The Danger of If-Then Arguments

Reflections on posting responsibly on social media

Happy Monday! I hope you had a great Thanksgiving weekend!

The next month, for most folks, will be a rush of holiday shopping, confirming travel logistics, and bracing for interactions with that relative(s) that threatens to morph your family into the next reality TV show.

It’s an exceptionally stressful season, and the higher the levels of stress, the wonkier the communication and reception of information.

Today, I’m writing about a trend that I’ve noticed on social media posts.

The abuse of conditional statements.

If you are _____, then _____.

From three minutes of scrolling on Threads this morning. (By the way: Follow us on Threads @sexvangelicals.)

• If you find that your Jesus hates the same people you hate, then you don’t love Jesus. (Our business is catered mostly to ex-Evangelicals, so there’s a variety of these themes.)

• If you let the inner child lead yourself, then you’ll lose your Self.

• If you’re invested in growing, then you’ll find other people who are invested in growing too. (Therapists tend to make up the other segment of the advice component of our Threads account.)

I posted about my agitation with conditional statements on Threads. One commenter shared:

But aren’t all arguments if/then?

Good question. I think many arguments start as if/then statements.

Because if/then statements are hypotheses. They’re guesses. If I change (or, as more commonly communicated in social media, if you change) this one variable in your life, such as a particular behavior, then I/you will receive a different outcome.

And perhaps that’s true. In theory, all of the three aforementioned statements could be true.

But, taking us back to second grade science fair, a hypothesis has to have some sort of process, complete with a definition of terms, an information gathering process, and data analysis, in order to be proven.

So let’s take the first example. If you find that your Jesus hates the same people you hate, then you don’t love Jesus.

A social media science experiment

Well first, we have to define our terms.

Who is Jesus? Who was Jesus historically, both during his lived experience, and, more importantly, after his death? What has Jesus represented to other people, both currently and historically? What elements of Jesus’ life have been highlighted by certain people, and ignored by others?

There are two thousand years of books that have been written about this, not speaking for the countless wars and hundreds of millions of lives lost regarding the differences in how these question gets answered.

What does hate mean? How does hate get compared with other emotional synonyms, like dislike and loathe? How does hate get communicated relationally?

What does love mean? Julia and I are relationship therapists, and we have no idea what that term means, because love can look a lot of different ways.

Second, we have to find some sort of information gathering process. This part may be a little easier, because it’s increasingly easier to find church spaces and online communities that practice outright discrimination toward queer people, people of color, and highly conservative people.

Typically speaking, information is gathered two ways: quantitatively and qualitatively. What would happen if we developed surveys that asked people to rate their likelihood to participate in certain behaviors along a Likert scale? (An example of quantitative research.) Better, what would happen if we built relationships with people in these spaces and asked them about present and historical experiences that led them to the live and virtual worship spaces they inhabit?

Third, we have to develop a data analysis process. Julia and I are biased toward the power of qualitative research. What would happen to us, as researchers, if we sat for an hour with twenty people and only asked curious questions, no “gotcha moments”? How would reading through 140 pages of transcripts impact the ways that engage with these people and stories? (After all, if I do research, I cannot exclude myself and my own experience from the research process.)

Perhaps I would develop some empathy for the people that I interview. Perhaps I would hear common language and themes that these people used, which would open the door to more curiosity and more reading. Perhaps I would loathe these people even more, and I would need to find some ways to tend to the combination of grief and homicidal ideation that may arise within me.

Finally, we can develop a conclusion.

But even the conclusion is tenuous. Based on the participants that I talked with, I discovered these themes and trends.

Here are some dots that could be connected. Here are some dots that need more information to be connected. Here are future questions that we need to ask to get more information, and here are some ideas about how I/we might gather that information.

There’s one more element to the scientific process that I’ve left out.

Variables.

Again, going back to second grade science, variables are the long list of contextual factors that may impact the way that a research project goes. Dependent variables are factors exclusively connected to the research project. So in the case of “Who loves Jesus?”, that may include a person’s participation in religious communities, the amount of time someone has spent gathering information about Jesus, and a person’s participation in pro-social (or anti-social) activities. Independent variables are contextual factors that aren’t directly connected to the research, but may nonetheless play some role. Race, age, class, gender, and education level are almost always independent variables (even though they sometimes get treated as if they’re dependent variables, especially in far-left and far-right communities).

This is another Substack altogether, but this is ultimately why research on relationships and families is incredibly difficult to do. There are too many variables to make accurate assessments. And because of the high number of variables, there are always exceptions to the primary conclusions.

So what’s wrong with If/then statements then?

Many if/then statements operate as rhetorical statements, meaning that if you do this, this will be the outcome that happens. And perhaps they’re right. But there are too many variables, and as a result, too much human variance to make these assumptions point blank.

I don’t know the people that posted these posts, but my guess is that, regardless of how likely their hypotheses are (and all of them are likely), they did not participate in a process that I described.

And even if they did, the word limitations around sites like Threads and Twitter X and TikTok would restrict the presentation of this information in a thorough way.

I suppose I would have to do an experiment about that and ask every person on Threads who uses an “If/then” statements how they gathered this information, asking them to cite their sources. Which I don’t want to do, because that’s not why I’m on social media. I’m on social media to:

1. Promote Sexvangelicals, Relationship 101, and other projects that Julia and I are doing.

2. Explore the silliness and complexities and depth of life. And laugh along the way.

In conclusion:

Please post responsibly. Here are five ways that this can look.

1. Write about your own experience. And say things like, “This is my experience.”

2. Write within your own scope of practice. There are lots of things that you are good at. Share that with the world! And, you are likely not an expert in Middle Eastern geopolitics and history, Jewish or Islamic theology, or guerrilla warfare or espionage. That’s okay. (And if you are, your wisdom of how these systems work.) My expertise is in interpersonal communication, which is why you’re getting this Substack article in your inbox, and not some anecdotally driven rant about Netanyahu, Hamas, or the practice of warfare.

3. Cite your sources. Use hyperlinks and bibliographies. Connect people with other people whose ideas you’re building on to create the content you’re sharing. This is actually the first Substack that I’ve written without any source citation, but if you’d like to read extended information, check out David Wilson’s chapter on If-Then Arguments in A Guide to Good Reasoning: Cultivating Intellectual Virtues.

4. Use social media channels that allow for longer form content. To be fair, there are a few really good resources that provide short-form content about relationships; we highly recommend Therapy Jeff, Decoding Couples, and Dr. Emily Morse. But even their videos consistently miss the complexities of relationships and systems, despite their best effort. We attempt to get around this by using Substack, which allows us more time and space to explore some of the infinite variables and complexities, and to more directly name the nuances.

5. Schedule face-to-face time with people. Find two people per week (that you don’t live with) to have face-to-face conversations, either on Zoom or out for coffee. The connection that happens through face-to-face interactions opens up a largely variance of emotional experiences than avatar-driven interactions, such as the comment boxes of our social media streams.

Let’s heal together!