This post is by Lizzie.
I have been robbed twice in my life: first as a grad student when I was traveling and most of my belongings were in a rental car, and second when some teenagers crow-barred the apartment I was staying in. The first time I was robbed I learned a some useful information that made getting robbed the second time easier: when you tell people you’ve been robbed they often say the most useless things. People who purported to be my friends would reply immediately with, ‘what type of car was it?’ or ‘where exactly did you park?’ While there are definitely predictors that increased the probability of me being robbed, I didn’t fully see the point of these questions.
Eventually my Mum or some other soul wiser than me explained this to me. They’re asking these questions to construct a model of the world in which they don’t get robbed. I sort of get this: it can be traumatic to have most of your worldly possessions stolen. I hope they didn’t also know that it can be painful to have your friends be so lame and self-centered.
I was trying to explain something similar the other night when a friend and colleague caught me after a group zoom call to ask me something. She had met someone who was a graduate student when I interviewed at their graduate institution for a faculty job. I always enjoyed meeting grad students on interviews; they were so much fun, asked interesting questions and made me hopeful about the world. I interviewed at many places and have run into some of these students since and always really enjoy it, so I thought this was where the conversation was going. No.
The student had recounted that at the end of my job talk a senior white faculty member got up and made an obnoxious and gendered comment that in no way related to my science.
I don’t remember this. I suspect I don’t because it was the least of my troubles back then. I remembered the guy though. In our one-on-one interview he asked me if I was planning to freeze my eggs. And in case you as a reader want to chock this up to a one-off, my notes from asking a female faculty member in the department are: “Everyone has had totally weird interactions with him, when she interviewed he told her all about his relationship with his wife. Someone else interviewing told him to **** off. And nothing slows him down, he’s gotten worse with age.”
What I told my colleague on the Zoom call, though, was what hurt was how people replied to it. How many people tried to brush it off in one way or another (even when I couched it in my reality — I liked this guy in many ways and people are multifaceted and complex, they are rarely all good or evil).
I was trying to recount this an hour later over beers but I didn’t get to finish the thought. One woman worked to come up with witty quips that I should have said back. And the one guy said, ‘oh, I know him. He likes to shock people. You know how you should handle this guy is ….’ which led onward to ‘I wanted to invite him a few years back and my colleague said ‘I dunno’ so then we invited him and someone known to be even crazier! And let me tell you about him. He got into a physical altercation with someone ….’
So, I just wanted to make a public service announcement to folks who want to reply in similar ways to people telling you about harassment they received — consider keeping these thoughts to yourself. And then maybe take some time to figure out why you so desperately jump at saying them.
In other news, look what I saw on my hike on Wednesday!
Cool photo! Is this an Ibex? Sorry AG, but this is way better than cats :-)
(I have nothing constructive to say about this post, other than that I’m sorry you were robbed, and that I agree with your Mum that all people like to construct mental models where they like to think they have some control over situations for which they have no control over.)
It’s an Ibex! It was so cool. Apparently they are called ‘steinbock’ here (apologies for my spelling) which seems a general name for wild goat and pretty similar to steenbok — a term I believe applies African things that look like Ibex.
From your description it’s not 100% clear but it sounds like you had a lot of stuff stolen, which is unfortunate, but that neither time was robbery, which means stealing things from someone by threat of violence.
Given the context, you might say I should keep this to myself, but I think it makes a big difference whether you were at gunpoint/knifepoint or otherwise feared for your life vs you unfortunately lost many valuable items but we’re not personally in danger.
Ah! Thanks. You’re right, I didn’t fully know the distinction until I just looked it up. I guess I am just less comfortable with the verb ‘to bugler’ … would I have said to my friends ‘I was burgled/burglarized’? Perhaps this would have slowed them down with their other questions!
It’s “to burgle”
It seems like the bad behavior is the robbery or harassment themselves.
Not everyone is capable of the right empathetic response in the moment, particularly over drinks.
I am not giving anyone an out because of the drinks; they were not intoxicated.
I believe Anon is referring to the lightness of the social environment rather than drunkeness. I’m not expressing agreement or disagreement with that, but I suspect that’s Anon’s thinking.
