What prevents one from communicating effectively during a conflict situation in an online community?
What prevents one from communicating effectively during a conflict situation in an online community?
Cognitive biases
Cognitive biases are our subconscious reactions. Often our position is due to our prejudices and patterns of behavior that we have learned during our lifetimes.
Cognitive biases are systematic behavior patterns that are based on unconscious reactions, mental shortcuts and emotional factors. Here are the most common biases.
- Hindsight. The confidence that nowadays events could be predicted in advance.
- Fundamental attribution error. The habits of labeling people based on superficial facts.
- Confirmation bias. When one intentionally searches to prove their ideas and refuses anything that disproves them.
Exaggeration
In a conflict situation we should not exaggerate or generalize. We need to avoid using words like “always” and “never” and focus on discussing only specific behaviors that we have observed.
Feeling superior
One should never show any signs of superiority directly or indirectly when communicating, especially in a conflict situation. Even if you are one hundred percent sure about the right answer, present your ideas as suggestions.
Being negative
When one feels angry, their typical reaction is to start blaming the other side. All they will get in response to the blame is others’ defensive reaction. Before starting a conversation be sure that you feel good and do not experience strong negative emotions to the other party that can affect the way you communicate.
Going off topic
Sometimes when you contact a user about their destructive behavior, they begin to rationalize the behavior by providing “whys”, referring to others, etc. This allows them to divert the conversation from discussing their behavior that you observed to discussing some general and sometimes controversial ideas. You need to prevent this from happening the moment you see it. When you see a user who rationalize their behavior in those ways, do the following.
- Explicitly show that you hear what the user is saying.
- In polite neutral language return to the conversation to the user and their behavior.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.