[vital]

I'm going to quote an interesting passage from the book "Undoing Depression" by Richard O'Connor (page 158, 1st edition).

------

What's wrong with these conversations?

SHE: What time is the concert?
HE: You have to be ready by seven-thirty.

SHE: How many people are coming to dinner?
HE: Don't worry, there's plenty of food.

HE: Are you just about finished?
SHE: Do you want dinner now?

---------------------------------------

This kind of thing used to drive me crazy, but I have never seen it pointed out in literature and still don't know what to call it. Does it have a name?

- vital

[CANDC]

It is a condescending attitude of superiority of one person to another. It is also NOT communicating. By cutting off the other person the person pulling a control move is basically treating them like a kid being immobilized and kept in the dark as parents often do to bolster their waning sense of self importance.
Unfortunately this type of communication (really lack of communication) is too common leading to dysfunctional relationships.
If you want a term how about "dysfunctional communication"

[guilloche]

I don't know the name for it, but it strikes me as very controlling...

Do you mean in terms of not directly answering the question?

My mother does something like that. I ask her a question and she will tell me everything vaguely related to the question without actually giving an answer. I swear that woman is incapable of directly answering a question lol

I know the word you're thinking of but I can't remember it myself now. I do remember that it's a sign of autism though.

[Alone & confused]

Evasive? Because there is never a direct answer??

[Tommo]

Rude. That's the word....

[vital]

Originally Posted by CANDC

It is a condescending attitude of superiority of one person to another. It is also NOT communicating. By cutting off the other person the person pulling a control move is basically treating them like a kid being immobilized and kept in the dark as parents often do to bolster their waning sense of self importance.
Unfortunately this type of communication (really lack of communication) is too common leading to dysfunctional relationships.
If you want a term how about "dysfunctional communication"

This is the way a certain unnamed parent of mine used to talk to me for most of my childhood. I was constantly stuck saying:

ME: Don't do that!
PARENT: Don't do what?
ME: That thing you're doing!!
PARENT: ?

I could never ever get it to stop.

I suspect this happens ALOT between people. It really needs a good name. Maybe just "condescending" or "controlling" is right, but I think that usually the person doing it will deny that and may even be unaware that they are doing "it" whatever "it" is.

- vital

There is an actual psychological term for not being able to directly answer a question or talking in a round about manner. I can't remember what it is though and now it's doing my head in lol

My conversations tend to consist of: "Was that fire engine red?"

"It came from that direction."

"That's nice but that isn't what I asked you."

[hamster-bamster]

The responder is making assumptions in these conversations. The responder reads into the question the meaning that, to him or her, could be the only valid reason for the question to be asked. But if that were indeed the case, the person asking the q. would have simply asked it in the way that would have made the response appropriate. Since the q. was asked the way it was asked, reading something into the q. is perceived as rude and condescending.

[hamster-bamster]

Originally Posted by BeteNoire

There is an actual psychological term for not being able to directly answer a question or talking in a round about manner. I can't remember what it is though and now it's doing my head in lol

My conversations tend to consist of: "Was that fire engine red?"

"It came from that direction."

"That's nice but that isn't what I asked you."

that is probably dubbed tangential or circumstantial

but it is NOT what these examples are. People whose TP (=thought process) is tangential or circumstantial are more random in exactly how indirectly they answer a question posed to them. In OP's examples, the response is not random - each time the response reads into the q. something quite predictable. The responder assumes that the only possible reason for asking about the time of an event is learning when to be ready; the only possible reason for asking if a partner or parent is done with a some sort of an assignment in the evening is being hungry, etc. It is very much not a random walk.

[hamster-bamster]

Originally Posted by vital

This is the way a certain unnamed parent of mine used to talk to me for most of my childhood. I was constantly stuck saying:

ME: Don't do that!
PARENT: Don't do what?
ME: That thing you're doing!!
PARENT: ?

I could never ever get it to stop.

I suspect this happens ALOT between people. It really needs a good name. Maybe just "condescending" or "controlling" is right, but I think that usually the person doing it will deny that and may even be unaware that they are doing "it" whatever "it" is.

- vital

Wait... what you are describing is the exact polar opposite of the examples in your OP. You are describing a kid who is making an assumption (the assumption is that the word "THAT" describes what the parent is currently doing, which is problematic for many reasons - e.g. a parent maybe preparing dinner and talking on the phone at the same time) and then getting upset that the parent does not read the assumption right. The parent here does not attempt to read the child's mind. In OP, the responder was overly aggressive in trying to read the conversation partner's mind.

[hvert]

Is that mind-reading?

[Trippin2.0]

It's called my pet peeve, sub par communication skills, annoying, etc etc etc...


My daughter does this allll the time, I have to remember she's 10 and not get infuriated with her.


She assumes she knows the answer before I even finish the question, therefore she never or hardly (to be fair) listens to my question as she's formulating her answer...

(On numerous occasions I have actually wondered how she makes it to the top of her class with this "defect")

Idk what its called but I remember learning about it during a communications course sometime ago.


My eldest sister does it too.


When my daughter does it these days, I just stare at her, if she shoots me a quizzical look, I ask her if her reply answered my question at all, whereby she promptly answers me accurately.


I do it to my sister too, maybe I'm a little condescending, but they would both agree that its better than a rage response...

[vital]

Originally Posted by Trippin2.0

My daughter does this allll the time, I have to remember she's 10 and not get infuriated with her.
She assumes she knows the answer before I even finish the question, therefore she never or hardly (to be fair) listens to my question as she's formulating her answer...

Thanks trippin and everybody.

