I've thought this for a very long time, but was triggered to write it down when describing my father's behaviour to a friend, and so of course thought to write it down more fully here too.
If I define what I mean by 'tertiary thinking' then readers will most likely guess the instances of it that bother me. Tertiary thinking is the habit of taking into account other people's responses to your actions when deciding what to do. I call it tertiary because it's the third step from the action; the first step is the action itself, the second another person's response to it, and so the third step is reconsidering the action in response to the person's predicted response. Obviously this can go on forever; it's a cycle of bluff, double-bluff, triple-bluff and so on that makes many strategic games of my youth games of chance: because two skilled players can see the best moves and must simply guess which the opponent will do. In this way, if we rank options in order we hit a game-theory problem: that the best option is to respond to the person's move and do a counter-move, but that the person will know you'll do that and will counter your move, so you counter that move instead... ad infinitum.
I’ll provide a couple of examples: firstly, as I just stated, this happens when playing games. If I want to capture a space that my opponent in a game controls, I will move towards it. But my opponent will see that his space is important, and defend it. Therefore my best option is to leave that space and take one or more less important spaces so that he has wasted his time defending somewhere that wasn’t attacked. But he knows this too, so he doesn’t defend the space. Therefore my best option is to attack the prized space.
The second example is more relevant to the contexts I am currently considering. There is a woman who wants me to cook dinner. I don’t want to cook dinner. She could ask me, but she knows that I don’t want to cook dinner and so she will only get her way half the time (in a sharing relationship). Because she knows I might refuse, she instead chooses to have a tantrum about something else. I will then respond to this tantrum by placating her, which will involve making dinner. So far, so normal. But actually, I don’t, because I know perfectly well that it’s her turn to make dinner, and so instead of her getting her way all the time, I still refuse to do things that I think it’s unfair for me to do. So as a response, she should stop having tantrums, because they’re a waste of time. However, she doesn’t, and we live through tantrums all the time.
The two examples differ, in that one cannot reach an equilibrium, and the other does, but an unsatisfactory one. It is my experience that when people indulge in manipulation and are unsuccessful, they are especially unsatisfied, just as people who are manipulated are unsatisfied. Even an attempt at manipulation using positive actions is unfair, to my mind. A third example will illustrate. My aunt buys me a tasty chocolate box when I am staying with her. I am startled, but can hardly refuse a generous and tasty present. “Why thank-you, dearest Aunt”, I say. “I feel lazy tonight,” she replies “Would you do the cooking?”.
The generous and thoughtful gift is suddenly no longer a kind gesture, but payment for a service to be rendered. The problem here, as with all manipulation using positive actions, is that my aunt has set both sides of the bargain. She chose that I would do the cooking, and chose what she would do in exchange. Bargains enforced by emotional blackmail are not optimal outcomes for me.
Now we know what tertiary thinking is, we can see a number of applications where it's an important concept: in financial markets, personal dealings and government policy.
Although I obviously first hatched the concept as a child, after thinking about the board games that my father taught me, I want to start with the most personal of the subjects I've mentioned here. In relationships (and not just sexual ones, but friendships too) it is very common for people to engage in tertiary thinking. My personal examples are perhaps best not described here, but it is probably easy for most people to recall an example for themselves. I can certainly imagine one: a person wants to go out with some friends, and the partner sets a deadline for return. Now if the partner wants the partier to come back at 11pm, the partner might say 9, in order to reach 11 as a compromise between 2am and 9pm.
Or a person might say "I'm fine" when she (stereotypically) is brewing an argument not because she means it but because she's saving it for a time more convenient to her. Or one might find someone saying "You don't care for me" when she means "I want my way", or perhaps "You should express your feelings more".
These examples are just a drop in the ocean of human interaction; I find that I see examples everywhere, in lots of small ways as well as these large and typically unpleasant examples. Describing these examples as unpleasant isn't very helpful, since I find almost every instance unpleasant. One final example is from the film I'm watching: Alien 3. Ripley refuses to tell the medical officer, who is her friend, about the alien, because she's worried about being judged. So she avoids his judgement by not giving him a chance.
We can easily spot some flaws in the principles that would lead to such behaviour. Firstly, and most importantly, I suppose, from a practical point of view, is that if one person can do it, then so can everyone else. When no-one is saying what he means, everyone loses touch with who thinks what, and no-one really knows each other, and communication and compromise are impossible, since no-one dares truly say what he thinks because that information is precious in the war to get his own way. Tertiary thinking turns human interaction into combat. That's hardly a way to feel close to people.
Secondly, it is inherently selfish. Accounting for someone's responses in order to get what you want does not show love or care for the other person. As I have just stated, it treats the other person as an enemy to be manipulated and fooled, not trusted. It might be used by people who claim that the other's actions are not demonstrating their feelings, but it is a very similar thing itself; it shows not an innocent person being hurt, but a selfish person being aggressive and manipulative.
