Are you familiar with motivating operations (which until recently were known as establishing operations)? I am a graduate student studying behavior analysis. Motivating operations (MO) are not well understood in my field and are virtually unheard of outside of my field but are beginning to prove their utility in applied behavioral literature as well as in clinical practice.

I believe that the question you posed can be answered rather easily when considering MOs, operant behavior, “emotional” responding typically exhibited when punishment (or a worsening situation) is likely.

But you are so right. The right brain left brain twirling girl thing always gets a good reaction, but nobody takes the news of some cognitive snafu well at first. Or at least they haven’t in my experience.

If you were to claim that someone is mistaken in his vision, you automatically propose his general lack of rationality in all of his decisions, which is much more offensive. You provide him with an overflow of criticism (i.e. information) that he’s nearly incapable of comprehending because it’s simply too daunting to sufficiently defend himself against (and pick his way through). On the other hand, if you allude to a mistake in one of his particular decisions, it allows him to focus on a less suffocating (and less presumptuous) assessment of him that keeps the door open to the chance that he’s not hopelessly irrational. He’s forced to more acutely examine the fallibility of his rationality when you bluntly state (or assume) his vision is irrational.