Notes on Hedging and Introversion

A friend recently pointed me (via Facebook, of course) to a Carl King blog in which he outlines ten "myths about introverts." He bases these on his reading of the book The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olson Laney and on his own experiences. As an introvert myself, the list struck a chord with me, but I was especially interested in his third myth. He says:

Myth #3 – Introverts are rude.
Introverts often don’t see a reason for beating around the bush with social pleasantries. They want everyone to just be real and honest. Unfortunately, this is not acceptable in most settings, so Introverts can feel a lot of pressure to fit in, which they find exhausting.

This one stands out to me because I am often thought of as rude, aloof, and any number of other horrible things. It's something about myself that I have hated and that I have made concerted efforts to change. But the fact is, I don't ever even know when I'm doing something that others think is rude. And I am, in fact, far from being aloof; I am actually extremely emotional, though I am completely out of my element when trying to figure out how to express emotion in a socially acceptable way (so, I simply don't).

With regard to my accidental rudeness, I recently had an experience that I found enlightening, as I figured out what my misstep was, and why one particular person thought I was being rude, when I in fact, had no intention of being so.

Recently, while on a call, a coworker with whom I rarely work approached and asked "do you need anything?" I was extremely busy: I was on the phone with my our crime information unit, I was having an IM conversation with my dispatcher, and I was talking on the radio to our helicopter all at the same time. None of this, however, was anything she could do for me, so I said simply "no." She said something I didn't really hear in a tone of voice that was clearly perturbed and she drove away quickly. She then sent me a message that said "sorry I asked."

She apparently found my very terse answer to be rude. Of course, I had not intended to be rude. I was very busy, so I answered her question as directly and as quickly as I could. As a student of rhetoric, I was instantly interested in why my intention has miscarried. The fact is, and this is something I had not thought much about until this incident, there is an awful lot of hedging in our day to day communication.

"Hedging" is the process through which we qualify our language in order to soften the points we make, or the things we say. Our modern American culture seems to prize hedging a great deal. We are expected to use softening expressions like, "in my opinion," "I think," "but thank you anyway," and so on. It's a linguistic cue that is designed to be somewhat self-effacing ("this is what I believe, but it's only my opinion"), and thus exalting the other interlocutor.

Of course, these are dense, unspoken (and arbitrary) conventions designed to provide communicative context, especially with regard to how the speaker positions himself relative to the listener. In other words, by softening one's language, one in essence shows that he is not aggressive. Hedging is the linguistic equivalent of a dog's refusal to look her owner in the eye, in order to show that she is passive. And in a culture that presumes everyone to be equal, it's very important to us that we show through these cues that we are not trying to be the big dog.

It is this sort of dense communicative rule that is often lost on introverted folks like me. Perhaps this is because we tend to be fiercely interior and thus it does not occur to us that we will not be interpreted by our language alone, but also by these linguistic and contextual cues that we don't quite get--because we don't quite get other people.

Of course, while it has been a fun intellectual exercise for me to think about the importance of hedging, I don't expect that I'll start doing more of it. That is because I will continually fail to realize that I'm not doing it already.