’m currently imagining from which I generated the above dialogue, screwing around with things like ‘evidence’, or even acting calm (thus implying that the rules (which every non-evil person can infer from their heart, right?) are not a threat to you or that you think you’re above them—see also, some uses of “god-fearing” as a prerequisite for “acceptable” in religious contexts), is breaking the social script. It’s presumed to be trying to confuse matters or go around the problem (the problem that they have with you; think “skipping out on your court date” as an analogy in a less emotional context), and it gets you the most guaranteed negative judgment because you didn’t even meta-respect what was going on. Your mainline options under that kind of regime can be more like “use a false apology to submit, after which the entire social reality is that You Did It but at least you showed some respect” or “make a counterplay by acting openly defensive, which acts kind of like a double-or-nothing coin flip depending on whether the audience both believes you and believes enough others will believe you to coordinate against the accuser”. (In this context, the audience may culturally share the felt-sense of “don’t try to get all fancy on us” even if their beliefs about your specific guilt may vary.) Naturally, as Kaj_Sotala described above, refusing to say anything at all can be interpreted as a tacit admission, so that doesn’t help either.
“Agitated? Listen to this guy. He’s fucking agitated!” “Well, good. That’s good. You stay that way.”
Maybe you could say that the type of emotional and motivational backing for what “acting defensive” means in that context is substantially different from the type of “defensive insecurity” being described above, but at least when I imagine the experiences and expressions they come out close to indistinguishable. I can also imagine trying to retain a feeling of security on the inside (likely at great mental cost) while play-acting the defensiveness in the above context, but that seems like a very noncentral case.
Now for extra fun, imagine this being simultaneously watched by people whose main experience is in a different cultural regime where (perhaps due to the above type of control being uncommon and frowned upon) they can more reasonably justify defensiveness as evidence in favor of guilt, except you don’t have separate private channels to those people and to the people above—possibly because you don’t even know which subset of people is which—and everything you do is being interpreted by both.
I think we’re talking past each other a bit.
I agree that the thing you’re arguing against has the challenges that you’re pointing at, in contexts like those. I’m suggesting something different.
One where you’re not doing the whole “Oh no! Don’t look at the evidence, because if you do you might think I’m bad!” thing—or, more realistically, not doing the “Don’t listen to him he’s lying!”/”No, you’re wrong, I’m innocent!” type thing. Not flinching from the evidence, but rather being present with it and doing something without pushing it away.
There are a lot of different things one could do securely, but here I’m pointing at one in particular which is relevant when people think you’re actually guilty—even if they’re not being particularly fair when accusing you of stealing cookies or whatever.
Let’s go through your hypothetical line by line, giving names for easy reference:
This line as stated is a bit ambiguous. Is the speaker here purely confused and curious, or are they also kinda conveying “Because if so, that’s kinda stupid, right?”?
If it’s the latter, or looks like it might be the latter, then it makes sense that your next line might follow.
Frank has clearly communicated that he sees Bob as making an unfair argument, rather than being genuinely curious, and that he feels condescended to and unfairly treated by Bob.
If Bob isn’t driven to defensiveness out of insecurity, and he actually cares about Frank’s point of view here, he might say something like:
This response helps to disambiguate the first response, and to show that it really was a sincere attempt to understand Frank’s perspective here.
In contrast, if Bob had said the other line, it would also have helped disambiguate, albeit in a different direction:
In this context, where this line is coming instead of actually addressing Franks concerns, it shows pretty compellingly that Bob doesn’t find Franks perspective worthy of addressing. It also shows that even when Bob knows that Frank is going to take it as an insult to his intelligence, he wants to do more of that. So, confirming that “You realize how dumb that is, right?” interpretation.
Neither are insecure responses, but one is much more respectful and the other is much more provocative.
So let’s look at what makes these situations so difficult. These people are clearly very sensitive to implication that you might be “above them”, and simultaneously can’t handle concepts like ‘evidence’. But like… are you not above people who can’t handle concepts like ‘evidence’, in some important way? In your mind are you really on equal footing, if we’re being completely honest here? I certainly couldn’t blame you for having that view of things, if you do. At the same time, can you see why maybe it’s reasonable for them to feel talked down to if you do what you’d describe as “Calmly explain that we should look at the evidence”?
It can be extremely difficult to navigate these situations without pissing people off when the people in question are simultaneously very sensitive to hints of condescension and also seemingly unable to grasp the basics. So when you say things like “Wait, you thought that was a rule?” they’re going to hear that as “Wait, you’re that dumb!?” and respond with hostility like “What the hell kind of nitpick is that?”. And honestly, they might not even be entirely wrong to read it that way.
One way to respond to this is to double down on “Well, their rules are stupid, and I am above them, so I can be secure in the fact that they can’t hurt me”. And if you’re right, then that’s probably better than subjecting yourself to their stupid rules in the first place. But if you aren’t, then they’re going to be quite motivated to hold you accountable for your hubris—as they should!