Lizzie:
I’ve found that when people behave unprofessionally in a work situation, I’m usually too stunned to respond directly at the time. This has been the case when the unprofessional behavior is directed at me, and also when I’ve been in the room and seen it directed at others. Also, on the rare occasions that I’ve responded immediately with outrage, it hasn’t gone well. So in my experience there’s no easy solution.
Same here, I am usually too stunned to respond. But that may be a good thing actually.
Obnoxious behavior should be handled by colleagues, not the visitor.
I sometimes have tons of witty retorts, but they don’t get me anywhere so I agree with your point that too stunned is often a very good thing. In the frozen eggs context I was definitely too stunned, and I got the job offer.
Obnoxious behaviour should be handled by anyone who feels they can, but I am not sure we have good models for what type of intervention (all the ‘calling in’ and ‘calling out’ stuff) actually makes a difference.
I agree there’s no easy solution. The bigger problem to me is that we still have people who hear the story and think ‘that wasn’t really bad, let me explain to you why’ and they’re younger people suggesting we’re not making enough progress. We need more senior people who say ‘that was unprofessional’ and shouldn’t have happened.
Also fun is when people try to quickly solve your problem for you. “Why didn’t you say xyz?” I understand that it’s often a genuine attempt to help, but typically:
* Their solution is something that you’ve tried or thought of and wouldn’t work
* The message that comes across is that they think your problems are simple and easy to solve, if only you opened your mind or were willing to make an earnest attempt
* You’re not looking for a solution, you’re looking to vent and want some empathy
Last week I mentioned (in comments) a statistical problem I’m working on. Another commenter, very nice and smart person, said I’m doing it wrong and mentioned some contexts in which my approach would be a problem. We had a bit of back-and-forth about it and I finally said, OK, tell me what I should do instead. And he said “What should you be doing instead? I’m not sure”, and then suggested something totally implausible as something maybe worth considering. I thought that was funny.
There’s nothing funny about your post but it leaves me with the same feeling of futility. Don’t say this, don’t say that, don’t behave this way or that way. OK. But you have to do something. “Sit silently” is not a good option either. How about telling us about some people who said or did the _right_ thing, so we can emulate them?
I had a similar thought. I imagine “what an ass!” might have been an unambiguously supportive response, but that’s not very deep, and it’s hard to see much beyond it.
It seems like the woman with the quips meant to join the poster in a fantasy of taking the guy down, and I can see how she (the quipster) might have thought this was being supportive. But this fantasy wasn’t where the poster was going with the story – she wanted to express her disappointment and hurt at the non-reaction of the bystanders (I assume that’s the part she wasn’t able to finish). If there’s anything like general guidance for this, it might be:
(1) recognize you’ve entered a new space when someone shares a shocking story like this and give yourself a minute to think about what’s going on before feeling like you need to react, and
(2) strongly consider giving the sharer more space to develop their thoughts before jumping in.
It seems like the dude in the bar just had no idea what was going on in that conversation, and he got distracted indulging his personal model of a sensible world (like Lizzie’s mom says). The woman had an inkling, but she guessed wrong because her urgency to help (or to get past the uncomfortable part of the conversation) got the better of her.
I guess my advice is pretty close to “sit silently” after all, but it’s not quite the same. I could imagine a very different conversation on bystander-ism unfolding if story had gotten that far (though I suppose it’s also possible this would have felt equally unsatisfying for some other reason). At some point, I guess there’s also a question of what expectations it’s fair to have for one another in any given conversation (speaking of the bar thing here, not the ass at the lecture who was clearly operating well outside of any reasonable expectations).
BTW, I’m not trying to preach here. I DEFINITELY would have failed the test in that bar, too. That step (1) of taking a beat before reacting is weirdly hard do in real time. But maybe one day…
This reminds me of the questions I got several years ago when my mom was diagnosed with cancer. “What kind?” Which I considered to be none of anyone’s business and also took as shorthand for “did she bring it upon herself?” I briefly considered telling people it was “Mid-Atlantic cancer,” the nebulous, implacable kind they used to get in movies, but decided that probably wouldn’t get me anywhere. Anyway, when my dad was diagnosed earlier this year I just told my job that I had to go visit him because he was having a “healthcare adventure.”
Jeff:
“What kind?” could also be related to “What are her prospects for recovery?” Some cancers are much more curable than others.
