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.
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. [...]
Because the only way that fear can be reflectively stable is if they are guilty.
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.
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?
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
Basically, by maintaining strict openness to the evidence, it takes away any motivation and justification you might have had for being unfair to me.
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.
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?”.
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.
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.
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.