Scribble Hub Forum

Humans are inherently defensive. Intentions don't matter much, especially on the internet where we have way less context clues and no visual or tonal feedback from the conversation partner. If someone thinks they are being attacked or accused of something, the natural response is to lock out everything from that source.

Learning to listen and understand is absolutely possible, but requires effort as well as going outside of our comfort zone in a topic. Human brains are just a bit stupid and prefer to let us stew in ignorance rather than try and learn, because it's uncomfortable short-term.

There's a ton of guides all around that basically deal with conversations. How to talk to people, how to win arguments and negotiations, how to convince people. Most of those are fairly simple psychological tricks based on the way brain perceives the conversation partner.

Know what's the simplest example? By using "you" in a post like this one (eg. [...] especially on the internet where you have way less context clues [...]), I would automatically make it feel like I'm criticizing you and put you on the defensive, making you far less likely to agree with me and look for excuses, even if all I wanted was give some advice.

I purposefully did not - I used general statements and "we", which makes it all less directed and incentivizes you to consider it more generally instead of your specific case. That would have worked even better if I didn't tag you here, but I kinda had to.