70
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
70 points (96.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43843 readers
645 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
a social question. I often hear that it is more important how people perceive what is being said, as opposed to what the intention of what was being said.
In that sense, I think it would be difficult to have consistency in both. Where I live, a lot of people think that how something is perceived is more important.
All I can say is that the greater the gap between what is intended and what others perceive, the more difficult things can become.
Politics (even family politics) is full of this stuff.
In some legal contexts intent really matters.
But intention can only ever be inferred (unless bluntly stated) you could argue that if people generally aren’t willing or able to examine things too closely, then perception becomes everything.
Someone else brought this up too which is why I originally was asking. I had to watch one of those anti-sexual harassment training videos at work. If I remember correctly, the dialog they used was "Remember, regardless of what you intended, the perception of what you said matters more" and they were talking about saying lewd things to coworkers.
So the person saying it doesn't find it to be sexual harassment to just say something lewd to someone, but someone else could hear it and perceive it as sexual harassment and the intent would just go out the window because it was perceived to be harassment.
The key word is “some”.
You’ll find bullying is treated in a similar way - the perception of the person who heard or experienced something is significant, the intent of the person who said or did something much less so.
On the other hand, one could be misleading and mistaken by giving out incorrect information, but one could be lying if they are knowingly giving out incorrect information… (intent)