Sans Fig Leaf
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"Framing"
6 December, 2007
I was chatting with a
friend about a mutual acquaintance who always seems to be angry.
Whenever anything goes wrong, no matter what it is, he gets angry as if
someone is intentionally making these things happen to him. He is
deeply offended by the most trivial accidents. Because he takes
everything, including natural disasters, personally, his conversations
are always very negative--because he always has a wealth of new or or
disaster stories to tell whenever we see him.
My friend opined that we
should make an effort, when conversing with the mutual acquaintance,
not to talk about things going wrong, in an effort to improve his
outlook. Which got us thinking about a variant on the old
chicken-and-egg question. Are his conversations negative because he's
angry, or is he angry because all he thinks and talks about are the
negative things in life?
It's easy to talk about
negative things. Something going according to plan doesn't make a very
interesting tale. For example, I ride the bus to work hundreds of times
every year, but I only tell stories about the three or four of those
trips where something went wrong, or very nearly went wrong. The angry
pedestrian who punched the bus as it drove by so hard that he cracked
the window is much more interesting than the scores of trips where I
rode into work without any difficulties.
Whenever a group of
friends or acquaintences get together, it's practically inevitable that
someone will tell a story about something going wrong for them
recently. We're socialized to participate in conversations. That means
talking about the same sorts of things the other people are talking
about. We can offer sympathy, commentary, suggestions, or tell a
similar story ourselves. It's quite common, once one story about some
sort of problem has been told, for several other people to chime in
with tales of similar troubles.
If simply talking about
things going wrong would cause people to be angry all the time, the
race would have destroyed itself in a fit of rage centuries ago. Which
leads me to think that it isn't the subject matter that's the problem,
but rather the perspective. The stories we tell about a particular
event can frame the incident as merely amusing, aggravating, or
downright disastrous. Unfortunately, it isn't just the perspective of
the story teller that matters. The listener's frame of reference can
turn one person's hilarious anecdote into a tragedy of Biblical
proportions.
For instance, when I told
some stories about some strange encounters I had at a convention last
year, one person who heard that tale launched into a rant about how the
world is full of rude and insane people, and it would be better to live
one's life in isolation rather than to constantly deal with the endless
stream of aggravation. I pointed at that at the same convention I
interacted with hundreds of people who were perfectly nice and often
quite pleasant for each of the weirdos I had met. The other person
insisted that most of the people I had had nice interactions with were
just as bad as the weirdos--I just happened to catch them during the
one moment of that day that they were being mostly harmless.
Which seems improbable--if
the vast majority of the people are acting ruding and maliciously the
vast majority of the time, why do I encounter such behavior
infrequently?
The real world is more
than just random probabilities. We may have an unpleasant encounter
with a person because that person is rude. Or we may have done
something which evokes rudeness from them. It's all about framing,
again. If I'm being very confrontational and demanding, it's only
natural that the other person becomes defensive and pushes back.
Whereas if I make the same request in a more deferential and solicitous
manner, I'm less likely to provoke an unpleasant response. Not
guaranteed, just less likely.
In other words,
perspective doesn't just determine how we perceive things--sometimes
our perspective puts the people we meet in an unfriendly frame of mind.
--Henry Ward Beecher
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