> I believe that this is an aspect of communication we need to talk way more about, since large parts of the population are currently handicapped like this.
> People often have good reasons for being mean, they could be tired, hungry, depressed or just spoke without thinking, those are really bad reasons for not listening if the actual message is sound.
How do you know if "the message is sound"? This actually has me thinking that it's an adaptive trait to pay more attention to people who have the energy to spare some kindness for others. Because clearly they're doing something well enough to either not feel tired/hungry/depressed or well enough to still have the energy to consider other people despite feeling any of those things.
I believe you can't know whether a message is sound until you've managed to work past/through your own strong feelings reacting to a message's pleasantness or unpleasantness. A heuristic which dismisses a message because of its unpleasantness or accepts a message because of the opposite is going to result in many, many false negatives and false positives with respect to message validity/usefulness. You can only pick apart a message's 'soundness' in the calm place that comes after emotion: where those feelings can be one source of information without their intensity overwhelming all the other information.
> People often have good reasons for being mean, they could be tired, hungry, depressed or just spoke without thinking, those are really bad reasons for not listening if the actual message is sound.
How do you know if "the message is sound"? This actually has me thinking that it's an adaptive trait to pay more attention to people who have the energy to spare some kindness for others. Because clearly they're doing something well enough to either not feel tired/hungry/depressed or well enough to still have the energy to consider other people despite feeling any of those things.