Responding to Unwelcome Events

When unwelcome events occur, our responses tend to follow well-used patterns that have value in many situations. But the less welcome the event, the more likely we are to respond urgently. We're more likely to hastily select one or more of these well-used patterns. Sadly, what we choose in haste might not be well suited to the needs of the situation. For example, suppose you receive a text message that reads, "How did we decide this?" One possible response would be simply to answer the question with, "We reached consensus at the last staff meeting." But another response might be to interpret the question as an attack on the decision, and then to defend the decision with, "We reached consensus at the last staff meeting, and you were there." Such a response could be interpreted as a counter-attack, or at least, defensive. If that happens, we're well on our way to toxic conflict.

There is some good news here. Hastily choosing a possibly unsuitable response pattern is itself a pattern. And because it's a pattern, we can learn to recognize it. (Humans are very good at recognizing patterns.) When we do recognize the responding-with-unnecessary-haste pattern, we can choose to take greater care and choose a response that's more fitting. That's the good news.

An observation probably not from Mark Twain

There's Most of us have great imaginations,
mostly about the truly horrible things
that may happen. We often get so
busy with our imaginations that we
miss the reality around us. — V. Satiralso some less-good news — responding with unnecessary haste isn't limited to events that have actually happened. We're endlessly clever about this haste thing. For example, there is a quote widely attributed to Mark Twain that goes something like, "I've been through many terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened." Although many authorities hold that this is a misattribution — that Mark Twain neither said nor wrote those words — those words are in Mark Twain's style, and the humor is certainly elevated to the level of Mark Twain's wit. Moreover, the pattern is recognizable to anyone who breathes air. We respond in haste to unwelcome events even before the unwelcome events have even occurred.

And this from Virginia Satir

Virginia Satir, who was a renowned family therapist, has observed a similar pattern she calls living the catastrophic expectation. [Satir 1976]

Most of us have great imaginations, mostly about the truly horrible things that may happen. We often get so busy with our imaginations that we miss the reality around us.

An update of Satir's description might add some clarity about the ineffectiveness of this approach to life. The "algorithm" for living the catastrophic expectation might go something like this:

• To make a plan for today, begin by making a list of all unwelcome events that might happen
• Sort them in declining order of severity
• Make plans for surviving the first few unwelcome events (the most severe)
• If you survive, repeat the process. If you don't survive, you're done for the day — or maybe longer

Satir's observation provides insight regarding our inner decision-making process that produces not-necessarily-Mark-Twain's result. By living as though the unwelcome event had actually occurred, we experience life as a sequence of unwelcome events, few of which are real. Certainly that's a guide to a misspent life.

What psychology research has to say

Psychology researchers have identified a cognitive bias they call neglect of probability. [Sunstein 2001] As Sunstein reports, "When strong emotions are triggered by a risk, people show a remarkable tendency to neglect a probability that the risk will actually come to fruition. That is, the emotional investment we make in worrying about risks tends to be more closely tethered to the consequences of the risk event given that it has occurred, than it is to the expected value of those consequences. We tend to neglect the probability of the event and focus entirely on its consequences.

Neglect of probability, as a bias, tends to cause excessive focus on the worst possible outcome, despite its improbability. The effect on preparations for unwelcome events is to cause us to deploy more resources to some events than can be justified by their probability. This effect occurs even when we can control our urge to make a hasty decision, though haste almost certainly makes bad decisions more likely.

Last words

Sunstein [Sunstein 2001] quotes Karl N. Llewellyn: "If someone is predisposed to be worried, degrees of unlikeliness seem to provide no comfort, unless one can prove that harm is absolutely impossible, which itself is not possible." Of course, the same is probably true for irrational optimism: If someone is predisposed to be irrationally optimistic, degrees of unlikeliness seem to provide no better hold on reality, unless one can prove that good fortune is absolutely impossible, which itself is not possible.  Top    Next Issue

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Footnotes

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