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).
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.
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.