"How to Communicate Rationally?"

This article is Lu Canwei's 98th original piece.

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Last week I started talking about losing weight, but there has been no progress at all. Today I began eating greens and running, but I twisted my ankle shortly after starting. Then I thought, why am I so unlucky? I feel hopeless about losing weight now...

Internal and External Causes

Just then, a book playing in my headphones pulled me out of my emotions, and I rationally assessed how serious the problem was. It seemed not as serious as I imagined, so I continued with my rehabilitation training. When we are about to do things we are reluctant to do, we often find many excuses not to complete them, thinking it’s not our problem anyway.

For example, sometimes when I communicate with others and they don’t quite agree with my viewpoint, I instinctively feel the urge to argue. This puts me in a state of thinking that it’s not my problem. This frustrates those who want to help you because every piece of advice they give you gets rejected. No matter how many suggestions they have, they all seem insignificant in the face of your mountain of excuses.

A phrase I often see lately is: If a person always looks for external causes, they will be the same after ten years; if they look for internal causes, every day will be a new experience.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all issues should be attributed to one’s own mistakes, because sometimes you are indeed right. Therefore, we need to be clear about whether we are the student or the teacher in a given situation. When facing issues, we should assess our credibility. In areas you are familiar with, and the other party is not, you can weigh your credibility accordingly, and at that point, you should be the teacher. However, if you are in an unfamiliar area, you should weigh the other party’s credibility, and then you are the student.

If neither party is familiar, then don’t waste time pecking at each other like chickens...

Online Violence

Of course, in many cases, you can think rationally, but the other party gets heated, which then affects your emotions, leading to a wasteful debate. The most common example is online trolls; even my articles with a small readership can encounter trolls, so one can imagine that trolls are everywhere.

For instance, if you find someone calling you an idiot, most people's first reaction is to say, "You’re the idiot." Then the other party will continuously twist your viewpoint and turn it into personal attacks, such as calling you a dinosaur, saying you dress poorly, or that you are short, even if these may not be true. Then you start to defend yourself, and the other party escalates, leading you to a breakdown, and they end up feeling satisfied...

If the other party calls you an idiot, boldly admit it; after all, who hasn’t done a few foolish things? Then the other party might continue to insult you, at which point you can acknowledge it and praise them for being so smart, saying you’re really lucky. Then continue with the above steps until the conversation ends.

Essentially, this type of communication is both parties arguing over winning and losing, creating an imbalance of power. They want to see you lose; they want to win. The angrier you get, the more entertaining they find it. When facing online violence, you need to be strong and disregard hateful and vulgar comments. As long as you don’t let emotions control your anger, the other party loses. If you view it as a competition where whoever gets angry first loses, rather than caring about the other party's words, you can better handle such incidents.

The more you try to defend yourself, the more the other party will confirm that their strategy is correct. They will label you to rationalize some obviously incorrect information in the debate.

In 1973, a psychologist named David Rosenhan conducted a psychiatric experiment. He recruited eight fake patients and told the doctors at a psychiatric hospital that they were experiencing severe auditory hallucinations, but aside from this symptom, their behavior was normal. As a result, seven out of the eight were diagnosed with schizophrenia. After being admitted, all their behaviors were normal, they no longer experienced hallucinations, and had no other psychiatric symptoms. However, when they requested to be discharged, they were diagnosed with "worsening delusions," and the medical staff even invented new terms to describe the severe "condition" of the fake patients.

After the first results were published, Rosenhan conducted another experiment. This time he had 192 ordinary psychiatric patients admitted to a hospital. Given the first results, this hospital conducted a thorough assessment of all patients and identified 41 whom they believed to be "fake patients."

This is also the labeling effect, so when the other party insults us as idiots, we can simply admit it.

Recommendations:

Review using the PDCA model.

Discuss what I gained from "Making Money with Skills."

It’s better to be a bit low-key.

Talk about the recent public statements of three big figures.

Only by embracing reality can you become better.

A girl born in 1999 said: Sometimes life is more important than a job.

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