On Consequences vs. Intentions

A bit of language-communication-deconstruction inspired by various recent mailing-list and comment thread goings-on, in which I've personally said little but observed a fair amount. And if you think you personally inspired this post you are almost certainly wrong, as I wrote it only after observing a lot of different conversations in a lot of different places, to the point where I believe I've detected a pattern but couldn't extrapolate out who exactly said what when and where even if I wanted to.

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I've noticed that misunderstandings abound whenever you have one (or more) people focusing on consequences in their statements, and one or more other people focusing on intentions in their statements.

Very often, it seems that when Person 1 points out the potential (or actual) consequences of something, they are interpreted as telling Person 2 what their intentions and thoughts are.

And then subsequent exchanges consist of Person 1 expressing great confusion at why Person 2 is so upset, and Person 2 getting more and more upset as they perceive Person 1 to be ignoring their feelings.

Sometimes this even leads to Person 2 actually going back and trying to tell Person 1 what their intentions are (or at least, telling them a lot of things that look like that), because they feel like that's what was done to them in the first place.

And...when I see this sort of thing going on, I honestly have no clue whether it's even possible to participate usefully in the discussion (which is one reason I don't participate much in long, heated discussion threads).

If I say:

"Look, Person 2, Person 1 didn't mean to accuse you of X, he was just trying to point out the consequences of what you wrote",

...is Person 2 going to find that helpful, or are they going to think I am "teaming up" with Person 1 and claiming their (Person 2's) feelings don't matter?

And if I say:

"Look, Person 1, when you used this sort of language to point out the consequences of Person 2's statement, they took it as a personal accusation of bad faith, despite any disclaimers you might have applied, because they are accustomed to only seeing language like that used when an actual accusation of bad faith is taking place",

...is Person 1 going to appreciate that, or just figure it's a matter of people reading too much of the wrong things into what they're saying?

I probably have a slight personal bias toward Person 1 (as in, I tend to be a consequence-pointer-outer myself, and have been misunderstood many times because of this, and I tend to find people who themselves make a practice of pointing out consequences easier to read) but I try not to translate that bias into anything that stops me from seeing why people might be reacting the way they are to a statement.

In other words, I don't think there's any basis for saying either Person 1 or Person 2 is "always in the right" in any universally generalizable sense (and of course there's the fact that the Person 1 and Person 2 roles can "switch" multiple times in a conversation, depending on the direction it takes).

But I do think it can be said that when you think someone is accusing you of being a bad person, or of doing something bad on purpose, it would probably be a good idea to look more carefully at what they're saying before responding. They might just be trying to tell you that what you're doing could lead (or has lead in the past) to particular negative consequences.

And, conversely, I think it's a good idea to (if you are a consequence-pointer-outer) understand that some people are really sensitive to wording and phrasing, and will literally not understand what you mean if you don't explicitly point out that you are trying to discuss potential/actual consequences, rather than Make The Other Person Feel Bad. (And I am not saying that people ought to be "babied", just that some might not have yet grasped that there's even a difference between talking about intentions and talking about consequences.)