Indeed. I would feel much different about someone’s mom having cancer if it was, say, skin cancer vs metastasized brain cancer. Similarly, if someone is ‘in a car crash’, that’s too bad and “I’m sorry that happened”: but the level of sympathy will vary based on whether it was a fender-bender or if people died. (And anyway, the only kind of cancer people would have that reaction to is lung cancer.)
I feel similarly about OP: people certainly have some odd reactions to ordinary questions. So if asking the obvious question is so terrible, then what *are* the right questions to ask…?
I also disagree with Lizzie’s interpretation, which ironically I would characterize as being exactly the sort of self-centeredness she thinks she’s criticizing: those questions are an invitation to expand on the traumatic event without the speaker seeming overly self-centered by ostensibly sharing useful information (which is of course in reality largely useless), much the same way your mom will say “I see, how fascinating! do go on” when you burble about your latest ‘special interest’ (spoilers: she doesn’t see) – but Lizzie can’t see the kindness of it, and then blames *them* for being self-centered!
Maybe. I’m not sure I agree with the details of who is and isn’t self-centered and how we would judge that, but I that the mere fact that you and Lizzie interpret the story differently does point to something important, which is that there is probably no response that everyone would agree is the best, or maybe even that everyone would agree is good. Probably some people just want to vent and to be sympathized with, others would like to work through the “why me” questions and want to replay what they could have done differently, others would welcome an attempt to be light-hearted about it and point out that things could be worse, etc. etc. As Kant said, the only unqualified good is a good will. If someone is trying to say the right thing, we should cut them a lot of slack even if they get it completely wrong.
That said, I still want to know how Lizzie wishes her friends had responded. I would learn something.
Several of the comments in this thread sound like they could have used more thought than the writers gave. Some examples:
Andrew said,
““What kind?” could also be related to “What are her prospects for recovery?” Some cancers are much more curable than others.”, and Gwern responded:
Gwern said,
“Indeed. I would feel much different about someone’s mom having cancer if it was, say, skin cancer vs metastasized brain cancer. Similarly, if someone is ‘in a car crash’, that’s too bad and “I’m sorry that happened”: but the level of sympathy will vary based on whether it was a fender-bender or if people died. (And anyway, the only kind of cancer people would have that reaction to is lung cancer.)
I feel similarly about OP: people certainly have some odd reactions to ordinary questions. So if asking the obvious question is so terrible, then what *are* the right questions to ask…?“
I would hope that in circumstances such as those above, people would try to put a little more sensitivity into what they say and write than what Andrew and Gwern wrote. For example, saying directly, “What are her prospects for recovery?” would be kinder than asking , “What kind?” And Gwern’s comments, “people certainly have some odd reactions to ordinary question,” , “So if asking the obvious question is so terrible, then what *are* the right questions to ask,” seems to be neglecting the fact that “odd”, “ordinary,” and obvious” are words that have dismissive connotations, so are especially insensitive when talking about someone’s negative experience.
Martha:
I disagree that asking “What are her prospects for recovery” is necessarily kinder, it is only more direct. And in some cases being more direct is not the kindest approach, especially in the case where there are zero (or near zero) prospects of recovery – in that case you are essentially forced to outright state the fact they are almost certainly about to die, unless you choose to lie, which at least in my experience is far less distressing than responding what type of cancer it is. Asking the cancer type lets the asker infer the severity (as Andrew says) but it’s also open-ended enough that it offers the person being asked a chance to steer the conversation away from mortality.
Fair. I may not cut my fellow humans enough slack.
I agree it’s very insightful to see how differently people interpret things, and a great utility of the blog.
In this case at the bar, I would have appreciated a ‘s***, is this stuff still happening and what can we do better so it happens less/stops?’ or, from the person who had invited this guy to his graduate course I would have dreamed to have heard, ‘oh no, I just invited this guy to a class; I really hope he didn’t treat any of the students this way.’ Basically, I am often looking for people to validate a reality in which what happened is something we would prefer to happen less in academia. I am still astonished how rarely I get that, and I am not always sure it’s because of the opaqueness of human communication.
