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Warrigal comments on Rational Communication - Less Wrong
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Comments (38)
A model:
Most people parse out 'why' questions as a request for them to give the narrative they've constructed surrounding an incident or set of incidents. In most cases where a person is upset about an incident, it's largely because they haven't worked out an acceptable narrative about it yet, and in such cases asking the person to relate that nonexistent narrative will just upset them, primarily because it comes across as judgmental ("you should have an answer to this question, and it's bad that you don't"). In situations where a person is not upset, but is explaining something or relating a story (even a personal or emotional one), asking 'why' will work much better, because the story being requested already exists.
Do you have some more evidence for this? Most of the things you said don't strike me as clearly true.
Not especially. It's the model I use, but it doesn't suggest behavior much different from other models, like NancyLebovitz's, so the fact that it works for me doesn't say much about its accuracy. (I prefer it because it's relatively nonjudgmental and because it primes for 'people construct narratives which may or may not be related to reality', which is not a concept I find especially intuitive in practice.) It was more intended as an instrumentally-useful suggestion for people using models that do suggest that asking 'why' about peoples' emotional states is a good idea.