How social ideas get corrupt

Kaj_Sotala
Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:35:20 GMT

I’ve noticed that sometimes there is an idea or framework that seems great to me, and I also know plenty of people who use it in a great and sensible way.

Then I run into people online who say that “this idea is terrible and people use it in horrible ways”.

When I ask why, they point to people applying the idea in ways that do indeed seem terrible - and in fact, applying it in ways that seem to me like the opposite of what the idea is actually saying.

Of course, some people might think that I’m the one with the wrong and terrible version of the idea. I’m not making the claim that my interpretation is necessarily always the correct one.

But I do think that there’s a principle like “every ~social idea[1] acquires a corrupted version”, and that the corruption tends to serve specific purposes rather than being random.

Here are a couple of examples:

Attachment theory. People with insecure attachment read about attachment theory, and then what they imagine secure attachment looking like is actually an idealized version of their own insecure attachment pattern.

Someone with anxious attachment might think that a secure relationship looks like both partners always being together, missing the aspect where secure attachment is meant to provide a safe base for exploration away from the other. Someone with avoidant attachment might think that secure attachment looks like being self-sufficient and not needing others, missing the aspect where it also involves comfort with neediness and emotional closeness.

These misinterpretations also get reflected in popular discussions of how to do parenting that fosters secure attachment. E.g. sometimes I see people talk about “secure attachment” in a way feels quite anxious and is all about closeness with the parent, and forgets the bit about supporting exploration away from the parent.

So-called Non-Violent Communication (NVC). NVC is a practice and philosophy about communication, where the original book about it is very explicit about it being something that you do for yourself rather than demanding of others. If someone speaks to you aggressively, you are meant to listen to the feelings and needs behind it rather than taking it personally or blaming or judging them[2]. The whole chapter on “Receiving Empathetically” is on how to respond with empathy when you are the only one using NVC.

One of the pillars of NVC is also making requests rather than demands. The book says that a request is actually a demand if the other person then gets blamed, judged or punished for not granting the request[3], and that NVC is not about getting other people to change their behavior[4].

And then there are apparently some people who are into NVC and aggressively police the language that others use, saying that everyone has to talk to them in an NVC kind of format. Which goes against everything that I mentioned in the previous two paragraphs, as it’s a demand for others to use NVC.

I feel like I often run into various other examples too, but these two are the ones for which is it’s the easiest to point to a “correct” form of the thing. In many other cases, it’s not as straightforward to say that one is a correct version and the other is distorted, as opposed to there just being two genuinely different versions of it.

Emotionally selective reading

There are several different things going on with these. One is that it’s easier to transmit a simplified and distorted version of an idea than the whole package with all of its nuance intact. “NVC is this specific formula for how to express things” is quicker to explain that all the philosophy in the whole book.

Another is that, as you might notice from the anxious vs. avoidant example, is that often the corrupted ideas are pointing at opposite extremes. Each contains a grain of truth, but then exaggerates it to an extreme, or fails to include bits that would be required for a full picture.

I think that’s pointing to the third factor, which is that any new ideas will be filtered through a person’s existing needs and emotional beliefs.

People have various pre-existing ideas of what is good and what is bad. If an idea implicitly says “here’s a theory of what’s good and bad”, a person may subconsciously assume something like “I know that X is good and Y is bad, and this is a theory about what is good and bad, so the theory must be saying that X is good and Y is bad” and come away with a very selective reading of the idea.

On a more phenomenological level, one might say that there will be parts of the theory that resonate with the person and others that don’t. If someone is reading a book, some sentences will feel like the point and some will feel like less essential caveats. “Here’s a form of language that works better” might read as the actionable point, with the “NVC is something you do for yourself” bit being quietly forgotten or rationalized away.

Often, beliefs are adopted not because of their truth value but because they allow a person to do something they wanted to do. The stronger the person’s need to believe in something, the more likely it is that they’ll selectively read ideas like this.

This implies that the corruption is somewhat predictable. If you have a sense of someone’s psychological needs, you might have a sense of how they’ll distort any given framework. An anxious person’s misunderstanding of attachment theory isn’t random, but emerging from their personal psychology.

