What researchers have known for decades about the sideways door to the truth.
My Friend Has a Question
Somewhere in the world right now, a woman is typing “asking for a friend” into a search bar about a rash, a husband, or a recurring dream involving a bank balance. The friend in question is, as always, sitting in her chair, wearing her dressing gown and holding a smartphone. Everybody has a friend like that. She has an extraordinary run of bad luck, and exactly the same symptoms you do; she is thinking of leaving a job that sounds remarkably like yours and has the decency never to turn up in person, which is fortunate, because otherwise she would have to explain why she has been borrowing your face for the last twenty odd years.
The usual reading is that this is a minor act of cowardice, or of getting the answer without having to own the question. There is some truth in that, in the same way that describing a parachute as a way of avoiding the ground is technically accurate. What interests me more is that asking for a friend works. People who struggle to say certain things directly about themselves can sometimes say them in thirty seconds about somebody else, often in more detail and with considerably less editing, provided somebody else is the one standing in the frame.
Researchers noticed this a long time ago, finding it less charming than useful. Ask a person directly what they think about themselves and the answer has to pass through everything they already know, believe, defend and have learned to say about who they are. But ask them about somebody like them and something rather less edited can emerge, delivered with the confidence of someone who believes they are discussing a stranger. The most famous demonstration of this involved instant coffee, a shopping list, and a group of women who had absolutely no idea what they were actually giving away.
The Great Instant Coffee Scandal of 1950
In the late 1940s instant coffee was refusing to sell. The women refusing to buy it said, when asked, that they simply didn’t care for the taste. On the face of it, this was a perfectly reasonable answer. As it turned out, it was also complete nonsense. One researcher named Mason Haire suspected the taste had little to do with it.
So, instead of asking women about coffee, he showed them a shopping list. Half of them saw a list of items such as hamburger, bread, carrots, baking powder, tinned peaches, potatoes and a jar of instant coffee. The other saw exactly the same list with ordinary ground coffee in its place. Everyone was asked to describe the woman they imagined had written it.
The woman with the ground coffee came out of it reasonably well, while the woman with the instant coffee was savaged. On the evidence of one jar, a room full of perfectly polite strangers concluded that our instant coffee woman was lazy, disorganised, a poor planner, careless with the housekeeping money.
In some of the more forthright responses, she was not much of a wife, which amounts to a remarkable character assassination to hang on a hot drink. None of this commentary had come up when anyone was asked about coffee directly, but the moment the coffee belonged to someone else, the gloves came off.
What came out wasn’t really an opinion about coffee at all. It looked much more like a detailed account of the rules these women had absorbed about what a ‘good’ wife and housekeeper was supposed to be, and what might be inferred about her if she were caught taking a shortcut in her own kitchen.
That’s the part I find most interesting and, at the same time, faintly unbearable. Each woman, describing a stranger she would never meet, was calmly reading out the rules she lived by, and she could do it with complete confidence, precisely because discussing a stranger gave her a little more distance from herself. Nobody in that study was lying when they said they didn’t like the taste; they just hadn’t noticed how much more than coffee the taste was carrying.
Everybody in the Focus Group Knows Somebody Like That
Anyone who has ever sat behind the mirror at a focus group will tell you that the most reliable sentence in market research is “I wouldn’t, personally, but I can see why some people might.” Nobody in that same room will admit to buying cheap wine, a frozen ready meal or a self-help book with a sunset on the cover. Yet every one of them knows many people who have, and can describe those people’s motives, budgets and private disappointments in astonishing detail. By the end of such a session, a researcher may have a beautifully clear picture of the market, built partly from people explaining why they themselves apparently aren’t in it.
The rest of us run the same arrangement at work, where the most honest thing anyone ever says in a meeting is “I’m not speaking for myself here, but I think some people in the team are feeling a bit stretched,” at which point everybody nods gravely and studies the faces around the table, because everybody knows precisely who these “some people” are. These mysterious “some people” are tired, haven’t had a pay rise since the government before last, and would quite like it noted, for the record, that they covered the rota again. Ideally, nobody will notice that “some people” is sitting right there with a notebook and a slightly wry smile.
