tale-bearing

[cellio]

Suppose you are, say, at a convention in another city. You step into a room to hear someone you know talking with a group of people you don't know. The person you know is griping about his landlord (without naming names). The landlord is a friend of yours and is in a nearby room.

Do you (choose all that apply):
(a) listen in unobtrusively;
(b) fetch the landlord and tell him to listen in;
(c) repeat the tale verbatim to the landlord later;
(d) give the landlord some general feedback (e.g. "have you fixed that roof yet?");
(e) approach the group with some general comment about dealing with landlords;
(f) approach the group and say something like "how dare you talk about Joe Blow like that"; or
(g) shrug it off; it's up to the person to approach the landlord himself if he wants things to change?

It would never occur to me to do (b), (c), or (f); it seems like it can only cause hurt to the landlord. Depending on how close my relationship to the landlord is and what else I know of the situation, I might do (d), (e), and/or (g). I suspect I am not always strong enough to avoid doing (a), though walking away is the correct thing to do most of the time.

I'm sure that at times people say unflattering things about me outside of my hearing. That's a fact of life. In some contexts I am a public figure and have to expect that, and anyway, people talk and rant and gossip and that's just something we all have to live with. I figure that if it's important, the person with a complaint will find some way to let me know about it. And if not, well, I can't address problems I don't know about and the other person just has to realize that. No one told me about any telepathy requirements in human interaction, and I don't buy the approach of "leaking" the gripe to mutual friends and relying on it getting back to the person. That kind of sneakiness bothers me.

I have had an encounter with someone whose beliefs about such situations are very different from my own. I thought that by writing this down I would come to some understanding of why the options I find obviously incorrect might be obviously correct to others, but so far that insight is eluding me.

Comments

As usual, I get overly analytical about what's frequently complicated by emotional responses...

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

I can see circumstances where (c) is may be appropriate, especially if the person speaking is advocating some action about which my friend should be warned. Say, someone's starting to lobby various officers to petition to have my friend recalled from an office; I may feel he should know such a plan is at least afoot. This is hazardous, and it's often appropriate to consider whether (g) is a better idea because I'm presenting here-say and am likely to accidently misrepresent at least some part of that (especially the nature of the particpation of the people being talked to) which will complicate the situation. But I can see how it occurs to folks, myself included.

In the varient of this where the person is named, I can see (f), and have done so, when I felt the conversation was unnecessarily catty. There's a milder case that's not so much "how dare you" as "you should consider extenuating circumstance X about Joe Blow" which still identifies the person, but has a less defensive tone. In either case, siderea has a good point about the dangers of this in cases where the person isn't named, because you can end up (even if it's done in perfectly good faith) undercutting the person.

This then gets really grey and messy if names aren't mentioned but it's still arguably possible for a reasonable listener to discern the person being discussed. If someone discusses one of the many Pittsburgh consulting firms with a lot of Brazilian Java developers, for example, the fact that they don't name names is a technicality - anyone who has sufficient backstory to care would know who's being talked about. At this point, the argument that I'm undercutting rather than defending my friend doesn't carry as much weight. (For extreme cases, of course, it carries none, but again - this is a grey area. Which, unfortunately, also means its one about which reasonable people will disagree.)

The person discussing the landlord also needs to keep this in mind - they're assuming nobody they talk to (or few, who will be discrete) know who their landlord is. If the landlord is in fact at this convention, though, it's possible that a large number of the "flies on the wall" around the conversation know said landlord, and this starts having the effect (whether intentional or not) of character assassination which would inspire defense. Again, grey areas - how public is this discussion? How easy is it to figure out who's being talked about? At some point, reasonable people can start disagreeing about whether or not the speaker is (perhaps inadvertently) having the effect of "trashing" someone rather than discussing a problem in isolation.

Fortunately, we're talking about an overheard conversation in a room, something with no persistence. Similar concerns come up about blogging all the time - if I rant about my boss in my journal, in a way that's publically visible, but I don't name names, do I have a reasonable expectation that my boss will not see that as trashing him in a publically recognizable way? That's a matter of almost public record. Certainly, Murphy's Law being what it is, I should assume he will happen upon that rant.

More complications, more grey areas: I don't rant about my boss in public posts in my journal (my boss, should he be reading, is a fine and noble fellow anyway.) But perhaps some other employee rants about his boss over brunch and a movie with his friend Pam, and she publishes the fact that her friend (unnamed, but we all know who does brunch and a movie with her) was ranting about his boss at the aforementioned firm with a large number of Brazillian Java developers. Should I expect my boss to find out over a game of golf with Pam's boss (oops, not me, hypothetical other employee...)? Should I expect my boss may be perturbed?

And what fault do I reasonably have if I don't know she's going to put this in her blog, but it's out there at all because I initially talked with her privately? What if I do know she's planning to discuss it? Should I tell her not to? Is it enough to at least get her to take out the part about Brazilian Java programmers that pretty much nails me? Or is it enough, when it comes down to it, that there're no names?

Re: As usual, I get overly analytical about what's frequently complicated by emotional responses...

[cellio]

I may feel he should know such a plan is at least afoot.

Agreed, but that doesn't necessarily mean relaying all the specifics of who said what. And as you say, it's hazardous.

In the varient of this where the person is named, I can see (f),

I agree. Once someone has named the person the damage has been done, so you aren't doing damage by jumping in with specifics.

This then gets really grey and messy if names aren't mentioned but it's still arguably possible for a reasonable listener to discern the person being discussed.

And this, in turn, gets into the gray areas of composition of the surrounding group. To use your example, for instance, if you're all off at a gaming convention in Wisconsin and the people you're talking to don't even know you're from Pittsburgh, then you're pretty safe in griping about the anonymous Brazilian Java consultants you work with. If there are 5000 people at the convention and two of them are your local high-tech friends, it's still fairly safe if you think your coworkers are reasonable people who won't do (f) -- because even if they overhear and can identify the situation, because they know where you work, no one else at the convention is going to get any new information about your company from your discussion. And even if the coworker you're griping about is here in Wisconsin with you, if he's just a gaming widow not attending the con (but is currently in the hotel lobby waiting for the dinner run), that's not obviously wrong to me. So it seems to boil down to layers upon layers upon layers of risk, and different people have different tolerances, and that makes everything gray and fuzzy.