NPR: Invisibilia: Flip The Script > Dealing With Hostility, Anger, Confrontation - The Opposite

NPR: Invisibilia: Flip The Script - Non-Complementarity

JULY 15, 2016.
Flip the Script.

Psychology has a golden rule: If I am warm, you are usually warm. If I am hostile, you are too. But what happens if you flip the script and meet hostility with warmth? It's called "non-complementary behavior" — a mouthful, but a powerful concept, and very hard to execute. Alix and Hanna examine three attempts to pull it off: during a robbery, a terrorism crisis and a dating dry spell.

Flip The Script ...

The story is multi-part ... robber, radicalization, dating and finally the science.  It reminded me very much of my work in software consulting where I was always going into a "hostile" environment where it was perceived that the company I worked for was responsible for "the problem".

In our political environment today it has become standard behavior to be "hostile" no matter what. This presents a very problematic situation.   I always viewed my task as trying to find ways for the groups involved to "save face".  It usually worked.  The failures usually resulted from "major coverups" where one group really knew they had botched it.  Even then "saving face" for them was sometimes possible ... blame it on other related external factors.

A philosopher’s 350-year-old trick to get people to change their minds is now backed up by psychologists

As Brain Pickings points out, Pascal set out the most effective way to get someone to change their mind, centuries before experimental psychologists began to formally study persuasion: ...

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others. 

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