Lizzie: how is everyone else in the world supposed to know what your expectations are? Of all the people responding to your post not one seems to have known your expectations. Does that surprise you? If you were telling this to a shrink the shrink would say that you’re expecting other people to A) read your mind; and B) be motivated to fulfill your exact wishes. Why do you expect that? Why do you think people owe you that?
Regarding the thefts, it just seems that your expectations of how your friends *should* respond is way out of line with how they do respond, so perhaps you should adjust your expectations? Think of it as an empirical result: you expected one outcome, but in reality there was a different outcome. So apparently you need to revise your concept of how people respond.
chipmunk:
What Lizzie said in the original post made total sense to me. I think our society is pretty out of whack when it comes to things like emotional awareness and addressing harm constructively, so I’m not surprised, exactly, when people don’t do a good job of those things. But I disagree that when people treat us in ways that are invalidating, or frame a pattern of harmful behavior as something to bend ourselves to accommodate, we should just set our sights lower. This is the type of thing that sets people up, in part, for abusive relationships, not to mention larger things like dysfunctional institutions.
It’s absolutely true that expecting other people to read our minds as to really specific needs is a recipe for unhappiness and disappointment. And similarly for a sense of “being owed”, if taken too far or in a punitive direction. But hoping for some caring words and validation when we’ve been through something difficult…I think we all deserve that. That doesn’t mean we’ll get it, or that other people should be punished if they fail to provide it. But just as people, we’re all worthy of that. And a society where those needs can be met more often, and are met more often, is one that I’d aspire to.
Steven Universe fan said:
“And a society where those needs can be met more often, and are met more often, is one that I’d aspire to. ”
I’m sympathetic to your point (and Lizzie’s feelings) in principle. There have certainly been times when I expected validation, didn’t get it, and felt hard-done-by. But that left me with a choice: demand that the world change or change the way I handle lack of validation. Which change can I affect? I’m not a religious guy but I like that line from that prayer: “and the wisdom to know the difference”.
I like how this entry was posted in Decision Theory. Nice one.
I never categorize my posts; I always enjoy seeing later what tags they get (from Andrew I presume).
Thanks for the post Lizzie. I can totally relate. It seems like a common reaction to hearing about gender-related bias is to immediately try to explain why the person might have acted that way or defend their qualities in other respects, probably trying to make it seem less bad. But that often leaves the person who brought it up regretting that they said anything.
And worse for me, it makes me feel like people actually don’t think we have a problem here.
Yeah. And it can be hard sometimes to tell to what extent that is what people mean to suggest with their responses versus they are just trying to resolve the uncomfortableness of hearing something unpleasant for themselves.
Once I had a colleague respond to my report of some minor (but still problematic) harrassment by someone we both know by bringing up how he thought female CS Phd students had better opportunities on the job market, which is about the worst response I can think of in terms of signaling that he didn’t think harassment was worth worrying about!
Oh, we have a problem. And it’s bad. A friend was finishing up her MS in Comp. Sci. with a prof. who I thought was a nice guy (I used to play Go with him). He’s one of the most famous people in comp. sci. If you are reading this, you know his name. And he decided, despite being married, to “fall in love” with said friend. And tell her about it and expect a positive response. The only thing she could do was grab the MS. and run like hell. (This was a while ago, when there was much less history of people complaining about this sort of garbage, but this bloke is so major, I don’t think even getting called on this sort of thing with solid evidence would dent him today.)
A decade before that, a woman friend and I took an MIT AI course together. The grade was based on a take home problem set/test, and we were allowed to work in pairs and hand in joint work and both would get the same grade. We divvied up the work, but I used my account at the Macsyma group to type up all our answers. I got an A, my partner got a C. We went and screamed at the idiot (male) TA, who had assumed that I had done all the work (I hadn’t), but the bottom line was that we had an a priori promise for identical grades, so we both got our (well earned, thank you) A.
(Not long after that, she took a year off (but did come back and finish) to take over the job of local hardware guru for a Mass Eye and Ear research group, a job which my father had been doing (as the site engineer for the very first DEC LINK-8 on-site lab computer). That job is now held by the significant other of another MIT friend.)
Both friends did quite well for themselves. One was the manager for several years for a software product you probably use every day, the other the top tech manager at a major industry computer security software company whose product you haven’t (and aren’t supposed to have) heard of. But that doesn’t excuse/forgive or in any way lessen the obnoxiousness of the BS.
