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Ruphail's avatar

If an argument comes off as especially bad to my ears I avoid voicing criticism, and this is often my most common reason for avoiding it. Either I think it’ll come across very harsh, or I don’t think it would be worth engaging with the person. Sometimes I’ve voiced criticism, and I got the sense that I was disliked for it (It wasn’t confirmed), and that fear also often stops me from engaging. Engaging in a positive or neutral way I find is easier.

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Markus Stoor's avatar

Seems like underengagement could explain underdeferment trough some kind of inner availiability mechanism.

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Stefan Schubert's avatar

Potentially, but see the discussion on "access to reasons" in this article:

"One standard explanation in the advice-taking literature holds that participants trust their own views more because they have access to their reasons for those views [18,66]. There are, however, reasons to doubt that this is a necessary condition. Results show that egocentric discounting occurs even when participants are asked to revise an estimate without being given access to the cues that motivated the estimate [67] and that egocentric discounting is also observed when participants are presented with someone else's opinion, falsely presented as their own [29,68]: they put more weight than they ought to on opinions that are presented as their own."

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2020.0052#d1e582

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