Has anyone here ever purposefully stopped talking to or responding to someone they know? Can you describe the the thought process behind it?
Not everyone finds it easy to say "No." (See here, for instance.) If someone has been hinting at something long enough and the other person just doesn't get it, silence may be the last recourse out of an unpleasant situation without actually coughing out some straightforward denials.
Also, the process of rejecting someone outright and in clear terms can be hurtful for both parties; if the rejecter doesn't particularly hate the rejectee, they may well wish to avoid being the direct cause of that pain. That may be a case of washing their hands with some omission bias, but it's not obviously-and-universally-true-in-all-cases that failing to respond is never any better than playing mute.
In short, the thought process may be as simple as wanting to spare someone pain. "I'm not interested in seeing you any more" is the painful directness that many want to steer clear of, while "Sorry I can't make it I'm busy" is an example of a hint that other people may not get. Some people have no problem making the connection that "Sorry I can't make it I'm busy" means "No", but others do, and they'll see it as essentially the same as "Sorry I can't make it I'm busy but how about tomorrow," which is a fundamentally different response. I don't remember when I realized the difference myself, but I think it was an "A-ha!" of a decent size.
I definitely understand "Sorry I can't make it I'm busy" as a placeholder for "No," and I would understand no further response after something dismissive like that.
I don't understand not even a dismissive response.
The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?