Use Hanlon’s Razor To Communicate Better On Social Networks

Social networks have truly revolutionized the way we communicate. Just a few years ago, it was almost unthinkable to communicate live with your friends when you were not with them. Now all we need is an internet connection and a profile on one of the many social networks that exist.

What hasn’t evolved yet is the way we interact with others and the way we use language primarily as a tool for building relationships. And of course, all kinds of misunderstandings can arise when you don’t talk face-to-face with someone, misunderstandings that often say more about the person interpreting the message than the person sending the message.

The elephant in the room

Your phone goes off. It’s a notification from one of your social networks. You look at your phone and read ‘Hey! How are you?’.

Now it’s just that you had a bad day that day or the person who sent the message is one of your coworkers who is always snogging at your boss and you think he wants to ask you a favor again . Or maybe you’re in a really good mood or it’s your best friend who really wanted to talk to you. However, the person who sent you a message cannot know all this. He can’t know this because your conversation isn’t face-to-face. Thus, he has no access to other important factors, such as the importance of your choice of words:

• Proximity: The location and circumstances in which the conversation takes place. It’s not the same to greet someone on the street who is obviously in a hurry and races past you, apologizing for their hasty behavior, as it is to greet someone on a social network. When we are logged in to our social networks, it may as well be that we are just busy on our computer. We look at messages to see if they’re important, but we don’t necessarily have a reason to respond right away. This allows the recipient to jump to all sorts of hasty conclusions, the most dramatic being the most dramatic: “He doesn’t like me, or he would respond,” “He’s mad at me,” or “What could I have done?”

• Vocal or extralinguistic behaviour: This refers to our own intonation, the way we pronounce words, but not the content itself. No matter how often we use it, neither irony, nor sarcasm, nor jokes can always be noticed equally well in conversations on social networks. The tone in which you speak is very important for understanding the meaning of the message, and in a world of technology, this tone can only be captured with video messages.

Verbal or Linguistic Behavior: Yes, this refers to the language we use to get our message across. But also in this case the distance of the receiver plays a role. If the guy you like says hello to you in person, it will make you nervous and you may react as if you have a speech disorder: stutter, aphasia, anomie… This is not the same as if he bumped into you talking on your social network and you happen to be surrounded by friends who can help you figure out what to send back in order to appear “not nervous or stupid” or to appear “original”.

This is something most of us are aware of. We know that communication depends on all kinds of factors, from our tone to the distance between two interlocutors. However, we do not take this into account at all on social networks. It becomes an elephant in the room; we all see him, but we all explain his presence in different ways, by interpreting messages in a way that suits us best.

Hanlon’s razor

Robert J. Hanlon gave us a solution to this problem back in 1980, before social networks even existed, in his famous book on Murphy’s Law. In this book, Hanlon expounded an idea also called Hanlon’s razor, or Hanlon’s razor, or the Hanlon principle: “Never attribute malice to what can be adequately explained with stupidity.”

Hanlon’s razor involves reducing the degree of intentionality we attribute to most of the conversations we read and have on social networks. Many of the mistakes we perceive and interpret as insults are the result of circumstance or oversight far more often than anything else. In reality, the world will forget us much faster than it will plot against us.

As we mentioned above, written communication lacks all kinds of important information that we do have access to in direct communication. That is why it is important to be careful about how we interpret the written word. In this way, we will be able to avoid anger and misunderstandings that actually make no sense.