Psychology
fromPsychology Today
21 hours agoHow We Learn to Be Wrong Together
Agreement often feels safer than the pursuit of truth, leading to a conflict between belonging and clarity.
On the morning of the Unite the Right rally, I lumbered down the staircase of a Catskills Airbnb rented for a bachelor party to learn that only hours before, a gang of white nationalists stormed the University of Virginia campus wielding Tiki torches and chanting, 'Jews will not replace us.'
In the practice of psychiatry, we like to think we have better radar than most doctors for identifying incoherent thinking in our fellow humans. Incoherence is one of the crucial signs for potential disasters in the central nervous system-delirium, psychosis, mania, intoxication, stroke, encephalitis. And yet, now in the waning years of my career, I confess that I've practiced this skill of identifying incoherent thinking with only the vaguest definition of coherence, and no measure.
We watch people lying, and we know they're lying. And also, you watch people dealing with lying not very well and not enjoying it. The lying, backstabbing and manipulation the game inspires does indeed make for delightful TV viewing.
What I've discovered is that the people who earn genuine, lasting respect aren't doing something special. They're actually not doing certain things that the rest of us can't seem to resist. Psychology backs this up. Research on social dynamics and group behavior reveals that respect isn't earned through dominance or attention-seeking. It's earned through restraint, authenticity, and a quiet confidence that doesn't need constant validation.
Research on casual conversations reveals that more than 60 percent of informal conversations are gossip or the exchange of related social information. Dunbar defines exchange of social information as conversations about people and relationships (e.g., who's related to whom, who's allied with whom, who's married to whom), whereas a more narrowly defined subset of social conversations constitutes pure gossip, containing an element of judgment or evaluation of a not-present third party.