So I totally agree that this kind of secure response invites these kinds of problems. And that’s why I was suggesting the other direction, for cases like this.
As in, actually respect their judgement. Even if they don’t use the same language as you, there are going to be reasons they believe things. Even if you think you know that they’re wrong and why they go wrong, you can choose to find out instead. To ask what they think because you want to understand where they’re coming from, rather than as a ploy to highlight how stupid they are. If they take it that way, you can listen, take them seriously enough to check for any legitimacy that their interpretation might have, whether maybe you were actually a little more judgy than you meant to be, and get back on track telling them honestly that you don’t see them as dumb, you just don’t understand their perspective yet.
This is the opposite direction of “using big words to distract”, and the only time you’re trying to get on trial for something else is when you honestly believe that’s their real gripe with you. So it’s not an attempt to distract but an offering to submit to their judgement more than they were even asking for. And if that doesn’t come across at first pass, you can clarify that too: “Okay, so it is the cookie you’re most mad at me for? I know you’re mad for legitimate reason, I just want to make sure I’m addressing what’s most important to you first”. Rather than the security coming from “Lol, I’m so above you I’m untouchable (try me!)”, it’s coming from “You wouldn’t stay mad at me unless I’m doing something wrong, so I don’t have to defend myself. I trust you”.
When doing this, you’re not pleading guilty to anything you’re not guilty of, nor are you pushing away their perspectives to focus on promoting the idea that you’re innocent. Because you’re genuinely interested in their perspective, and you’re actually respecting them, they’re going to tend to feel more respected than when you tell they’re wrong/dishonest/whatever without even considering and acknowledging their perspective first.
It’s going to be difficult to pull off if you’re secretly thinking “Man, these are the lies I have to tell to get along with these dummies”, but when it’s genuine it shines through. Not immediately, necessarily, for the same reason that an abused dog doesn’t instantly trust its new owner. It takes a significant amount of evidence to overcome rationally formed priors of abuse/condescension/etc, so if you judge things after the second back and forth it won’t look great. In this one, the dog is kinda biting her, and the woman was expecting to get bit for real. If you only watch the first few back and forths, it’s easy to walk away judging it as “Man, that lady wouldn’t leave the dog alone”/”The dog didn’t like that”/”That wasn’t working”. Watch a bit longer though, and you’ll see that the evidence was being tracked all along. Certainly to better outcomes than if she defensively scolded the dog for snapping at her unfairly.
It’s true that this tends to break the social scripts regardless, but in a good way that side steps rather than engages in conflict. For example, one time my wife accidentally cut in a drive through line, and the guy she cut in front of got super pissed and started yelling at her. When her response was just “Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t see you. Want me to back out so you can have your spot in line back?”, he immediately had his foot in his mouth in recognition of “Fuck, I’m the asshole here, for not considering the possibility of an innocent mistake”—which I think is pretty safe to say wasn’t part of the script he was running in his head. Technically that one is kinda admitting guilt, but only admitting what was true, which was only an innocent mistake not “deserving to get yelled at” (hence the foot in mouth), and iirc not even one he thought was worth backing out to correct after she acknowledged it.
Does that make more sense, or do you have more pushback?
Being “defensive” is not a synonymous with “defending oneself”, at least not in a way these words are typically used.
Being “defensive” implies usage of dirty practices, such as ad hominem, emotional manipulation, misrepresentation of the other party. Essentially, party behaving in a way where a normal good-faith constructive conversation is not possible.
I find it uncontroversial that such a behavior is considered suspicious and undesirable.
Being defensive can certainly mean behaviors that go that extreme but I’ve seen it used to cover much milder and more acceptable behaviors too, such as merely insisting on one’s innocence in a way where you are unwilling to admit having done any single thing wrong.
Claude Sonnet 4′s explanation of what “acting defensive in conversation” means
When someone is described as acting defensive, they’re typically engaging in behaviors that protect themselves from perceived criticism, blame, or attack. This usually involves:
Deflecting responsibility—They might redirect blame to others, make excuses, or refuse to acknowledge their role in a problem. Instead of saying “I made a mistake,” they might say “Well, you didn’t give me clear instructions” or “Anyone would have done the same thing.”
Counterattacking—Rather than addressing the issue raised, they turn the focus back on the person confronting them. If criticized for being late, they might respond with “You’re always nitpicking” or bring up the other person’s past mistakes.
Minimizing or denying—They downplay the significance of their actions or outright deny that something happened. “It wasn’t that big a deal” or “I never said that” are common defensive responses.
Emotional escalation—Their tone may become angry, hurt, or indignant. They might raise their voice, become sarcastic, or shut down entirely.
Justifying extensively—They provide lengthy explanations for why their behavior was reasonable or necessary, often missing the actual point being raised.
Taking things personally—They interpret feedback about specific actions as attacks on their character or competence.
Defensiveness usually stems from feeling threatened, vulnerable, or ashamed. While it’s a natural protective response, it often prevents productive communication and problem-solving because the person isn’t really listening to or engaging with the concerns being raised.