During the period I was at MIT (1972 to 1981), the number of women seemed to be increasing and things seemed to be getting better for women there. When I looked back to see how things were doing 30 or so years later, there had been no progres. None. Zilch. Zero. At some point over the last 10 years there has been more awareness that there’s a problem. I think/hope, anyway. (A humongous percentage of MIT undergrads are kids who are the first in their family to go to college (and there’s enough financial aid to support them), so I’m willing to not damn MIT completely.)
I discovered computer science in my senior year of college – Ann Arbor, U of Mich, 1980 and since 1981 I have bounced back and forth between working in academia and industry. I can confirm that there has been no progress. We all have our stories.
I’m sorry for your story, but I really appreciate the thematic link you drew here. It makes sense to me that these things might have a very similar origin.
Someone I know once got cancer in his GI tract. Upon hearing the news, some older mutual acquaintances told me “Let that be a lesson to you. Watch what you eat.” I don’t have any kind of quantification of this, but I feel like there is a generational gap at play, where older folks struggle with the idea that things happen that could not have been forseen, that were undeserved, and that there may be no lesson in it.
I’m not Lizzie, so maybe the author’s opinions diverge from my own, but I’ve had similar discussions amongst my friends. My expectation is just something along the lines of. “Oh man, that sucks. How are you feeling? What are you going to do now? Have you reported it to X?” The distinction is an emphasis on how the other party is doing and what mitigation or remediation efforts can be done now, not how the other party may have foreseen the issue and prevented it in the past.
The offending questions may be asked for reasons other than diminishing the problem or assuaging one’s own fears; postmortems can be genuinely helpful, but there’s a time and a place. It does risk sending the message that “you could have seen this coming and stopped it,” so one should first consider the possibility that some problems could not have been anticipated or preempted, and that the other party may have done all the right things.
There is a large class of offensive questions like this. If your leg is in cast, everyone asks what happened. Then that is usually followed up with comments drawing attention to your clumsiness, or your lack of preparedness, or your risk-taking. If I just had a medical treatment, you might get these, as well as comments about your diet, smoking, exercise, pills, etc. It seems like people take delight in the misery of others, or wish to show off how they did not make the same foolish mistakes.
I often heard such remarks from the families of patients. A bad manifestation of this search for blame is in pediatric oncology where major tension between Mom and Dad are common with each blaming the other in some way. The worst thing which is extremely common is the oncologist saying that the patient failed the treatment; actually the treatment failed the patient. We are all fallible and should think before we speak.
During the pandemic, my teenage daughter started having some serious mental health problems. A therapist recommended that we enroll in a DBT (Dialectical behavior therapy) program. The rule is that the whole family attends the meetings, not just the teenager. DBT is kind of like that book that Andrew recommends: “How to Talk so Kids Will Listen…And Listen So Kids Will Talk” in that even though it is about the kids, it applies to pretty much anyone. One important thing I learned from DBT is how to respond when a person is in distress. The first thing to do is to validate their feelings. The worse thing to do is to invalidate them. So if someone says to you, for example: “This kid in school told me I am fat and stupid, and now I want to hurt myself,” realize that a) this person trusts you enough to share this painful thing and be thankful for that and b) say something like: “That must feel awful, I am so sorry you are going through this…” A sure way to invalidate is to say something like: “You mean that kid, Billy? Common, he didn’t mean it; he is just doing what other kids do.” The latter is worse than saying nothing.
Me: “hi, my transactions keep failing, what’s the problem?”
Person in Third World Country: “That must feel awful, I am so sorry you are going through this…”
The technique is called validation, and it can be learned independently of DBT. There are books on it, but I would just recommend the short article Linehan, M. M. (1997). Validation and psychotherapy.
It really works amazingly well with people in distress, from age 2. I wish I knew about it earlier, it should be taught in school.
Lizzie –
Kind of off topic in a way as to the main points of your post, but you say…
> Eventually my Mum or some other soul wiser than me explained this to me. They’re asking these questions to construct a model of the world in which they don’t get robbed.
I think there may be more to it than that.
