Agreeableness
Sometime in the hormonal and ethical effluvium of my youth, I was gifted with a very low key but very effective superpower: Agreeableness. In fact, it’s become such a cornerstone of my personality that some of my friends in Prague have named the “Garamoni” as a percentage scale of agreeableness.
I have found myself in the following scenario many times:
Friend A: “This topic implies this fact or observation, and my position is the only thing that makes sense.”
Friend B: “Wait, but what about this counterexample? It’s pretty clear that my position makes more sense than yours.”
Friends A and B: “Michael, what do you think?”
Me: “I can really understand both of your positions! Let me hypothesize a potential combinatory third way in which both positions make sense.”
Friends: “Wow that was at least 70% Garamoni.”
Sometimes my response is more hesitant, like: “Okay, I can kind of see where you’re coming from.”
Friends: “Wow, only 30% Garamoni there, that must be rough.”
The implication is that sometimes I act as though I agree in order to ameliorate, ingratiate, or pacify (which, according to this obviously rigorously defined scientific scale, is anything that falls below 50% Garamoni
). Though, my friends are generous enough to also imply that this actually reflects poorly on the people that I’m talking to, rather than on me. Despite that, the idea remains that I put on an act when I disagree with someone. Which… if I’m being honest… is true. I don’t think that’s a bad thing—but it’s also important for me to be self-aware of this tendency.Recently, one of the friends who helped create the Garamoni scale was asking us what our one piece of big meaningful life advice would be for someone. It was in considering my answer that I realized: agreeableness can be learned.
As soon as I began to explain the mental strategy for how to do this, I also began to semi-anxiously analyze my own words as they poured out of me. This sounds kind of manipulative. Are you doing this to people to achieve some end? Are you taking advantage of people’s trust? Anxiety is a natural consequence of speaking without thinking, to be sure.
As I thought about it later, though, I had to laugh at myself. The way I explained it at first did sound like a very utilitarian and ultimately cold deployment of convincingly feigned sympathy in order to win allies and social inclusion. It felt like a Rick and Morty level of psychological fucked-up-ness. But, while speaking before thinking is very bad, speaking while thinking is moderately adequate! I was able to salvage it.
Paraphrasing myself now to sound much better than I did in the moment, I said something along the lines of: “the key to agreeableness is to genuinely try to understand the other person’s perspective on something by being completely receptive to their own point of view, humbly accepting that your own may be wrong.” You are making a quick visit into their story of reality to try it on, see how it fits. If it fits perfectly, you get 100% Garamoni! *confetti* Then I can then do a little Bayesian updating and incorporate it into my reality.
Alternately, it could get 10-20% Garamoni, which is where I say, “I’m not sure I understand you. Could you explain that a bit more?” Because if I can’t reach at least 50% Garamoni with someone, I am not actually understanding their perspective. Sometimes this results in my being able to convince them that they don’t have it right. Yes, using this superpower has allowed me to persuade people, authentically, that they were wrong.
But it has to be an active expression of empathy. True agreeableness isn’t false or utilitarian. The reason it can be learned is that I also believe empathy itself can be learned and expanded. There have been many occasions in my life where I have been able to de-escalate hostile situations, help people resolve their conflicts, and genuinely convince some of the set-in-their-ways types of people that we see so often on social media to see things in a more compassionate way. The benefits go way beyond that, though.
For me, it has been one of the most important ways in which I’ve found harmony and joy in my life. People I would carelessly dismiss otherwise became a bright thread in the tapestry. Disagreements that could sour the future instead became sweet reconciliations. And the times in my life when I haven’t done it well are times that I often regret.
If you enter into any interaction with another person perfectly certain that you have the Truth on your side, you may be able to “win” an argument or psychologically strong-arm yourself into a position of influence or power, but you won’t be making many friends along the way, and those you do make will more than likely be opportunists. The thing is, you can achieve that result while also being kind, generous, and empathetic, and find more authentic partnerships. Specifically, I think that self-certainty can be disentangled from confidence.
Confidence is a virtue reinforced in pretty much every level of society I can think of. Business? Be confident. Acting? Be confident. Relationships? Public speaking? Politics? Medicine? All boosted by confidence. Self-certainty, however, has kind of slipped into the shadow of confidence, though, and promulgates itself like a nasty little parasite. It is certainly not a virtue. Why? Because it is a “closed” emotion.
Now, perhaps I am giving too much credit to the trait of openness, but it has been both my lived and observed experience of life that openness is better in most ways. (Do you see what I did there?) Becoming closed by way of certitude is an insidious process. I suspect many people who are closed off in this sense would insist that they are very open people, open to all sorts of ideas and beliefs. But when these people are given the opportunity to share their own ideas and beliefs, their default stance is unyielding.
I could blather about polarization, tribalism, the media, social media…those things are all there to be mined and minded. But my point is that the cultural attitude, in the US and the parts of Europe that I’ve spent a lot of time in over the last six years, is that to have an idea and to express it means you must be militant with certainty. A single whisper of contrition, and your entire argument—nay, your worthiness as a human being!—is immediately garbage.
This black-or-white approach is something most people know is unfaithful to our lived realities. So why is it our go-to attitude when we find ourselves on the social pulpit? It’s been conditioned, sure, and not everyone has the tools to be constructively self-reflective. But I think the real reasons go a little deeper. It seems to me that we’re all just scared. Behind our shields, walls, and facades, we are all vulnerable human beings.
We want and crave acceptance, and when we’re told confidence is the path to acceptance, self-certainty seems to be the only way. This becomes especially toxic when we recognize that most people aren’t actually certain of what they think, they just impose self-certainty on themselves, and then get stuck in the mire of their own self-deception.
It’s not the only way.
Actors and performers know this secret. I imagine politicians, lawyers, and other public speakers know this as well. Confidence is a performance. The number of professional stage performers who acknowledge that they still experience stage fright even decades into their careers should tell us something about that. What non-performers struggle to parse is that even a performance can be authentic.
To loop this back into the main thread here: empathy is also a performance. Until it isn’t. But the performative side of it is no less genuine than the “real,” felt empathy. This seems at best counterintuitive on its face, at worst it seems actively manipulative. Those concerns vanish once it becomes clear that the experience of empathy is never and can never be about the empathizer. It is always about the other person.
This is also a key takeaway from acting school. There are many methods of acting, but not a single one emphasizes selfishness in scene work. Make your interactions about them. Take in their story, their views, their ideas, and react only to what they offer you.
And this is why I think empathy can be taught and trained and expanded. Because it was taught, trained, and expanded in me and everyone else around me in acting class. Now, you are likely to have a lot of bad scene partners who won’t offer you the same courtesy, the same vitality, that you offer them. It can be frustrating, one-sided, and dispiriting.
But I have witnessed so many beautiful openings and so many wide-eyed nods of fervor in the sense of relief that people get at actually being heard. So even if I gently disagree with them immediately afterward, they know they can lower their hackles and engage in a place of real discourse.
Now that is 100% Garamoni right there.
This scale does not reflect the relative frequency of any given response by the aforementioned Garamoni himself