Bias

[mrissa]

Recently I've received several compliments that ended in "although, of course, I might be biased." Hmm. Actually, it's more than recently. It started with my parents when I was pretty small. "Your dad and I think you're kind of neat. Of course, we might be biased." (In this context, "kind of neat" is Scandosotan for "fantabulous.")

I've been thinking more about this lately, about how we're taught to systematically discount this sort of thing, how we're supposed to treat compliments as untrustworthy if they come from close to us. You can't trust your parents, your best friends, your significant others, anybody who might actually like you as a person, much less (heaven forbid) love you. Unless they say you look horrible. Then it's all for your own good. Believe the bad, discount the good. Bah.

I think most girls are taught that guys will compliment you only to get you in bed, and we shouldn't listen to them. Somewhere along the line I started to wonder why they'd want to go to bed with someone who was not at all appealing in the first place. That's more than a little strange, and it made me think that something was perhaps wrong with this advice. That sure, maybe there's a time in some people's lives where very large percentages of their preferred sex(es) are attractive to them, but that the attraction is no less genuine for that.

I think we need to trust compliments. I think I need to trust compliments. That doesn't mean taking them as unvarnished truth. It does mean trusting that sometimes there's a good reason for someone to say something nice. That often there's a good reason for it. That a bias in favor of you says more good things about you than bad. It's no surprise that when we like people, we think more highly of them, or vice versa, or that the two would play into each other. The interplay doesn't make them less trustworthy.

Having actual female friends has really helped this along. Having women in my life who are neither family members nor engaged in some complex system of zero-sum point-scoring has been incredibly liberating. The positive, grooming parts of primate behavior are starting to show their face in my life -- hesitantly, but still, there they are, these other primates, reaching over a coffee table to tuck a strand of my hair back or noticing my earrings or lighting up when I take the time to say to a stranger in the grocery store, "That's a great sweater."

I started thinking about all this -- and I can't decide whether this is odd or appropriate -- at my first con. It was ICFA, and they were getting a picture of the whole crowd of us down by the pool, and some lovely woman (I think I remember who, but I'm not absolutely certain) pushed my shoulder gently and said, "Go in the front, ducks, you've got lovely legs." Which is so foreign to how physics women interacted, and so very very foreign to how my high school pecking order was arranged, that I smiled at her all baffled-like and went in the front as instructed. It was extremely confusing. I poked at it in my brain for awhile: she wasn't trying to get anything out of me, and she was noticing some physical thing. How very odd. What was she doing? She was being nice. Real, warm, friendly niceness to some confused kid who had all the hallmarks of being part of her own tribe.

She was making it all go. It was like making bread for somebody, only with a little word and gesture instead. I hadn't really known that kind of thing could be done without flour, sugar, butter, usually some overripe bananas. It is much easier to trust banana bread, because when you poke it with your finger, it's still there. (Depending on who lives at your house, that is....) But biased, fallible human compliments and positive interactions are part of making it all go, too. It's not all baked goods. This is probably a revelation people from non-baking cultures don't need to have. As I am from a baking culture, it was quite necessary.

(I do not entirely believe the world would fall apart if I stopped making banana bread. No; because there is still gingerbread, and apple bread, and pumpkin bread....)

I don't mind if you know me and you think I'm prettier than you would if you didn't know me. I think that's just fine. I probably think you're better-looking than you would be if you were some stranger, too. Some biases are to be trusted. The ones that go warm and human and caring, those are the good ones. Go with those.

Comments

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Bravo!

pre-coffee muddling

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

Wow.

I've got to think about this for a while, because it feels like an essential truth.

(Aside: Soren tells me I'm beautiful, and my automatic response is to shake my head and look away a little. Even though I have objective evidence that I'm striking, accepting such a flat compliment is hard, and too easily dismissed -- "Well, you're in love with me.")

Related to this, though, is how quickly reasonable acceptance of such a compliment can be perceived as snobbery. If you say, "Thank you," because you know you are pretty, rather than immediately saying, "Oh, no! My nose is too big, I have knock-knees, don't you think my eyes are too small?" some people will accuse you of being arrogant.

I'm struggling for a world in which I can be pleased about my positive attributes, and proud of the things I've strived to achieve, without being perceived as having false modesty or overweening arrogance. (The distinction, for me, is that I'm pleased that I have big brown eyes, but I was born with them; I'm proud of my posture, and the carriage of my arms, because I've taught myself those.)

Re: pre-coffee muddling

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Someone who accuses you of being arrogant for thanking someone graciously for a compliment is not your friend. Or else they need to be taught how friends behave. Also, accepting a compliment is not the same thing as agreeing with a compliment.

The difference between pleased and proud is an important one, although sometimes the line gets fuzzy between receiving good genes and choosing to make good use of them. Totally agree there.

Does it matter if Soren's love for you makes him see the positive bits more clearly than the negative ones? How would that be a bad thing? Do you see his positive bits more than his negative ones?

Re: pre-coffee muddling

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

My wife and I both, at times, have been called arrogant because we tend not to conform to what other people think we should do--often meaning what everybody else is doing. This sounds like one of those types.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Exactly so: there's an arrogance about correcting someone else's taste. If they said to you, "Your best friend is gorgeous," you wouldn't dream of saying, "Actually, she's rather plain, and have you seen those thighs? OOF!"