Thirdly, it denies the agency of the other person. It shows an inability to trust them, or allow them to make their own decisions. In this way it is inherently aggressive, even though many instances might better be called 'passive-aggressive'. It certainly blends into emotional blackmail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_blackmail):
'Many of the people who use emotional blackmail are friends, colleagues and family members with whom we have close ties that we want to strengthen and salvage' - parents, partners, bosses or lovers. No matter how much the blackmailer cares about the victim, they use their intimate knowledge to win compliance. '"My way or the highway" is the punisher's motto. No matter what you feel or need, punishers override you'. By contrast, 'self-punishers cast their targets in the role of the "grown-up" - the only adult in the relationship...supposed to come running when they cry', while sufferers tack the position that 'if...you don't do what I want, I will suffer, and it will be your fault '. Finally for Forward and Frazier, 'Tantalizers are the most subtle blackmailers...offer nothing with a free heart'.
Knowing that the victim wants love or approval, blackmailers may threaten to withhold it or take it away altogether, or make the victim feel they must earn it. If the victim believes the blackmailer, he/she could fall into a pattern of letting the blackmailer control his/her decisions and behavior.'
It blends into emotional blackmail because it abuses people's desire for compromise; to show some goodwill and reach a balanced decision. Even in meetings of strangers, humans have a desire, either instinctive or culturally engrained, for co-operation (and for good reason; co-operation is vital for society).
Am I also condemning being thoughtful and tactful, when one keeps quiet about something, or speaks carefully, in order to spare another’s feelings? I don’t think that all instances of tact fall into this hateful category, and the reason is because they don’t abuse and control another person, lead to bad consequences if everyone does it, nor show selfishness or a lack of trust. Having described general differences, can we be more specific about how to distinguish between types of tertiary thought? Of course we can! The answer, perhaps lies in re-thinking my name for the problem. Tertiary thought isn’t really the problem at all! The problem is quaternary thought: the next step in the chain of action and response. The problem is not in allowing other people’s possible responses to control your behaviour, but trying to control other people’s behaviour. So tertiary thought is a problem only when it goes a step further and is deliberately chosen in order to obtain a quaternary response, rather than, as in cases of tact, preventing a response by not divulging the information that would cause it.
Having made this distinction, I can expand the problem to include all even levels of the chain of action of response. It doesn’t matter if you consider a person’s response to your intended action, revise the action, consider the new response and repeat any number of times: it’s all manipulative if the end-point you’re using to judge your planned actions is someone else’s response to them, rather than what your actions might achieve themselves. I do think it’s worth distinguishing secondary thought, which involves no revision of your own action, from quaternary and above. If I simply ask someone to do something in an open way I’m not being manipulative; it becomes manipulative and an abuse of the other’s status as a free agent when he doesn’t know that I want a certain action but I am attempting to make him do it. So I might adjust a request to be particularly polite if I know the person to be a stickler for manners, but the request is still open: he knows I want something from him, and so my politeness is more akin to tertiary thought, of allowing possible responses to control me, than to manipulation of others’ responses.
I am a straightforward person in person; I say what I mean and what I think, but not because I’m simple-minded. I have seemed like an easy target for manipulation by others, but have not been: I am straightforward because I like things that way, and I dislike conflict and emotional complexity, not because I can’t spot it or am bad at it. And so I get called stubborn, because that’s the only other way to adapt to manipulation: either you join in with the lies and attempted manipulation, or you simply refuse to play any sort of back-and-forth at all, whether it be genuine compromise or simply manipulation. Of course, I also have another motive, which is that I prefer to stick to principles than emotions anyway, and when it comes to principles I don’t like compromise anyway. Most people understand this notion when I say something like ‘I’d refuse to murder a person even if it would make the rest of the world happy’, and agree that compromising one’s principles is a bad thing. And yet when it comes to ‘I see no reason why I can’t have a good night out with my friends’ some people think that a girlfriend making enough of a fuss about it should be enough for me. If I ask why she finds the idea so terrible, I’m apparently a nasty person, whereas she, who wants to prevent me having a good time, is being wronged.
This specific example hasn’t really come up for me, but I know that it’s an example from enough people’s lives to resonate with them (and, if you swap girlfriend with boyfriend, with even more people). I wonder how one gets like that: does upbringing play a role? If people are unresponsive to direct requests, but give in to childish tantrums, do they inculcate this behaviour? How much has my (strict) upbringing interacted with my tendency to rationality and thought (rather than feeling) to make me particularly devoted to principles as the basis for actions rather than compromises involving feelings? The girl I knew certainly lacked insight into her vile behaviour, and so must have grown up with it as a perfectly acceptable part of her day-to-day life; it was her default way of interacting with people, and what she always used to get what she wanted. So it was what she tried when she wanted love, but very sadly it doesn’t control people’s feelings: only their actions. And since it’s a method of introducing conflict into relationships, it kills love rather than fostering it.