I think when people ask this kind of question they’re a also seeking for a way to be reassured that they won’t likely be a random victim of misfortune. It’s not merely that they’re seeking a model where they don’t get robbed – but also trying to fight against all the evidence we get that bad things happen randomly. So they want to think that there’s a clear cause-and-effect to when misfortune will visit us.
That’s similar to what your mum described, and maybe it would still leave a feeling that they’re essentially exploiting your misfortune to find a way to comfort themselves (there but for the grace of God…) but another take is possible: the world can make us anxious and so we have pet little algorithms, that we employ somewhat reflexively to help us deal with anxiety-provoking events.
As is discussed on this blog often, uncertainty can be tough. It can be comforting (or at least we have an illusion that it’s comforting) to find a way to explain things that can’t really be, or maybe don’t really need to be, explained.
I’m only talking about the first part of the post here, obviously the behavior of that faculty member is ridiculous and should have been called out.
One thing that surprised me in this post was the phrase
“People who purported to be my friends”
I feel that people say a lot of weird things. I would not hold my friends up to such a high standard that if they say something I don’t like or something that offends me, I would think that they are not really my friends or that they just claim to be my friends. In my opinion, people (especially friends) are entitled to saying dumb and thoughtless things from time to time without having to be cancelled :). The phrasing just seems excessively harsh to me.
I can’t recall the source, but this reminds me of some article or book from many years ago that claimed it is a basic difference between men and women, that when women tell a story about something bad that happened to them they just want emotional support, and men hear it as a problem to be solved and start making unwanted suggestions. And vice-versa, when men want solutions they get emotional support. I’m sure that is too broad a generalization and gender isn’t an exact binary condition, but this post does sound a bit like that.
I must be a man because I wanted to talk about how to solve the problem, and to me the problem doesn’t get solved by me taking down some white guy asking me stupid sexist questions (with my witty quips or outrage in the moment), it gets solved by creating a system where we agree this is something we don’t want happening and figure out ways to make it happen less. One thing might be to stop inviting him places, IMHO.
Lizzie:
I don’t know why it’s relevant that he’s white?
It’s only somewhere on the gradient of relevance — not on one extreme to me, but I think he would be called out on these comments more if he were not white.
Jim:
You’re thinking of You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen.
This books sound awful based on Jim’s description.
I think the concept (described in multiple popular, pop-psychology books) isn’t useful as come kind of lockstep formula, but has some value for understanding modeling, in very general ways, differences in how people engage. Not entirely unlike the model suggested by your mum.
I think there’s certainly an underlying truth that often some people tend towards suggesting ways to “solve” problems for others when moving towards support could be more productive. Perhaps the reverse is true as well. The extent to which this does or doesn’t break down along gender or sex is kind of another issue.
Lizzie:
It’s been awhile, but back in 1990 or 1991 when I read Tannen’s books, I found them to be interesting. I also saw Tannen give a talk on the topic and that was interesting too.
And the author is white!
P.S. It might have been “He Said, She Said”.
I assumed you were thinking of “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.”
It’s interesting that I agree that the colleagues’ reaction in the second story (about the faculty member) was totally out of line, but that I feel that the reaction in the first story (about the car burglary) was not egregiously bad. And I’m not sure I understand why I felt this way. A few possibilities:
1. There’s a clear perpetrator for sexual harassment and it’s obviously the harasser’s fault they harassed. It’s clearly an individual and they have a face. For a burglary on the other hand, we don’t see the perpetrators so it feels more abstract, even though the action was committed by an individual(s).
2. Thieves are more sympathetic than harassers. There’s no reason for anyone to have made that remark that faculty member made. It was completely unnecessary and by a person in relative power. On the other hand, although burglarizing is wrong, it’s often committed by people with less privilege. A life of crime doesn’t pay off for most people so that people resort to these types of crime is unfortunate.
Also, part of an explanation for the reactions in the stories is about tractability. People may agree, for instance, that we should be taking steps to reduce crime/burglaries everywhere but this is obviously a very difficult task for a single person to do. But taking individual action to e.g. avoid certain places is tractable. It’s not ideal obviously but it’s something that can be done. I do see why these responses can run orthogonal to each other by playing into the hands of the perpetrators giving them more power and distracting attention away from the real, larger solutions. But also people may not always care about solving the larger problem, they just want those bad things to not happen to them specifically, and have less care about if it happens to other people.