‘AIBU?’ It Depends…
An essay on perception, shared understanding, and the tacit assumption that the understanding of context is always shared.
For some reason, opening ‘Am I Being Unreasonable?’ (AIBU) on Mumsnet feels like a “guilty pleasure”. Perhaps it’s because I have so many things I should be doing instead of reading 40 pages of back and forth between people I have no connection to in real life, especially because I never join the conversation by posting.
I read it for a couple of reasons: (1) I’m incredibly nosey, and (2) I like to hear other peoples’ perspectives on things and see how they differ from my own and each other. It’s simultaneously a great reminder that people can interpret situations very differently, and also that internet-based conversations are not always the place to go for nuanced discussions.
I think that’s why, in general, I never post a reply.
One of the things I’m known for is the phrase “it depends” — but never as evasion or a hedge. Because you can bet that I’m going to have at least a handful of things that I think ‘it depends on’, gathered from observing, noticing, seeing patterns, and generally studying social life like I’m going to be examined on it later. Mumsnet AIBU is generally not the place for “it depends”. Not because what gets posted is independent of contextual variables, but because lots of people seem to post without actually wanting to know if they are being unreasonable or not.
The most satisfying posts are the ones where people ask for opinions and hear that they probably are being unreasonable and respond with a “fair enough, thanks for the insight, I’ll go and apologise”. I feel like these are in keeping with the original intention of the thread. However, my favourite ones to read are probably the ones where people post their AIBU and one of two things happens: commenters tell the original poster (OP) that they’re being unreasonable but the OP absolutely refuses to accept it; or the responses are split and commenters start vociferously disagreeing with each other, whether the OP comments or not. In the case of the former example, I feel like there needs to be a topic called “I don’t believe I am being unreasonable at all and just want to rant; do not disagree with me”, but that’s probably an excessively long title so I’m not sure Mumsnet will go for it. In the case of the latter, however, the thing that always surprises me is not that people see a situation so differently, it is how certain some people are with so little data!
Conversely, I like all the data. And I am rarely certain. The reason “it depends” is my go-to answer for so many things is because I feel like I spend my entire life decoding the world by identifying the variables which influence a situation. I know that there’s a degree to which everyone does this — I don’t know many people who wouldn’t check a dress code before attending an important function, or the weather forecast before deciding what coat to pack, or how much things cost before deciding whether to buy something. And even if they don’t do those things themselves, I don’t think they would consider them unreasonable things to be done. However, my brain is oriented to the world like this, permanently and without interruption. Many people do not think that is reasonable.
Over the course of my education, my working life, being in groups — just generally existing around others — I have been described as over-thinking, pedantic, ’reading too much into things’, seeing things that aren’t there, and other such sentiments. I have been reminded that “it’s not that deep” on several occasions. And whilst I can appreciate that my constant need to understand things deeply can be irritating, I wish people didn’t assume that I’m operating this way to be awkward or unreasonable on purpose. Because baked into that idea is the assumption that I can ‘turn it off’. But I can’t; it’s just the way my brain is wired.
Because when I describe myself as ‘data-driven’, I’m not talking about statistical evidence, numerical data, or even anything necessarily formalised. I’m talking about how:
I’m constantly scanning the environment for clues about how to interpret the situation — answering what sociologist Erving Goffman highlighted as one of the core questions of social life, “what is going on here?”. Then trying to work out what the key features are that mean that this situation is defined in this particular way.
I’m trying to work out why things happen in the way they do and the degree to which they’re intentional or a taken-for-granted part of life. Although I never really got into the discipline of Conversation Analysis, I love the question posed by Schegloff and Sacks, “why this, now?”.
And then, probably most importantly to me, I am always trying to understand the function of whatever is happening by asking “what is this about?”. This not only orientates me towards what is trying to be achieved, it also helps me see connections between things based on functional similarity — even when there’s a difference in what things look like on the surface. This helps me navigate variation by creating a kind of ‘index of functions’ in my mind.
For a long time, I thought that this was the way that everyone navigated life, but I’ve come to realise that it’s not. Not because people don’t have to perceive, interpret and make sense of the world, but because they don’t seem to need to attend to these questions as actively as I do.
This means that, unlike many people, I struggle to take things for granted even in familiar situations because I am constantly aware of contingency — even when a situation is easily recognisable, I still hold the ‘definition of the situation’ lightly because I’m aware that I might have missed something, have misdefined, or something could change at any time. Additionally, almost every situation is full of data that doesn’t need to be attended to, or at least not all the time, and so not only do I need to apprehend what’s there (or not), I also need to dismiss and disregard some of it too. Some of this is organised by the context itself.
