Sounds like 2 cultures, and the adaptive person realizes who they are speaking to, and adapts to that culture to have better conversations.
I was raised as a 'civil' person, but learned that in some groups, you get a better result & energy as an interrupter.
Another dynamic is high overt conflict & emotions vs low overt conflict & emotions cultures. High overt will seem like they are arguing passionately about something and they will never see each other again, and 10 minutes later are having tea like it's no big deal, because the emotion level isn't really a big deal to them. The same emotional display in a non-overt culture and you can be fairly certain that the conflict is a a fairly big deal, and 10 minutes later, it won't recover.
And bad things happen when the high/low wires get crossed. A high-overt arguing with a low-overt often leads to confusion and resentment, because the exchange was no big deal to the high-overt, but a hostile act to the low-overt.
Yeah, this can unfortunately happen with almost any communication style mismatch. The best advice anyone can follow is just, start from an assumption of good faith.
I've seen it most bafflingly in a tech help forum I used to frequent: folks coming for help would get really miffed at requests for clarification/expansion from the people who were trying to help. Probably some of those requests should have been worded better -- less terse, a little more "friendly"? -- but I never really understood the starting point of "anything other than an answer to my post is rude" that seemed to come up over and over.
Haha, true. And I've had it where we would only dare do this over "safe" topics, like some branching strategy or library implementation detail or whatever. But we would never do the high-overt thing about politics or family life or something "real". :)
I was raised as a 'civil' person, but learned that in some groups, you get a better result & energy as an interrupter.
Another dynamic is high overt conflict & emotions vs low overt conflict & emotions cultures. High overt will seem like they are arguing passionately about something and they will never see each other again, and 10 minutes later are having tea like it's no big deal, because the emotion level isn't really a big deal to them. The same emotional display in a non-overt culture and you can be fairly certain that the conflict is a a fairly big deal, and 10 minutes later, it won't recover.