It’s an easy chortle, but also a remarkably sophisticated piece of social engineering. “Some people” lets you say the true thing, test how it lands and retreat without quite so much of yourself exposed if the room turns. Which is more than the direct approach has ever offered anyone. The trouble is that it works so well, we stop noticing we’re doing it. After enough years of speaking on behalf of “some people“, it becomes surprisingly difficult to remember what you’d say if it were only you.
Hypothetically Speaking
“Hypothetically” is the friend’s more educated cousin, the one who went to university and now insists on being taken seriously. As if in the whole history of language, nobody has ever used it about something that was, at that precise moment, happening to them. Hypothetically, if someone were to hand in their notice without another job lined up, would that be mad? Hypothetically, if a person hadn’t spoken to their sister in four years, how would they even begin? The question arrives wearing a little academic gown, as though the asker is merely interested in the theory, and everyone listening is too polite to mention that the theory has a mortgage, two children and a very specific sister.
In these instances, the hypothetical is useful, because it lets you walk around inside a decision without having to make it. Rather like wandering through a show home deciding where your sofa would go. You can try the idea on, watch how people react and hand it back if it doesn’t fit, while preserving at least the polite fiction that nobody knows whose sofa we’re actually measuring for. The difficulty comes when the wandering becomes the whole activity, and the same hypothetical gets floated every year at roughly the same dinner, followed by the same pause and the same verdict, which is usually that it’s a lovely idea for some other person in another life.
That’s the moment an old rule can step in and protect you from the answer you’ve already begun to give yourself, because imagining a different life is one thing and allowing it to become available to you is quite another. Most of us carry a few of these, written long ago for very good reasons, and we can stay so loyal to them that we keep the question hypothetical indefinitely, because the day it stops being hypothetical is the day we may have to discover whether the rule still deserves the authority we’ve been giving it.
The Agony Aunt Has Never Once Believed in Your Friend
Every agony aunt who has ever lived has opened a letter that begins “I’m writing on behalf of a friend,” read three paragraphs about this friend’s husband, this friend’s mother in law and this friend’s increasingly specific feelings about the man who reads the gas meter, glanced at the signature, which says something like Worried of Wolverhampton, and known, with a fairly heroic degree of confidence, that the friend and Worried of Wolverhampton have never once been in separate rooms.
The remarkable thing is that the agony aunt plays along anyway, every single time, answering the friend with tremendous seriousness, advising that the friend might consider a frank conversation with her husband, that the friend deserves better, that the friend is not being unreasonable, and should perhaps stop letting the gas man in for tea. That isn’t a failure of perception but professional courtesy of the very highest order, because the agony aunt understands something the letter writer doesn’t: the friend isn’t a disguise to be torn off, it’s the thing that makes the advice possible to hear.
Advice aimed straight at you has to get past every defence you own, and most of us own quite a few, whereas advice addressed to your friend slips in through the side entrance while your defences are busy guarding the front. Worried of Wolverhampton can read that her friend deserves better and feel it land somewhere it would never reach if the sentence began with her own name. The fiction was never the obstacle to the truth but the delivery route, and the best agony aunts have always known that the kindest thing you can do for someone telling the truth sideways is to stay standing exactly where they’ve put you.
Nobody Ever Said Dignity, They Said Socks
None of this is confined to coffee studies and problem pages. I found it somewhere I wasn’t even looking for it. My doctoral thesis involved a great deal of listening to lone parents who had built businesses of their own. When I asked why they worked as hard as they did, again and again they told me they wanted nice things. I’ll admit that for a while I took this at face value and pictured something along the lines of a hot tub, or possibly a car with heated seats, which probably says rather more about me than it did about them.
What those ‘nice things’ began to look like, when I finally looked properly, was drinking a takeaway coffee while it was still hot, a new pair of socks that nobody else had worn first, or ten minutes sitting alone in the car on the driveway before going indoors to whatever was waiting. Nobody ever said, in those words, that they wanted some small evidence that their own needs still counted, or a little dignity in a life arranged almost entirely around other people. That is a hard sentence to say out loud to anyone, let alone a researcher. So they said socks instead, and the socks said everything.