None of this is to say that the people wouldn’t get genuinely novel ideas from the frameworks. Someone who gets enthusiastic about NVC and starts using it in all their communication isn’t just taking their existing beliefs and rationalizing them. They are learning and doing something genuinely novel, and they have gained a lens for understanding the world that shows them at least some correct facts. But filters in their mind are also systematically hiding awareness of other truths.

The effects of vibe and my own corruption-complicity

I’m now going to flip this and show how I myself might have been doing the exact same thing that I’m criticizing others for.

Because an important complication to what I’ve been saying above is that sometimes the vibe and the explicit message of an idea are in conflict, and the “corruption” may not be so much a literal corruption, but a correct reading of the underlying vibe.

Take Non-Violent Communication. It’s literally called “Non-Violent Communication”, implying that anyone who doesn’t communicate in that way is behaving violently. Here’s how one of the chapters in the book begins:

In studying the question of what alienates us from our natural state of compassion, I have identified specific forms of language and communication that I believe contribute to our behaving violently toward each other and ourselves. I use the term life-alienating communication to refer to these forms of communication.

Certain ways of communicating alienate us from our natural state of compassion.

The author, Marshall Rosenberg, literally starts the chapter on how to communicate empathetically by implying that anyone who doesn’t follow these principles is “behaving violently” and being “life-alienating”. The book has plenty of passages that read to me as morally loaded language that are basically saying “doing things my way is superior to anything else”... while at the same time saying that moralistic judgments are something to avoid.

If someone reads the book and comes away with the belief that anyone who doesn’t use NVC is “being violent” and “life-alienating”, while NVC practitioners are the ones connected to their “natural state of compassion”... then it’s not very surprising if they end up wanting to police other people’s language.

I was quite surprised, some time back, when I went back to re-read the NVC book and encountered this language and vibe. I hadn’t remembered it at all. Meaning that I myself had read the book selectively, filtering out some of the subtext in order to only focus on the explicit content. No doubt because I myself am uncomfortable with conflict and with judging others, so I focused on just the explicit “NVC is for yourself” message while ignoring the parts that conflicted with it.

And also, while I’ve generally found the principles of NVC to work spectacularly well, on one occasion they worked badly, because I myself forgot about the parts of it that didn’t resonate with my own schemas as much.

If a conflict-avoidant person like me reads NVC and other similar pieces of advice - like Stephen Covey’s “seek first to understand, then to be understood” - they might come away with a very specific emotional fantasy. It goes something like “if I just endlessly empathize and try to listen to people with whom I’m in conflict, then eventually they’ll empathize back and we can reach mutual understanding”.

This is a powerful fantasy in part because it does very often work! Trying to engage in constructive conversation and genuinely empathizing with the upset and needs of others first does often lead to mutual agreement.

However, an important part of NVC is also checking in with your own feelings and needs, and not giving in to demands that don’t align with your own needs. On at least one occasion, I ended up in a situation where I would empathize and empathize with someone who was making demands of me… but who then would never empathize with my needs or consider them valid. This effectively put me in a headspace where I felt pressured to give in to their demands, as their needs felt much more salient than my own.

I effectively skipped the part about checking in with my own needs, because that would then have required me to stand up for myself and refuse the demands, and this felt uncomfortable to me. So while some people end up reading NVC in a way that gets them to police the language of others - effectively reading it in a more conflict-y way than intended - some people also read it in a less conflict-y way than intended, and end up giving in to others too much.

I expect that someone who is using NVC to police the language of others might be - consciously or subconsciously - anticipating this failure mode. They might be afraid that they or people they care about won’t be capable of checking in with their needs if others don’t speak in an NVC kind of way, and will then be unduly pressured.

Conflicted authors

Let’s go back to the bit where the vibe and explicit content of a source seemed to conflict at times.

Why is that?

Now, I don’t want to speculate too much about Rosenberg in particular. Maybe I’m just misreading him. But NVC is hardly the only source where the vibe and explicit content seem to conflict. Without naming any more names, I have noted that there seems to be a more general strand of spiritual/self-development writing that seems to be saying something like “my practice will make you more loving, compassionate, and open-minded, and anyone who disagrees with my method is a complete idiot who doesn’t understand anything”.

