This is an insightful read. Especially for its time! I struggle with being defensive at home; for example if a mistake that I've made is pointed out, my first reaction is to deny or look for excuses rather than to empathise with the other person, who may be feeling upset and unheard as something has happened for the nth time. For some reason, this doesn't happen to anywhere near the same degree at work, where I am fully able to own my mistakes and look for ways forward.

Text at this level of emotional abstraction can be quite difficult to internalise, especially for those with less practise or who might be "on the spectrum". It's helpful to have one or two illustrative examples in each category. For example:

Evaluative: "Sort out your code before sending it for review, it's an absolute mess yet again and wastes my time."

Descriptive: "After an initial review I can see code style issues A, B, C, some of which also occured in PRs X, Y, Z. Please make sure you're checking through for these in future review request as it would greatly streamline the review process."

Also, listing out a set of categories is useful, and even sufficient for many people. But it doesn't tell you how to stop being defensive, just what being defensive looks like and how to deal with defensiveness in others. Defensiveness often stems from some insecurity about yourself. Reassuring that insecurity can resolve the issue. In my above example with Evaluative and Descriptive text, the speaker may be more evaluative if they're stressed about time-pressures and resent having to mentor more junior employees. It might be helpful for them to cultivate the part of themselves that values broad, long-term knowledge and skills growth in the team, and to take some perspective regarding the relative seriousness of those time pressures.

“As a person becomes more and more defensive, he or she becomes less and less able to perceive accurately the motives, the values and the emotions of the sender.”

Such a great insight. The content of defensive communication isn’t a requirement here. Anything that increases the defensiveness of the communicator/listener lowers the ability to perceived.

Fear makes us stupid. No plan for future civilization can succeed on fear-based tactics alone.

I wonder, is there any research on offensive communication? Like, people who seize control of a conversation by going on the attack, who respond to another person's statements by changing the subject to something they've done wrong. Defensive communication is unattractive and tends to be ineffective, and I think there are people who pursue a consistent strategy of trying to make others look bad by triggering defensive behavior in them.

The first pair (evaluation/description) is especially tricky to separate in a management situation. I have seen many times an employee make a mistake and be given proper descriptive feedback, they will take it as evaluative and their performance will degrade due to the added pressure - and eventually be let go. Similarly, if the manager doesn't mention the performance and is unconditionally supportive, the employee will continue to do poor quality work, will be let go and then complain that they were not given enough feedback and the chance to do a better job. It takes real finesse to understand the person, see their potential and set a path for improvement.

I provide this because it was the basis of this paper: "”Be Nice”: Wikipedia Norms for Supportive Communication" https://reagle.org/joseph/2010/06/reagle-nrhm-special-collab...

> Wikipedia is acknowledged to have been home to “some bitter disputes”. Indeed, conflict at Wikipedia is said to be “as addictive as cocaine”. Yet, such observations are not cynical commentary but motivation for a collection of social norms. These norms speak to the intentional stance and communicative behaviors Wikipedians should adopt when interacting with one another. In the following pages, I provide a survey of these norms on the English Wikipedia and argue they can be characterized as supportive based on Jack Gibb’s classic communication article “Defensive Communication”.

I used to be defensive a lot, that's when I realized one of the main reason was due to low self-esteem and lack of self acceptance, many times people weren't trying to devalue me or offend me but because of I couldn't really accept myself, I usually thought they were attacking me instead of actually engage in the conversation to see if they really meant to judge me.

After therapy, lots of reading and learning to accept myself, now I feel better and more efficient communicating, sometimes I don't even notice people are judging me or making fun of me, because now I seek very little validation from people, this makes me focus on the issue and supporting kind people around me.

it's still a work in progress, but this new perspective of the world brings me more freedom and happiness.

this is a very good read, and I did found some of the mistakes I sometimes make in communication, this is one of the post that'll make me want to reread in the future.

> Besides talking about the topic, he thinks about how he appears to others, how he may be seen more favorably, how he may win, dominate, impress or escape punishment, and/or how he may avoid or mitigate a perceived attack... Such inner feelings and outward acts tend to create similarly defensive postures in others; and, if unchecked, the ensuing circular response becomes increasingly destructive.

Interesting to read in light of the other recent item "How I ship projects at big tech companies": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42111031

> You only know you’ve shipped when your company’s leadership acknowledge you’ve shipped. A congratulations message in Slack from your VP is a good sign, as is an internal blog post that claims victory. For small ships, an atta-boy from your manager will do. This probably sounds circular, but I think it’s a really important point.

> Neutrality and Empathy

i have somewhat ..doubts.. about the latter. Showing Empathy and Being Empathic are different things, first being just a theather, easily overdone and moving into familiarity (How are you Honey, today? You're so great! from some random nurse in hospital. Or hairdresser.. Like that robot from Wall-E..). And that puts me into defensive, or maybe even, "ignore-those-BS" mode. Maybe i've seen too many Fake smiles.. and i overreact it. But IMO the border between above two is very difficult to walk.

> Transcribed from a mimeographed paper discovered at the University of Toledo, 4/88. Edited only to reduce gender-specific references.

Why do people do this? By all means write new documents the way you like, but… it’s from 1988, just let it be.

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