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Hmm. To me, people I know well don't start looking better, they just look *right*. I don't generally think of Ted as good-looking or not (I think to an unbiased person he is reasonably so), I just think of him as Ted-looking. This doesn't stop me from appreciating, say, the play of muscle in his back as the light catches it. On the other hand, I think people I *don't* know tend to look worse to me - I mean, if someone sort of looks like Ted but isn't, he's going to look not-quite-right to me, which will diminish his attractiveness until I know him well enough for him to look just like himself.

I'm not sure if people I know whom I don't like look better or worse to me, though.

"...But I might be biased"

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

And writers, as I'm sure you well know, hear this all the time. "Don't show your stories to friends and relatives because they'll just praise them, they won't give you honest feedback." I don't know about their friends, but mine are perfectly happy to offer negative criticism if they think it's needed. (Although granted I only show the stories to friends who read a lot of SF/F, so I'm pretty certain they know what they're talking about.)

Re: "...But I might be biased"

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

A loved one once asked me if maybe my book was getting rejected because it was no good. Because she thought it was good, but she loved me, so how should she know?

It was an extremely upsetting thing to hear. But yes, I've gotten quite negative critiques from loved ones, so I think it was just her.

Re: "...But I might be biased"

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I think the thing about relatives and friends being biased is...well, when someone knows you as a person before a writer, maybe when they mean "good" they mean "good for something that someone they know wrote" versus "good on a universal quality judgement level". It's a different scale being used, and maybe not the one you're looking for measure upon. My mom is like that: she can't get me out of the way of the story.

That being said, my boy is a thorough and unflinching critiquer, who does this thing. It's got to be all about personality.

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

Mrissa, I think you've poked at an essential truth here. It just seems like we are, as a people, hard wired to not be able to accept or give a full, honest compliment to those we love, like or generally care about, without some kind of qualifier.

I know it's a problem at our house. If careswen or I compliment the other one, the standard response is, "Yeah, but you're biased," or "you have to say that because you're married to me." Well, no. I say that because I DO think that blouse looks good on you, and I DO think your nose is cute.

I had an eye opening experience in The positive, grooming parts of primate behavior as you called it last week. I found myself sitting in a coffeeshop with a group of friends, just chatting, and it struck me how, for the very first time in my life, I actually was part of a circle of people who are friends and care about each other, as opposed to the one or two isolated friendships I have usually maintained over my life. It felt good.

And just for the record, the people in our household find the people in your household pretty nifty, even if we have only gotten together once. No qualifiers involved. We thought you guys were neat people, period.

In Peace
Michael

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, we like you, too. We haven't been socializing as much with people we don't know as well while everything is on hold schedule-wise, but you're definitely on our good list.

I have never once heard a marital requirement that one find the other's nose cute. It was, at the very least, not in any promises I've made. It's good to appreciate each other, but the specifics are up to us.

[careswen.livejournal.com]

When your schedules and ours settle down to a more available-to-try-out-new-people level, perhaps we could do something fun. Just let us know if you're interested and available.

Yeah, I don't remember the cute-nose thing in our marital contract either. Must be in the fine print.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We will definitely poke you when things settle a bit.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

There's a meme out there (no, not an LJ meme-thing) where parents and teachers make a point of unfailingly praising the work of young children.

It may even be a necessary thing; certainly a 10-year-old is very rarely a first-class pianist by objective standards, and yet that 10-year-old, and the 6-year-old that started taking lessons and lead to the 10-year-old, *does* need to be praised for what they accomplish along the way. I think perhaps people are bad at both *using* and *understanding* nuances in praise.

And seeing this happen, for work that objectively and by adult standards is mediocre, may encourage people to distrust praise from family and friends in general.

Then there's the model of the supportive wife to the artist, who's unstintingly supportive and doesn't actually understand the artistic work at all. The less said about that the better, it seems to me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think I got very lucky in my parents' use of nuance in praise. It was especially good, I think, because the folks understood something of what I was doing in most cases, so they could say, of my flute playing, "that fingering sounded a lot smoother," or "I could really hear the improvement in your embochure from all that practice you've done." And not, "Oh, honey, you sound better than Ian Anderson!"

Since almost no one things of the supportive husband of the artist in that way, it's not something that occurred to me as a spouse thing. I think of grandparents that way....

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

I'm extra lucky in that I have not only a supportive spouse, but a wife who understands what I am doing, and really wants me to succeed. So much so that she is in truth my first editor, proof reader, sounding board, and toughest plot critic. I love it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think a few people around here would know something about that.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, M'ris, I have to say that I like you. One thing did occur to me, though, regarding writing and friends/relatives critiquing the work. From what I've read of what you've written, I see parts of you in the characters, which means that I automatically like them and may be able to flesh them out more in my mind than someone who doesn't know you. While this does not mean that I think my judgement of the plot is affected, it may mean that I find more enjoyment in the book than those who don't know you, thus making a character critique more difficult to do for those close to you.

I do agree whole-heartedly that people need to believe compliments from their friends instead of discarding them, however, since each person's perception of another is unique, I am always left wondering what the opinion of the next person is. This holds not only for compliments but for people's ideas, opinions, and impressions are of various topics as well as of myself. It would be so interesting to be able to understand another's outlook.

At any rate, take care and get out of the holding pattern soon!

Heathah