My guess is that at least in some cases the reason is an instance of the same pattern that I’ve been discussing. Emotional schemas can subvert anything to serve their purpose, invisible to the person in question.

Someone might write a book on compassion and empathy and genuinely intellectually believe that you shouldn’t judge others, and even be genuinely compassionate and non-judgmental most of the time… while still having some need to feel better than others, or some desire for a clear framework that avoids uncertainty, or whatever.

And then that need will subtly leak into the text, with the author doing the same thing as their readers will - looking at what they’ve written and focusing on the aspects of it that they endorse and believe in (the explicit message), and filtering out aspects of it that conflict with that.

It reminds me of something I once wrote, that a reader said had an arrogant tone. I was surprised by that, because I thought I had gone to the effort of looking up the rationale behind views that disagreed with me and explaining what about those views was reasonable. And I did do that. But then I would also follow up the explanation of their rationale with something that amounted to “and here’s why that is wrong and misguided”, which the reader correctly responded to.

There had been a subconscious strategy active in the writing process, that performed just enough intellectual charity to let me feel that I was being charitable, all the while letting me feel intellectually superior.

Possibly I’m doing something like that right now! I don’t feel like I would be, but those kinds of impulses would have gotten good at hiding inside my mind by now.

So it is not just that ideas get corrupted in transmission. They get corrupted while being generated. People will always be looking at reality through the filter of their own needs and desires. They don’t just interpret reality through them, their process for generating and communicating new ideas is also one that’s trying to get their underlying needs met.

The internal conflict may also be functional. NVC’s simultaneous message of “don’t judge” and “people who don’t do this are violent” may be part of what makes it spread. The explicit philosophy appeals to people who value non-judgment, while the words about violent language may appeal to people who have difficulty dealing with that kind of language. Readers may then interpret it through the lens that they prefer, with the model getting a wider audience than if it only contained one message.

Of course, none of this means that we shouldn’t have new ideas. Even corrupted ideas still correctly describe some parts of reality. And many people do understand, and benefit from, the less corrupted versions of various ideas and frameworks. As I said, I’ve found the proper, explicit version of NVC is tremendously useful!

Even if a misapplication of it led me astray once.

1. ^

“Social idea” may not be the most accurate term for this, but I couldn’t think of anything better.

2. ^

"In NVC, no matter what words people use to express themselves, we listen for their observations, feelings, needs, and requests. Imagine you’ve loaned your car to a new neighbor who had a personal emergency, and when your family finds out, they react with intensity: “You are a fool for having trusted a total stranger!” You can use the components of NVC to tune in to the feelings and needs of those family members in contrast to either (1) blaming yourself by taking the message personally, or (2) blaming and judging them.”

– Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships. Kindle Locations 1820-1824.

3. ^

“To tell if it’s a demand or a request, observe what the speaker does if the request is not complied with.

Let’s look at two variations of a situation. Jack says to his friend Jane, “I’m lonely and would like you to spend the evening with me.” Is that a request or a demand? The answer is that we don’t know until we observe how Jack treats Jane if she doesn’t comply. Suppose she replies, “Jack, I’m really tired. If you’d like some company, how about finding someone else to be with you this evening?” If Jack then remarks, “How typical of you to be so selfish!” his request was in fact a demand. Instead of empathizing with her need to rest, he has blamed her.

It’s a demand if the speaker then criticizes or judges.”

-- Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships. Kindle Locations 1593-1600.

4. ^

“If our objective is only to change people and their behavior or to get our way, then NVC is not an appropriate tool. The process is designed for those of us who would like others to change and respond, but only if they choose to do so willingly and compassionately. The objective of NVC is to establish a relationship based on honesty and empathy. When others trust that our primary commitment is to the quality of the relationship, and that we expect this process to fulfill everyone’s needs, then they can trust that our requests are true requests and not camouflaged demands.”

– Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships. Kindle Locations 1624-1628.

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