For example, when watching a film at the cinema, the lights fade to darkness to signal that it’s time to stop attending to all the other people in the room. Watching a film with the lights on wouldn’t just impact the vividness of the images on the screen, it would impact the ‘vividness’ of the people sharing the space with you; the lights go down to bring the cinema screen images into focus and to reduce the focus on everything else in the environment. That’s why it feels so intrusive to hear rustling of food wrappers, or see a phone screen light up, or feel people moving around you — they remind you of the existence of other things and tacitly ask you to attend to them.
However, some contexts contain variables that are much harder to see, are less consistently organised, or people simply aren’t aware of all the data they’re providing in interactions and encounters and so give you mixed signals. The mismatch between what someone says, how they say it, what they express with body language, or through other communication mechanisms can really throw me. It’s not that I can’t do subtext, it’s that I struggle with subtext when I don’t know what is and is not intentional, or is intentional but in the way that it’s designed to ‘read’ as one thing but mean another. In short, I find it confusing to know how to respond when a situation or a person is unclear about what they want me to attend to and what they would like me to disregard. My experience is that they might not know either.
I think we all have examples where we have been confused by a text message or email that could be read in several ways, or been on the end of an “I’m fine” statement that reads as someone feeling anything other than ‘fine’. Or we’ve been misunderstood and someone has interpreted something we’ve said in one way, when we meant it in another. For many people, these occasions are closer to exceptions — an interruption in a flow of interactions where shared meaning is so often taken for granted because it can be, and which only requires people to switch, temporarily, into a more active mode of interpretation.
This active process of interpretive sense-making is pretty much constant for me and I’m always trying to find the patterns that help me do this more effectively. Which means that in every situation I take a default position which is to attend to almost everything, until I have a good enough idea about what variables are relevant, what they might mean, and therefore what I should attend to and what I can disregard and dismiss. Sometimes these patterns are shared social norms, tacit rules, or just typical behavioural cues driven by physiology. This means that their interpretation can be more or less be relied upon as accurate on first reading, even for me. Anyone who has ever raised a child through the toddler years has witnessed the “I-need-to-go-to-the-toilet-but-I’m-not-going-to-go dance”, and that’s about as speedy a ‘definition-to-action’ process as you can get! However, some actions have multiple meanings by default — yawning, for example, can be an involuntary response to someone else yawning, an indicator of tiredness, or a signal of boredom. And so an accurate interpretation requires attending to context beyond the action of yawning itself.
Sometimes things can be socially patterned but not applicable in that situation, context or for that person. For example, when me and my husband planned dance classes together, for the longest time I used to think that his eye-rolling was him being dismissive when I disagreed with him or asked him a clarifying question. One day I asked him not to, and he said he wasn’t intending it as a dismissive eye-roll and was instead trying to recall the mechanics of the dance move. In this situation, the data was there — he was rolling his eyes — but the typical meaning ascribed to eye-rolls wasn’t accurate in this particular case, for this particular person. Now I have learned this about him, I know to check first whether his eye-rolling is likely because he is recalling something, or because he’s actually frustrated with me!
This is what I mean when I say I’m surprised at how certain some Mumsnet commenters can be with such little data — if even the meaning of a fidget, a yawn, or an eye-roll can’t be taken for granted because they don’t have a singular meaning, how can people be so certain about what someone they don’t know meant by something they didn’t see within an argument they didn’t hear. And, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that people should be prohibited from having an opinion or from inferring a meaning based on an another person’s account. It’s the level of certainty — and the advice that sometimes comes from it that I struggle with. Because how we interpret a situation, for ourselves or for others, has a very real bearing on how we navigate them.
Personally, I find the highly organised situations much easier to navigate, because once you learn the variables — how they’re patterned, when they’re used and what function they provide — they can create enough predictability to reduce the need to interpret a situation afresh every time. This makes it easier to adapt your response to fit the context with minimal active sense-making. And whilst not all situations are organised and codified as explicitly as something like a cinema trip, the process of searching for variables, identifying how they’re patterned, what function they have in a situation, and the degree to which different actions fit with what is expected, isn’t confined to aspects of life which are structured.
Almost all situations contain contextual variables that people use to make-sense of what they see, feel and experience, even if they’re not as acutely aware of them as I might be. However, a lot of the time people take for granted that they are seeing the same variables and interpreting them in similar ways to others — they assume that those around them have perceived the same things, applied the same meanings, for the same reasons, and reached the same conclusions. So it can feel jarring when the opposite appears to be true. And sometimes people are not sure if their perception and interpretations are right, if their definition of ‘what’s going on here’ is accurate, or if their response was the ‘correct’ one. And so they seek input. Occasionally, this involves asking ‘am I being unreasonable?’ on an internet chat forum.
To me, at the heart of the question is a desire to know whether the things that they attended to were the right things to focus on; whether they were justified in disregarding and dismissing some information in favour of others; whether the meaning they made of it was accurate or correct in relation to the position of another. Ultimately, I think people want to know ‘given these variables, did I think/feel/do the right thing?’ And I get it. That’s what I want to know too. Do I think that’s unreasonable? I don’t know — it depends.