When a person speaks, they only do it for three possible reasons:
- They want to relate with others via sympathy or empathy about what they’re experiencing.
- They have a purpose they wish to accomplish, and they imagine someone else can help them fulfill it.
- They expect someone else to fulfill that purpose instead of them.
We treat conversations as a relatively simply process, mostly because we’re habituated to it, but it’s a rather elaborate mechanism:
- Person A makes decisions to use language, considering all the symbolic contexts they’re trying to express to Person B, and typically imagining what Person B is likely perceiving.
- Person A sends those sounds or symbols across a medium, closely considering whether Person B received them and understood them.
- Person B processes each sentence they heard into a set of values that create a small story, which assembles into an aggregate story across the message and, in the case of any cultural context, across the surrounding environment.
- Person B makes a decision on how to respond to Person A, then the role is reversed.
- As the conversation persists, Person A and Person B maintain partial memory of all the past information they recorded, and will draw on it at any time in the future, even decades later.
This “conversation” helps us understand the world around us better because we end up converging our perspective with the partial perspective of another person.
Our communication skill comes through two major sub-skills:
- How easily we can adapt our understanding of reality to conform to the image they see (listening).
- How well we can convey the image we want them to see using symbols they’d easily understand (language).
Our creative decisions are essentially the image of reality for the other person, proportional to how much they trust us. At the very least, if they don’t trust us, they see our image of reality as the viewpoint we hold and make a judgment from that. We’re constrained by the medium, whether it’s through writing, speaking, or body language.
Background
Our cultural upbringing defines the values we interpret and the stories we choose. More specifically, our culture dictates our subconscious bias, offset by the values we’ve identified with once we’ve attained enough maturity to integrate our shadow.
We constantly must approximate what other people are saying because we can’t precisely imagine what they’re thinking. We can easily communicate by sharing feelings, but expressing anything logically takes tons of effort.
Further, even if we could precisely share an idea, we wouldn’t have time to completely share it! Thus, we compromise by using various images and symbols to get our point across.
Image
We choose which and how many details to incorporate based on several factors:
- Our interpretation of what our listener wants to see.
- Our personalities and preferences for how we wish to approach something.
- The social context for what we’re sharing.
- Our interpretation of the most successful means of conveying information.
Our choices broadly create a few possible general communication approaches (DISC communication styles):
- Strip things down to concise stories.
- Emphasize social relationships.
- Focus on facts and information with many details.
- Focus on others’ understanding by repeating ideas multiple times.
Beyond this, we will adapt our style with many, many subtle approaches, all purposed to influence others.
People often add, remove, or change important details (aka “lying“) to distort the image from what others would have otherwise plainly seen.
Failing
Even with complete and brutal honesty, conflicts from misunderstanding are a fact of communication.
Firstly, each person has their own background and view of the world, so we each speak with a slightly different form of logical structuring. Most people aren’t patient enough to discover that structure, so they focus solely on elements they disagree with.
Second, most people misuse language (at least a little). Sometimes it’s from inexperience (e.g., a foreign-language speaker), but abusing language can also nurture an image that could grant more power. Unfortunately, misused words trivializes their value, especially with emotionally charged words.
The long-term effect of abusing words, no matter how, is that those words become a relic of their times and depict more about the speaker than the idea the speaker was referencing.
Finally, we tend to identify toward certain words or against other words. In doing this, we give much more value to those words than we realistically should. Nobody can be defined with only a few words, and identity with those words to the point of over-assertion is a product of immaturity, no matter how much it may hurt or caused past damage.
Not Failing
To avoid failing with words, we must attack each problem separately, and will intuitively do it automatically if we’re paying attention. We must do several things at once, so it’s not easy.
First, we must think through what people said more thoroughly. This requires taking time to parse what they said and what it may imply. The flow of conversation moves slower, but people understand each other more. This probably won’t happen across society, but individuals can gain tremendously from the practice, especially in heated conflicts.
Second, we should be cautious about how our usage of words can imply an image that’s inconsistent with reality. Again, this can’t happen across society because it would require complete self-ownership about the consequences from decisions we’ve made, but it’s the mark of all good leaders and successful people.
Finally, we must closely examine every time we identify with words. One useful trick is to compare any discrepancy between the words we use to describe ourselves versus how we’d feel if others said it about us.
Shared Understanding
When we listen and respond, we tend to gather a type of “shared understanding“. Enough of back-and-forth shared understanding will create common values that can establish a friendship.
This shared understanding dramatically expands our view of the world, probably farther than any books or formalized education. We see how they see life, so we can somewhat reliably imagine their experiences. Our minds imitate the values and beliefs we perceive from them through the medium of stories and feelings.
This only goes as far as we trust their experiences. Otherwise, we segment their experiences off as something we can analyze later. In that situation, we’re drawing our stories and feelings from self-made stories derived from their experiences as the source material. This can be useful for scientific inquiry, but tends to distract from the intimacy of the original storyteller.
As we integrate this understanding in with ours, we end up having two perspectives in our mind at the same time: theirs and ours. If we can successfully harmonize both views as equally valid, without needless invalidation, we can frequently see other things as if we were two people seeing something.
When we compound this form of understanding across all people, any one person can be as wise as everyone that person has encountered and learned from, up to the limits of their mental capacity and desire.
Shared Dismissal
One hidden, counter-intuitive benefit of discussing topics is that it gives us closure, specifically when the topics are difficult to express.
When we discuss a painful part of our past experience, we frame the language around it to make it more clear to us.
But, by reliving that experience in a way that includes someone else, that other person shares in that relived experience and gives us a sense of meaning out of a shared suffering. We’ll therefore feel less alone about that experience, but will also consider the situation resolved through its expression as a creative result that somehow created a benefit for someone else’s life.
Application
Conversations help us understand reality from others’ points of view, so maximum understanding requires we have frequent conversations with as many different kinds of people as possible.
We are such social creatures that we have conversations with ourselves! That dialogue helps us reason and understand things better, but it’s a quirky trait that shows how much we need companionship.
People who fail at communication tend to concern themselves with things they easily identify and specialize in, as opposed to identifying and specializing with people.
When people misuse words, we must clarify what that person means. Very often, people are destroying the value of that word by misusing it.
While the dialogue of questions and answers in our mind is strictly for understanding, people tend to answer questions based on what they believe the other person wants to hear. This can create cultural conflicts, and the only solution is to boldly answer questions the way we’d answer it if we ourselves were asking it in our minds.
The only way to make an AI chatbot work correctly is to prevent the conversation from going on too long. After about 2-3 minutes (or maybe longer), the AI won’t have enough memory to remember everything in the conversation. That AI would also have to have selective memory loss as well that refines the information into human-like stories.