Assume Positive Motivation
A key principle, difficult to cultivate
Daniel Gordis, echoing Yoav Heller, says,
trust is the willingness to attribute good intentions to the other. America is a complete collapse of trust.
Most of the discussion is about Israel, but the breakdown of trust applies more broadly.
[As a quibble, I would modify the description of trust. To trust someone, you certainly have to believe that they have good intentions. But you also have to believe in their competence. When you call customer support, it is nice to get a sympathetic response from the other end of the line. But when you realize that the person you are talking to cannot solve your problem, you are not going to feel a sense of trust. ]
When I worked at Freddie Mac back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the management fads that the company bought into was an attempt to shape corporate culture using a set of “operating principles.” The objective was to achieve better relationships across departments. For example, Finance and Marketing might be working at cross purposes and generating interpersonal friction, and the idea was to overcome that.
The most interesting operating principle that senior management came up with was “Assume Positive Motivation.” The idea was to recognize that no matter how much frustration Finance might be causing Marketing by insisting on fees that Marketing thought were too high, it was not the intent of Finance to make it impossible for Freddie Mac to compete with its rival, Fannie Mae.
Try applying Assume Positive Motivation to any contemporary political or cultural issue. For example, on the abortion issue, the intent of the pro-choice side is to promote the autonomy of women. The intent of the pro-life side is to protect lives that they believe begin at conception.
Or consider providing non-citizens with health care or college education. The intent of those who favor doing so is to deal with non-citizens humanely. The intent of those who oppose doing so is to deter people from crossing the border illegally.
Assume Positive Motivation does not mean that you have to say that both sides are equally valid. You can still believe that your side of an issue is 100 right and the other side is 100 percent wrong. What you have to let go of is the belief that the other side is evil.
Unfortunately, saying that the other side is evil is a very successful status-gaining strategy. I noticed twenty years ago that Paul Krugman’s entire shtick as a columnist was to paint conservatives as evil. Similarly, Rush Limbaugh spent every weekday afternoon on the radio telling listeners that liberals were evil.
David McRaney calls this the Law of Asymmetric Insight: you claim to know the true motives of the other side. And when it comes to politics, your claim is that the other side’s motives are evil.
I believe that our ability to hold together as a country can be reduced to a single question. Can enough people apply the principle of Assume Positive Motivation?
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Any group or society has a normative hierarchy of motivations. Cosa Nostra and Washington & Lee University each place honor uppermost in their motivations; but omertà and vendetta are crucial in the mafia's code of honor, whereas proactive cooperation with deans in rule-enforcement is crucial in W&L's student honor code.
Given a normative hierarchy of motivations, individuals feel pressure to conform — or to cloak their low motivations in the rhetoric of the high motivations. People who are skilled in rhetoric, perhaps thanks to higher education, might, on average, be less virtuous than others, but more artful in seeming virtuous. This is strategic misrepresentation of one's own motivations.
Then there is self-deception! Descartes wrote somewhere that one may gravitate to self-serving motivations, like a person who changes position during sleep until comfortable.
We all know people who have an unmistakeable propensity/tendency to pursue self-serving motivations in rhetorics that sound good.
Some important institutions trade in an ambiguous mix of high rhetorics and self-deception.
My point is that one should temper the principle of charity with realism about human nature and an eye for hypocrisy.
Fortunately most people abide by the APM in most aspects of daily life. Twitter and politics don't reflect that