When I’m feeling patronized, which happens a fair amount in a few subject areas, I sit in silence. It’s clear the down-talker is not looking for my contribution on the subject, and if I did pipe up with my perspective, some part of me would know I was trying to impress. My pride can’t take the idea of doing that—of managing someone else’s perception of my expertise level—so I rely on the hope that a third party will eventually set the person straight about me.
Nowadays the condescending explanations are usually a virtual experience. As my eyes go wide in despair, outraged that someone would infantilize me this way, I fight dual urges. One is to parry with a conversation-halting ‘Thanks, Tips’ (complete with sarcastic head tilt), and the other is to reach out to that webcam, flick it off its perch on my laptop, and slam the computer shut mid-call. I don’t, though. When enough time has elapsed without the encouragement of my verbal backchannel, the person tends to run out of steam and start a new line of conversation, which I then join with relief.
The trouble is, my wide-eyed, silent cringe has now been read as a ‘blank stare’ of incomprehension. I might as well be drooling and curling a lock of hair around my finger while they speak. And it leads inevitably to yet more dismissal of my knowledge (without their ever having looked at my work on the subject, of course) and more dumbing down of their communication about it.
In the emotion psychology world, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has started a near civil war by suggesting that the crossed wires above—my insulted paralysis mistaken for incomprehension—is the rule and not the exception. We’re garbage at reading each other because we think we know what emotions look like, but emotions don’t even look like any one thing at all. Darwin’s illustrations of universal facial expressions are a crock, in her view, and that’s not all. The emotions we feel don’t even have brain circuits in common or any other physiological fingerprint. Never mind that the last 200 years of research has focused on biologically-based emotions, that’s all just part of the replication crisis in psychology, she and her school of research argue. Her meta-analyses back it up.
Anyway, if any of you has tips (thanks, tips!) on how to deal with being underestimated, I am all ears. The frustration may not evoke the same pattern of neural firing in your brain as in mine, but I’ll take the solidarity gladly today.
What I usually do is just get up. Sometimes I walk away. If I saw your look, I would probably ask “you know this already?” because it’s embarrassing to be that frickin clueless as to be the “explainer” to someone who would do a better job explaining.
Add a tiny little smile and the slightest head tilt to your wide-eyed cringe look. It adds a bit of mystery. If the moron notices at all, it may make him curious at the very least, and uncomfortable if it works. Been there.