Some Signs of Harmful or Untrustworthy Relationships

Image generated by Clearer Thinking team using Adobe Express
Coauthored with the Clearer Thinking team and cross-posted from the Clearer Thinking blog. We recently conducted qualitative research by crowd-sourcing over 100 open-ended responses to the question: "What signs do you look for that help you identify people who are likely to be untrustworthy or who are likely to hurt you if they become your close friend or partner?" We thought the answers contained some insights that may help you to identify people with whom it would be risky ...
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Eight ways you can validate someone’s emotions in a healthy way (and four strategies to avoid)

Photo by Adrianna Geo on Unsplash
A lot of times, when people are upset, they want their friends and loved ones to "validate their feelings." I think there is a lot of confusion about what it really means to "validate feelings," and I also believe there are both healthy and unhealthy forms of doing this validation.  Healthy vs. Unhealthy Emotional Validation  I would say that the main difference between the healthy validation of emotions and the unhealthy version is that the healthy version is based on genuine c...
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Awkwardly Embracing Awkwardness

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash
All else being equal, it's good to avoid creating awkwardness. But too much awkwardness-avoidance can be harmful. Lately, I've been trying to accept a bit more awkwardness (rather than reflexively avoiding it) in cases where I think doing so can produce value. Here are four areas where I'm leaning more into awkwardness: 1. When asked for feedback on a project (and I think it will fail), I'm usually tempted to focus on what I like about it.  I've now become more likely ...
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On Emotionally Reactive Traits: a hidden cause of drama and ruined relationships

Photo by Rhys Kentish on Unsplash
Have you ever known a well-intentioned, kind person who had a pattern of creating interpersonal drama? I've known quite a few people like this, and they've often baffled me. Why would good people engage in behavior that systematically destroys relationships? After spending a while thinking about my past experiences with such cases, I now have a name for a cluster of traits that I believe, in at least some of these cases, help explain what's going on. I call this cluster "Emoti...
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Understanding Relationship Conflicts: Clashing Trauma

Artwork by Alexander Milov | Photograph by Adam Hornyak on Unsplash
Here is a common situation that you might have noticed: close friends (or romantic partners) suddenly have their relationship explode – both people feel like the other one hurt them and that they themselves did nothing wrong. These heart-breaking and all-too-common situations can arise from a pattern we call "Clashing Trauma." It has been estimated that over 70% of adults in the world have experienced at least one traumatic event in their lifetime. Consequently, the majority of fr...
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The enduring wisdom of a disabled man born into slavery nearly 2000 years ago

Imaginary portrait of Epictetus. (Imagine is in the public domain https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Epicteti_Enchiridion_Latinis_versibus_adumbratum_(Oxford_1715)_frontispiece.jpg)
This is a cross-post from my post on the Clearer Thinking blog (from March 1, 2022). The post first appeared on this site on December 3, 2022. Epictetus, born ~50AD, was a disabled man born into slavery in Phrygia (present-day Turkey). Nothing that he wrote down survives; we know about him only through the words of other scholars. But he was so wise that his ideas reverberate through society today. This article summarizes some parts of his incredible life and the impact that he had on the wo...
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What Are All the Things That Humans Need?

Below is my attempt to list all human needs ranked according to their typical importance (from most important to least). Thanks for the idea, Maslow! I'm defining a "need" here as something non-replaceable (i.e., you can't just substitute it for something else), which, if substantially unsatisfied, would inhibit well-being for the vast majority of people. You might say that you "need an iced tea" on a hot day, but it could be easily replaceable with lemonade or iced coffee, s...
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Intersecting advice from highly successful people

Photo by Paulina Milde-Jachowska on Unsplash
It's popular to read interviews and books with advice from highly successful people. But is their advice good advice? Perhaps it works for their situation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it generalizes to other circumstances. Maybe they are just overfitting to their personal life experience. Perhaps they are attributing too much of their success to the actions they happened to take rather than to factors outside of their control. And what should we make of the fact that advice often contradi...
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Is altruism rational?

Photo by Hernan Pauccara from Pexels
When people learn just a little about game theory, decision theory, economics, or even evolutionary theory, they sometimes come away thinking that altruism is somehow “irrational” or that rational agents are selfish. Here are a number of reasons why altruism is often rational: I. People can value altruism for its own sake: 1. Intrinsic values: as a psychological fact, most humans intrinsically value at least some things as ends (not merely as means to other ends) that are not about...
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The Reciprocation Problem

Sarah Parrott
The "reciprocation problem": a mathematical tragedy in relationships regarding how often people should ask each other to hang out The Setup Person X and person Y are friends (or lovers or close work colleagues or whatever). Person X and Person Y happen to both feel the same way about each other (i.e., equal amounts of interest, affection, lust, respect, etc.)Person X's ideal is to make plans with person Y every two weeks, whereas person Y (who has a lower amount of free time, or less need...
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