The William James zone

From The Usual Error:

Brains are surprisingly good at inventing reasons for being angry, even if the original reason has gone away and the only real remaining cause is the adrenaline in the bloodstream. It can be physically impossible to let go of anger until your body has settled down. The rate at which your body returns to its baseline non-angry state varies from person to person. Being in this state of reinforced physical anger is what we call the William James zone, and how long it takes you to get out of that zone is your “William James threshold.” The philosopher William James predicted this effect long before the science of biology was able to confirm it,1 which is why we named this effect after him. The stereotype is that women take longer to cool down from anger than men do, but every person’s William James threshold will depend on circumstance, upbringing, mood, and multiple other factors. It’s best to avoid making assumptions and instead learn to deal with people as individuals.

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All of this is useful to know, but what does it have to do with communication and problem solving? The answer is this: if you’re aware of the difference between emotional anger and physical anger, some situations become much easier to handle. For instance, if you know that the person with whom you’re communicating has a long William James threshold, when they get angry you can ask for some time to cool down before continuing the conversation. It might be helpful to take a break, to go outside for a few minutes and take a walk, or to be in separate rooms for a while. If anyone involved in the conflict is experiencing physical anger, it will be especially difficult to communicate successfully. This is why it’s often better to wait it out. Cool-down time is a good thing to negotiate before anyone gets upset so that you can ask for it in the moment in a way that won’t cause tempers to flare up even higher.

Being aware of the William James zone can also help you be more understanding of other people’s anger. If you realize that your partner is angry because of something going on in their body rather than because of anything you did, it can help put their angry outburst into perspective. A deeper understanding of what’s actually going on allows you to react with more compassion.

Thinking you can make the universe owe you something

Success generally requires pain (of only the pain of admitting one has made mistakes), effort. and risk. Unfortunately, people are known to get the causality backwards and ignore the hard parts, and assume that sufficient pain (sometimes their own, sometimes other people's) will produce riskless success.

This probably isn't the whole explanation, but I'm fascinated-- in a Gorgon's face sort of way-- my mind is apt to get stuck) by the way people can believe that punishment is a reliable way of getting what they want. I'll willing to bet most of them know of times punishment didn't control their behavior, and I'm sure they're heard of punishment failing to get punishers what they want (in extreme cases, the failure is called martyrdom), but somehow, it doesn't register.

Punishment isn't even a reliable way of guaranteeing that you don't get what you don't want.

Anyway, Timothy Burke wrote something which reminded me of the lovely essay at the end of Charlie Stross' The Atrocity Archives that looks at the overlap between espionage, horror, and geekery:

Covert action doesn’t seem any better than overt action in deliberately producing complex, multilayered sociopolitical change. “Get this government to stop doing something that is not in our long-term interests”, “Change the cultural and social nature of this government over there”, “Make this place stable”, “Make this group of bad actors less able to do bad things in the world”.

A covert action plan can, if all the stars align, accomplish these goals for a little while in a little way. Not, as far as I can see, to a degree markedly different than many overt institutions can. But there is something about secrecy that unleashes extravagant dreams and imaginative fantasies about a world where sociopolitical trends have simpler, more intimate, and more knowable levers, where killing heads of state is a hey presto! way to make a new state, or mindfucking insurgents with some leaflets and misinformation is a way to get rid of an insurgency.

It’s not just that coverts and their armchair supporters dream of finding the delicious center of tractability inside of the confusing, multilayered Tootsie Pop of modern life. It’s that they also hope that covert action will somehow rid us of the demon of unpredictable and unintended outcomes who so relentlessly stalks most other policy-making, as if covert action might be a humanint form of a smart missile, delivered only to its target. But if there’s any domain of government action where that demon makes his home, it’s covert action: most of all, he hates sunlight and transparency.