Maybe one aspect of this is people who behave as if any conversation is a competition that they are trying to win. I remember once I was the token male invited to a "Women in Physics" lunch. It was a shocking experience to see how different the conversations were from what I was used to. They actually didn't interrupt each other and actually listened to each other instead of thinking what to say while the other person is speaking!

- vital

[guilloche]

Originally Posted by vital

Thanks trippin and everybody.

Maybe one aspect of this is people who behave as if any conversation is a competition that they are trying to win. I remember once I was the token male invited to a "Women in Physics" lunch. It was a shocking experience to see how different the conversations were from what I was used to. They actually didn't interrupt each other and actually listened to each other instead of thinking what to say while the other person is speaking!

- vital

Hmmm... that's really interesting to me. Have you, by chance, read anything by Deborah Tannen? She's a psycholinguistic, and has a book on the differences in gender communication (specific to US culture) - I think it's "You Just Don't Understand Me!".

One of the things she talks about is that we all need "connection" and "independence" - like porcupines in the cold, we have to negotiate a bit... because when we get too much "connection" (too close together) the porcupines get pricked by each other, and when they get too far apart, they get cold.

She says that males (in the US, this isn't true in all cultures!) value "independence" more, so they're conversational patterns usually have to do with establishing their dominance. They tell more jokes, speak longer, and maybe interrupt more (I can't remember for sure that last one). Basically, they exaggerate their differences, as a way to establish independence and rank.

Women tend to value "connection" more - so women tend to focus more on what they have in common and downplay differences. They look for commonality.

I'm not sure what to do with that, but find it fascinating... and very interesting that your experience seemed to bear that out. I actually had a male friend that I loaned my book to, and we chatted about it... both of us felt like it was really a light bulb moment reading through it, and had no clue how different the opposite sex viewed communication!

[hamster-bamster]

All of this is fascinating.

The following happened in one of the classes for which I was the teaching assistant, so I had to offer help during office hours on an individual basis as well as run one large session pre-finals for everybody in a big auditorium.

So, that class was very quantitative. And in quantitative subjects, more so than in verbal, the sequence of knowledge acquisition matters a LOT.

Say, in a history class, if you missed a part, you can more or less still make sense of a later part because the "stories" are more disjoint. More stand-alone. But in a quant class or in a science class - think chemistry - if you miss the foundation, you have nothing to build upon. If I do not know the basics of organic chemistry, I will never understand the advance formulae with C and H written everywhere.

So, during the last session (Q&A),

1) a young woman asks me a Q in front of the class.

She qualifies the Q with all sorts of self-deprecating statements ("I am sorry", "I should have"), blushes, and, in a tentative voice...

ASKS A PERFECTLY REASONABLE QUESTION.

She had nothing to be sorry about - she did study on her own and during that studying happened on something that was not that well covered in the textbook.

2) twenty minutes later, a young man raises his hand. He puts on airs. He leans back in his seat and looks at me as if about to challenge me with the most difficult question.

AND ASKS SOMETHING THAT SHOWS THAT HE DID NOT UNDERSTAND THE FIRST LECTURE.

Now, the man was NOT dominant. The man was clearly not at ease with himself - it was more as if he could not just ask the question but felt obligated to put on airs.

And I saw it again and again - it is just that that example was the most striking.

[vital]

Originally Posted by BeteNoire

There is an actual psychological term for not being able to directly answer a question or talking in a round about manner. I can't remember what it is though and now it's doing my head in lol

My conversations tend to consist of: "Was that fire engine red?"

"It came from that direction."

"That's nice but that isn't what I asked you."

I've known people like that too although I think it's a bit different from my starting example. Maybe the subtext of the original conversation is:

SHE: <honestly asking a question>
HE: <I am taking the TOPIC of your question and asserting what should happen as related to that topic>

The one above is maybe

Person 1: <honestly asking a question>
Person 2: <I don't want to answer that directly>

I've known people who are like that to a maddening extent no matter how simple the question is and no matter how nice and gently you ask. If you say "can we meet at 2pm?" they will not say yes and they will not say no. It seems pathological and I strongly suspect that person 2 is unaware that they are evasive about any question no matter how simple.

Let us know if you think of that psychological term.

- vital

[ChipperMonkey]

Originally Posted by hamster-bamster

Wait... what you are describing is the exact polar opposite of the examples in your OP. You are describing a kid who is making an assumption (the assumption is that the word "THAT" describes what the parent is currently doing, which is problematic for many reasons - e.g. a parent maybe preparing dinner and talking on the phone at the same time) and then getting upset that the parent does not read the assumption right. The parent here does not attempt to read the child's mind. In OP, the responder was overly aggressive in trying to read the conversation partner's mind.

No, the OP gave examples of what his parent did (in the first post), and the example of the exchange with his parents was his reaction to his parent giving responses to questions that never answered the actual question (in the follow up reply). He is saying that he didn't know how to tell his parent how to stop those sorts of replies because he couldn't identify the response style. That is why the OP is here now, asking what sort of response style this is, because he has never been able to tell his parent "don't do this specific XYZ answering style"

[hamster-bamster]

Originally Posted by ChipperMonkey

No, the OP gave examples of what his parent did (in the first post),

As it is currently posted, the first post cannot be about HIS parents. The OP is a male, I take it, and you believe so, as well. But in the OP, two out of three times, the person asking the question is a SHE. So those cannot be the poster's questions. Plus, the OP said that we was "going to quote an interesting passage from the book "Undoing Depression" by Richard O'Connor (page 158, 1st edition)." So the three sample conversations were from that book.