Most people have a predefined set of intentions that a person can have towards another person. When people talk to each other, they don't reflect on what are the real intentions of the other person. They don't think: "Oh, this seems rude, but maybe he didn't mean that? Maybe he is actually trying to be friendly?". Have you ever been asked whether your intentions were correctly received? People usually don't do that.
People have a list of predefined intentions like attack, defense, criticism, flatter, show off, etc.
Other people's behavior automatically falls into one of those categories. It is done without thinking. When people feel hurt, they assume that it was the intention of this person to hurt their feelings. Then they feel morally justified to launch their own attack.
A lot of social behaviors had to arise to deal with this mechanism. People try to read other's intentions from their body language, voice tone, emotional load of words, etc.
But I'm not sure it is effective enough. People still very often can't guess other's intentions correctly.
Interestingly, the attitude that is set as default is a hostile attitude. People need to actively try to convince others of their friendly intentions. Otherwise, they are seen as hostile and unfriendly.
There is no predefined intention for cooperation in our society. An honest intention of cooperation can be interpreted as an attack.
Maybe because people feel threatened by everything they don't understand. And they can't understand an intention that is outside their predefined set.
Here I would like to wish good luck to aliens with fitting into this system and not being seen as offensive.
I developed a strategy to speak my intentions directly. But I'm not sure if it helps. People interpret my behavior according to this program anyway. The behavior of most people can be modeled using this list of programs. Sometimes I try to find my way around it, but in the end, it only confirms my models and predictions of the outcome.
When I talk to someone, I never use a predefined set of intentions. I've never had such a mental structure. I always put a lot of effort to guess someone's intentions.
Sometimes I see two possible explanations for someone's behavior. One which would require more thinking from this person and the second one, which would require less thinking. I don't remember any case when the first guess turned out to be correct. Usually either the second guess was correct, or the person was much more stupid than I thought it was possible and there was another explanation which I haven't even considered.
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