Every Social Interaction is a Social Experiment
By Purilaw
Often times when I just got off the phone from talking to someone, I’d find myself replaying the scene over and over again in my mind, with all the precise dialogue. I would judge myself if I think I said things I shouldn’t or wasn’t great enough. Hoping that I could replace my dialogue with a much better one.
Later I found out that it was called post-event rumination:
“When a person is stuck thinking over and over about an event that occurred, they are experiencing post-event rumination. Post-event rumination is a common experience for those overcoming social anxiety.” — John R. Montopoli, Cofounder National Social Anxiety Center.
If you’re my fellow social anxieties, you must know what I’m talking about. The feeling of self-criticism, embarrassment, guilt, and shame.
But… As I happen to do my research for my thesis, the analytical side of me begins to ask some research questions upon this problem:
“What do you expect? Even if you have something else to say, do you think it will be better? How do you know what to say? Do you have any theory or cheat sheet to talk to a certain specific person? A general rule of ethics may be. But aren’t two fingerprints never the same?”
Think about it this way, the very few first humans on earth didn’t have any guidebook on how to socialize. (Well, maybe there were a couple of holy books sent down from heaven, but that’s for another part of the day)
The only connection that bonds ancient humans together is the union of their needs to survive. They don’t even like each other, everybody is full of themselves, one only cares about one’s needs. Until they realize that it’s easier to hunt an animal together, civilization grows and communication started to happen. Relationships begin to be more significant than just survival.
Eventually, humankind gets more sophisticated. Philosophers and social scientists developed an interest to study human behavior and how we socialize, known as psychology and sociology. And it began to get passed down from generation to generation till this day.
But are their theories, ideologies, principles about all the socializing in the world solved all of our problems?
Social interaction is dynamic. No one rule fits all. Sometimes we have to adapt to the person we’re talking to, their traits and personalities, their mindset, their interest.
But even if we know all of that, how can we be certain a person can react expect them to react? It was all in the unknown. All we have is a hypothesis.
Every person is different, we may have some basic rule of ethics, but each and every person’s mind is unique in its way. They all have stories and moral judgment that they created themselves all of their lives. And we know nothing about it. We have no literature to study and we have no reference. So if you think about it, every social interaction is a social experiment. In a more personal kind of way.
We shouldn’t blame ourselves too much when we worry we did or said the wrong thing. Our actions are derived from intuition and emotions. We may not have enough time to think about what we’re going to say, it was all just a reflex on being our true selves. And if they think you are wrong, that’s their problem. They can’t blame you for being yourself.
The one thing we can do is: Be nice
The rest is just an outcome of our experiment.
