Making Sense of How Others Think

Have you ever been torn apart by a dilemma, so divisive you went and asked strangers for their opinion on it?

The challenge with difficult decisions isn’t usually uncertainty about the missing piece of information. The problem is anxiety, the emotional discomfort of not really knowing what the narrative actually is, caught between two or more frames that conflict in your head.

This was exactly the situation that brought someone to post a question in one of the career and management threads on Reddit. I was looking for a good example to illustrate the nature of sense-making, and Reddit users are, as always, opinionated and don’t hold back, which makes threads like this a great place to watch how people actually think and make sense of the same facts.

The presented dilemma: The author had been offered a director role with better pay. But they were hesitant, because they hadn’t spent long enough at their current job, and their resume read like a series of short sprints. Every move had actually been a step up, but they never stayed anywhere long enough to be promoted, and they were afraid their resume would read as “job hopper,” someone “chasing money” rather than someone who’d actually built something. They were afraid they were “out of lives,” and that this move, for the better pay and title, might finally be the one that cost them long-term credibility.

The post drew more than sixty meaningful responses, and looking through them carefully, clear patterns emerged in how people interpreted the situation and the advice they gave.

Erving Goffman, the sociologist who spent much of his career studying how people make sense of everyday situations, called this framing, the process of answering the question what’s actually going on here, before any conscious reasoning even starts. A frame decides which details register as relevant and which discounted as noise. This idea is extremely useful when we want to understand how others think and how we make decisions, while the process of framing is often invisible to the frame holder.

Reading through the comments, I could distinguish roughly five framing styles. I counted, loosely, how many comments fell into each, to get a sense of which frames were most common, which was an interesting observation on its own.

• Dismissal: The largest group (!) ~33% of all responses. These commentators barely engaged with the author’s framing at all, didn’t acknowledge the hesitation, and offered flat judgement instead. “Nobody cares. You are overthinking it”, was their verdict.

• Relabelling: ~26% of responses. If the author believed job hopping was bad, they pushed back: they reframed the same resume as breadth of experience. Some brought updated norms into it, calling someone a job hopper after two years is outdated, the market’s moved on, it’s normal now.

• Risk acknowledgement: ~12% of responses, who took the worry seriously as a real and calibrated concern, particularly at senior levels, rather than dismissing it.

• Cynicism: a similar ~12% share, who brought a generalised belief regardless of the author’s actual circumstances or feelings, “Companies have no loyalty, why should you”.

• Deeper meaning: another ~13% asked “what’s actually behind the question?” Some questioned the author’s own readiness to make senior-level calls, in essence they argued that “to be a director you need to be able to decide, and you seem to need Reddit to decide for you”. Others went further, naming things like imposter syndrome, or a dependency on what others might think sitting underneath the whole question.

What all of this shows is that different people bring different mental frames to the same situation. The world takes a different shape depending on which frame you’re standing in, and the judgement follows from that shape.

We carry a set of frames picked up over a lifetime, through family, through early workplace experience, through culture, and we reach for whichever one seems to fit, usually without asking where it came from or whether it’s still accurate.

Going back to the thread, what’s also worth noticing is that the author didn’t bring just one frame. They brought two, and that’s what triggers the emotional response, the anxiety and confusion. There are hints of shame in the language, a belief system running underneath it: “chasing money is bad”, “what others think of me matters”, but also another narrative: “I do a good job”, “I deserve this position”. So, they held two conflicting views of their own situation at once, and that’s exactly the sense-making challenge. If they’d only ever held the “just take the money” frame, there wouldn’t have been a post at all. The tension itself is what brought them to ask.

Most commentators, by contrast, couldn’t really access that tension. They saw the situation flatly and offered decisive solutions, especially the dismissal group. The moments where real feeling crept into a comment tended to be the moments where the situation brushed against someone’s own history. Others weren’t really responding to the situation in front of them at all, they arrived with the belief already fully formed, a fixed mechanism for resolving the tension: some with a reflexive positive reframe (”it’s not as bad as you think”, “look at it differently”); some with a generalised belief about how the world works (”company won’t be loyal”, “look out for yourself”). And then there was a group with a broader frame that looked at the relationships between the person and the situation (“what feeds this hesitation?”) naming the author’s own anxiety.

So this was someone who brought a dilemma to Reddit, and walked away with a stack of new frames to look at it through. What we don’t know is whether they found anything close to a definitive answer, or whether they’d already made the decision intuitively, and were really just looking through sixty comments for the one that confirmed it, filing the rest away as noise.

Frames aren’t something you solve once and put away. But a few things are worth trying to apply into your own decision-making process.

• When you feel caught in a dilemma, ask whether it’s really two competing frames you haven’t managed to reconcile. Is there a larger frame that could hold both at once, or a higher vantage point the situation looks different from?

• When someone’s view doesn’t match yours, ask what frame they’re actually using. It’s rarely a question of who’s right and who’s wrong. More often, you’re each looking from a different place entirely.

• Ask what frame you bring to the debates that matter to you, and where it came from. Frames are what make sense-making possible in the first place. Seeing your own is the harder, and rarer, skill.

Seeing a frame, and making sense of a dilemma, is one of the core capabilities that can actually be developed, through reflection and practice. This is often where I see coaching conversation do their real work for my clients. As they explore their situation, the frame becomes more visible, the choices expand and energy follows.

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