Nobody had asked them to do it that way. There was no clever technique, and no stranger’s shopping list. Only people reaching quite naturally for the nearest object that could carry the weight of a truth too heavy to set down, directly. It turns out we don’t need anyone to hand us a stranger before we start talking sideways, because when the subject is what we think we’re allowed to need, we go and find a stand in for ourselves, and often it comes in a multipack from the supermarket.
Your Friend Has Been Having the Same Problem for Years
Imagine you could gather up every question you’ve ever asked on behalf of a friend, every hypothetical floated over dinner and every “some people” offered in a meeting and lay them all out on the kitchen table in date order. You would likely notice something faintly embarrassing about those friends, which is that they have been having suspiciously similar problems since the late nineties. The details move around.
So, the husband becomes a manager, the manager becomes a sister, and the sister becomes a woman on the school committee who won’t stop volunteering you for the tombola. Yet, the shape underneath stays perfectly still, as though these friends have spent nearly thirty years ringing the same helpline about the same fault in a series of different houses.
That’s the hidden gift in asking for a friend. When you speak about yourself directly, you edit as you go, and every account comes out slightly tidier and more reasonable than the one before, so the pattern never gets a chance to show itself. When you speak about your friend, you may be guarding less of yourself, which means the same complaint, the same worry and sometimes the very same sentence can come out almost unchanged across the years, and the repetition sits there in plain sight, waiting for somebody to line two of them up and notice they match.
Most of us never do, partly because nobody keeps records, and partly because a familiar problem has a strange way of feeling familiar. There are good reasons repetition can feel safer than change. Familiar problems come with known rules, known roles and known consequences, even when none of them are particularly pleasant. The unknown asks more of us, which is probably why your friend keeps showing up with a different name and the same paperwork.
Why the Sideways Door Opens When the Front Door Won’t
There’s a reason you can usually diagnose a friend’s love life in about four seconds flat, from the far end of a table in a noisy restaurant, while your own remains a complete mystery after several decades of close study. When you look at somebody else’s life, less of you may be on duty. You may be protecting less of your own reputation, defending fewer of your own decisions or keeping less of your own score. So you can see the shape of things immediately, in the same way a visitor spots the crooked picture in your hallway that you’ve walked past every morning for eleven years.
Look at your own life head on, however, and an entire security team turns up. Every question gets screened for danger before it’s allowed in, and anything that threatens the version of you that has been getting through the day with a reasonable amount of administrative competence is turned away at the door with a polite explanation about context. That’s why the direct question so rarely gets anywhere, and why the friend, the hypothetical and the stranger with the instant coffee get waved straight through, because the security team is usually rather less interested in guarding someone else.
It’s also why the roles you keep getting cast in are so much easier to spot in other people. You can see in a heartbeat that your brother is always the one who smooths things over, or that your colleague is forever being handed the job nobody else wants. Yet it can take years to notice that you’ve been playing a version of the same part yourself, in every room you’ve ever walked into, because you were always far too busy playing it to watch.
Borrowing a Stranger to Tell the Truth
None of this makes the friend a liar, or you a coward. If anything, it suggests that human beings worked out long before researchers did that the truth is far easier to carry when somebody else is holding the other end, and that a borrowed story, far from being a hiding place, can sometimes be the place from which a person sees their own life more clearly.
The friend, the hypothetical and the stranger with the instant coffee are usually not real, nor need to be, because their entire job is to stand slightly to one side so that you can say the true thing without having to be the person it’s true about. Researchers have been making use of this for decades, but people were doing it long before anyone gave it a method section.
Sometimes the clearest look you get at yourself happens inside a story that belongs to someone else, simply because you’re not having to hold yourself still while you look. You don’t have to believe the story is real, any more than anybody ever believed in your friend; it may be enough to notice which parts keep sounding suspiciously familiar.
NyxDrop™: Sometimes the person telling you the most about yourself is the one who doesn’t technically exist.
What do you notice when the story isn’t yours?
Threadfinders uses stories, roles, relics, places and moments as a different way into the patterns that can be harder to see when we look at ourselves directly. You don’t need to believe the story is literally true. You only need to notice what feels familiar.