When You Do and Do Not Qualify Your Statements

Please pause before reading this blogpost and answer the title's implied questions for yourself.

Okay, let's try a concrete metaphor to begin our discussion.  Imagine you live immediately adjacent to a field pock-marked with many bare and grassy areas.  You do not have a garage or driveway, so you park on the street and your car occasionally is dusty.  How often do you wash it?  That depends on your personality and on external factors as sifted through your personality. If you are a "car person," you might wash the car often.  If you are a "it's just transportation" person, you might wash it rarely or never.  But even in the second case, if the car is new, you might be strongly inclined to keep it clean. 

My example is so simplistic and obvious that you could consider it worthless.  Almost anyone would realize that both internal and external factors would affect car-washing. However, I believe that literally everything you think and feel are determined by simultaneous online internal and external forces, either of which is more dominant in any given situation.  And to make my points I have chosen to offer one of the most contentious and divisive issues in America..

Tom says to Harry “There is never a justifiable reason for abortion” and he truly believes that.  In other words, at the time of speaking, Tom’s internal focus enables him to be cognitively and emotionally content with what he just said.  If he then allows his statement to remain unqualified, it further presumes that Tom’s externally-focused expectation is that he believes Harry agrees with the remark, or at least is not significantly troubled by it. 

On the other hand, what if after Tom utters his statement, he thinks that Harry might disagree with it?  That external focus presents Tom with a choice.  He, himself, needs no internal justification.  The main issue is whether he feels compelled to justify to Harry, a source outside himself.

To a considerable extent, the central issue is the importance that he ascribes to his own internally-based sense of genuineness versus the importance he ascribes to being socially accepted by Harry. For the latter, Tom might try to convince Harry about Tom’s abortion beliefs, or at least to positively influence Harry’s response to and/or evaluation of Tom.  There is a “critical threshold” specific to Tom that will cause him to act to stand by his original statement (internal sense of genuineness) or to reluctantly “water down” or change his comments (desire for social acceptance).     

Psychologists often use the term “agreeableness” to designate what they regard as one of five universal features of our personality.  They do not include “genuineness” among those five.  But I believe they should.

In our example, the fundamental issue might very well be the strength of Tom’s external need to be seen as agreeable to Harry versus his internal need to see himself as genuine.  In either case, Tom performs a costs-benefits analysis, probably unconsciously, but possibly consciously, that guides his course of action.  The variables within each costs-benefits analysis are idiosyncratic to Tom. For instance, does he have either a very strong or very weak need to be true to himself versus a very strong or very weak need for a positive relationship with Harry?

When you do or do not qualify your initial important assertions, you often can gain critical insight into your personality by assessing the relevant genuineness versus social acceptance dimension appertaining.  That is because life’s most valuable answers almost always are self-explored and self-generated.