So we have a world of unpleasant and stubborn ‘sociopaths’, who have experienced manipulation and prefer to avoid it, scheming manipulators who can’t trust anyone and abuse others, either without insight or to battle others, and benighted suckers who go through their lives enabling everyone else’s lives rather than living their own.
It isn’t solely a problem in personal relationships. We have exactly the same problem at institutional levels, of which the most important is the relationship between politicians and the media. A politician might like to answer questions directly, but he knows that if he does give a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’, even if he explains the answer and qualifies it, his thoughtfulness and all the exceptions will be ignored and the straight answer will be misinterpreted all across the media. The politician then gives complex and careful answers in which he devotes most of his brain power (minimal or not) to thinking about how to avoid traps, rather than dissecting the issue well. The journalists are starved of both silly splashes misinterpreting politicians and decent interviews expressing real opinions and politics, and so become more aggressive, and meanwhile the audience becomes ever more disillusioned with the wily and sly politicians. This relates to something I’ve mentioned before, which is how forgoing responsibility, even when there is no compulsion to be responsible, often has negative consequences. In this case the journalists who ignored a general rule to report on news, and instead started to create it by misquoting politicians, or focussing on small parts of their speech, sent the whole of politics into a downward spiral in exchange for a few cheap headlines.
Where else do we get this problem? Well, science suffers terribly from exaggeration. The field of thought that aims for unbiased assessment and logical detachment has ardent self-promotion at its centre. The numerous causes, from funding and career assessment, through to recognition and the chances of standing out amongst many, could be considered in an essay about this alone, but I think it worth saying that if you know that people will automatically subtract a set amount of certainty from whatever you express then in order to have them reach your desired level of belief in your research you simply over-emphasise the importance of your findings. If readers were better able to be scientific, and scepticism were better calibrated to the claims being made and the research supporting them, then there’d be less incentive for this. But now that it exists, if you want funding or to be published, you need to have something more spectacular to say than everyone else, and that means exaggerating more, in order to reach the ‘right‘ outcome of being competitive. It says a lot about humanity that we’ve managed to coat with lies the field of endeavour that seeks truth. We’ve corrupted it to human ends of making money, careers and social esteem and forgotten about the truth entirely. It’s a metaphor for every ideal that ever existed.
Did you think I’d finished, or had left politics behind? It’s not just the relationship between journalism and politics that suffers, but political discourse itself. Politicians have learned not only to fear sensationalism, but to use it. This gives us a tendency to extremism, and, where they can get away with it, simplistic analyses of situations that beguile supporters (and frustrate critics).
Politicians aren’t the only ones. The more we rely on responses, the more it seems acceptable. If it becomes too normal, we have people who think that the law should act in the same way. We start to have judgements responding to popular opinion that take into account emotional responses, whilst also purporting to be fair and just. Given that different people have different emotions, using them to determine a punishment, or whether a crime has been committed, can hardly be fair. I’ve been less than positive about emotions and their use in decision-making before, and said my piece more comprehensively there.
Finally, we come to economics, that makes the world go round. Free markets use the premise that individuals know what’s best for them. When it comes to stock markets, the premise is that crowds, by pooling their knowledge and putting a financial gain or loss on the knowledge, know better than any one individual, and each company is rated very accurately. Any one person can then gain an advantage by trusting the crowd more than his own, incomplete, knowledge. If more people trust the crowd, the sum of knowledge going into determining the price decreases, and markets become more volatile as more and more people respond to the changes as signifying wisdom. We get bubbles and other unpleasant consequences (economists are better placed to explain the problems of volatility than I am). Once again, it all comes from thinking about others’ responses (although in this case, not trying to control them). Where tertiary thinking turns bad we need either another stage of action and response, to turn into quaternary thinking, and trying to control a person, or we need a ‘game-theoretic’ approach in which there is a negative externality (this started as an economics paragraph, after all) to the benefit to be had by changing one’s response.
Humans have evolved big brains precisely because of the advantages of predicting others’ actions. And yet I don’t think that we should always employ this ability. An economist might ask how we could capture the negative externalities of the situations where it has bad consequences. I might ask how we stop people doing it (which are very similar questions). One way is to impose a social penalty on it. If people were to realise when someone else is using others, rather than their own abilities and exertions, and not give them funding, respect, headlines, votes or jobs on the trading floor, then I think it’d die down for a while. If, in personal relationships, people respond to manipulation with more of the same, the antagonism is destructive. If everyone were to adapt by being stubborn and not bending to emotional pressure, then perhaps we’d all learn to compromise using more sensible methods than manipulation, such as truth.
Isn’t it amazing where board games can take a child?
