The tree you don’t see 🌳

Part 1. Why did you write this essay?

This is an essay describing a way of visualising conversations and interpersonal interactions.

Sometimes, people don’t articulate their thoughts very well. But that doesn’t mean that their thoughts aren’t justified. Sometimes, the way people make judgements is based on assumptions that are built on past experiences. These assumptions and experiences can be easy to miss: in ourselves and in others.

I’ve decided to write an essay describing my model of how I and other people think about things for three reasons: Firstly, for myself as a writing / thought articulation exercise, secondly as a way for me to remember this model, and thirdly as a way for other readers to examine how they think / interact with the world.

Part 2. Thought trees: Personal experiences underpin assumptions like, “X is correlated with Y”

To start off really basic, people extract meaning from words by interpreting them through the lens of their personal experiences. That sounds like common sense, right? That’s how I think generally about language, for example. You see people use words in certain contexts, then you learn to correlate those words with those contexts, and that informs your understanding of what those words mean.

It’s not just language though — it can also be appearances, sounds, numbers, etc…Any kind of input that can be correlated with something else. Sometimes people express the sum of those correlations by using words like ‘energy’, as in “That person’s energy is off”.

I’ve found that over time, I have observed (consciously or subconsciously) how many things are correlated…and have built assumptions based on my observations to expedite everyday life. This idea is probably common sense, and similar concepts have been described before. In psychology one might talk about observational learning or habits, for example (How do habits guide behavior? Perceived and actual triggers of habits in daily life 2012, Learning About Pain From Others: An Observational Learning Account 2015).

So, this idea that we use assumptions / memories to understand the world around us seems pretty obvious. I like to visualise those thought processes like branches on a tree. As people accumulate data about their world, they build ‘thought trees’ based on their assumptions that ‘X’ things are correlated with ‘Y’ things.

This is the tree you don’t see. You don’t get to see all the life experiences that other people have had, and you don’t get to see all the assumptions they’ve built off of those life experiences. Heck, at least most of the time, you can’t even see your own tree. It’s difficult to tell which life experiences led you to have certain assumptions / beliefs. It usually takes a lot of rumination to discover the life experiences that have impacted your beliefs, and it takes a lot of rumination on top of that to think about the extent to which those life experiences have impacted your beliefs. And then it takes a lot of time to figure out which of those beliefs are coming into play in your daily conversations and debates.

Part 3. Examples of how the tree impacts interactions

In everyday conversations, making assumptions accelerates exchange of information: It’s thanks to those many assumptions that we aren’t paralysed by a need to define every word before talking to someone (默契).

But the thought trees underpinning peoples’ beliefs are often not verbalised or understood, and that can create conflict. When someone’s assumptions or observations aren’t expressed, their conclusions can sometimes seem ‘crazy’ or ‘irrational’. Someone who holds very strongly to assumptions might be branded as overly sensitive or nutso, even when those assumptions are informed by many / high-impact observations.

I came up with this whole ‘tree’ analogy because I think it helps with visualising what’s happening in certain repeated interactions. Namely, these kinds of interactions:

Step 1. Person ‘X’ feels hurt by something, but cannot pin-point why because they either feel too frustrated / emotionally exhausted to clearly explain why that thing hurt, or they simply can’t remember.

Step 2. Person ‘Y’ feels as though person X is acting overly sensitive / making hasty judgements based on flawed assumptions. Often times, this is also stemming from a hurt that person Y has, but cannot verbalise.

Step 3. Disagreement ensues, as both persons X and Y may have difficulty expressing their points of views.

I see this happening, for example, when someone in a marginalised group has trouble verbalising why a joke or comment offended them / made them feel uncomfortable. And on the other side, I’ve seen people in the ‘person Y’ category get frustrated by the fact that their reputation or perception has changed unexpectedly after they told a joke or comment. “Oh come on, all I said was ___. What’s so bad about that? Why are you making that face?”

Disclaimer: I’m not at all saying that the onus is on the person Y to decipher what person X is thinking / feeling. I also don’t believe that person X having a reason to feel uncomfortable means we should always cater to that discomfort. In my opinion, having a reason to do something doesn’t mean you get a free pass to do it. Having a reason to feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean society should always be re-shaped to make you comfortable — namely because one person’s cause for comfort can be another person’s cause for discomfort.

Here’s an example of an exchange and ‘tree’ that hopefully illustrates what I mean.

Imagine two people, a man and a woman. The man says, “I think it’s good that you don’t wear as much make-up as other women”. The woman thinks to herself, “Hm…why did he say that?”

The man could have had many reasons for saying that. Firstly, what is the idea that he thought was important enough to be expressed?

It could be that the comparison to other women is something he found important enough to talk about. Why might this be the case? The woman remembers (consciously or not) that she has seen other men compare women’s appearances because they know this will make women insecure. This was done with the aim of making those women seek the man’s approval. So, the man in this interaction might be doing something similar. The woman thinks that if the man is doing this on purpose, it would be an indication that he is mean, and she would think less of him.

On the other hand, the woman acknowledges that maybe the man wasn’t trying to focus on comparing women’s appearances at all. For example, he could have just said this comment because he wanted to fill the silence. The woman has seen other men do this because they find prolonged silence awkward and scary. She decides that if the man was in fact just trying to fill the silence, that wouldn’t indicate that he’s a mean person — although it might indicate that he’s a bit insecure in conversation.

There are actually many reasons he might have said that comment, and quite a few of them wouldn’t reflect well on his character. The woman concludes that this comment was a bit off-colour, but not damning for his character by itself.

But the man doesn’t get to see all the thoughts the woman had. And the woman doesn’t get to see all the thoughts the man had about her either. And maybe neither of them are even able to recognise or verbalise their own assumptions and thoughts. Which is unfortunate, because if they did, they could learn more about the other’s lived experiences and how it shaped that person’s model of the world. And maybe by learning how other people shaped their models of the world, we can improve our own models of the world.

So, taken together, I think paying more attention to our assumptions can help us understand our models of the world better. And I think it makes conversations easier to navigate when you give other people the benefit of the doubt that their opinions might have stemmed from real-world experiences.