Interpretive Presence™: A Field Study in Reactivity, Perception, and the Space Between

Part 1: What Happens When Meaning Meets Identity

 

Introduction: A Post, A Mirror, and an Unexpected Experiment

My day started with a headline—followed quickly by two more.

The first was a report from an online insurance agency stating that 44% of Tesla owners claimed their vehicles had been vandalized, presumably by opponents of Elon Musk and his involvement with DOGE. The second? A woman who stripped naked and defecated on a Southwest Airlines flight. And the third? A knock-down, drag-out brawl between cruise passengers as they disembarked—a continuation of a dispute that had started mid-voyage on a basketball court.

Three different stories. No overlap in context—except that I came across them on the same day. They were current, and they caused me to pause and wonder if this pointed to a deeper theme: the erosion of self-regulation in public behavior.

That sparked an idea.

I decided to conduct what I now refer to as my first Modern Consciousness® Behavioral Experiment.

I crafted a social media post that invited reflection. While I used the image from the Tesla article to highlight the post, I included the other two headlines as well in the text. I made no mention of politics. Instead, I commented on what I saw as the common thread: a possible pattern of low emotional intelligence playing out across unrelated domains.

For clarity, emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions as well as the ability to recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others. It includes skills like emotional regulation, empathy, self-awareness, and social awareness. In short, it’s what allows us to pause, reflect, and respond with intention instead of reacting on impulse.

I listed a few skills I felt were missing in these scenarios: emotional regulation which I’ve already mentioned, perspective, awareness, critical thinking, and basic respect for others. I noted that this didn’t seem like fringe behavior anymore—it felt like it was becoming the norm, with more and more of these situations popping up in the daily news cycles.

I ended my post with an open question: What do these stories tell you?

Then I boosted it. Not to go viral, but to hopefully give me a sufficient amount of observational data.

I targeted adults over 35 with no filters for political affiliation or interests. I wanted it to reach people unfamiliar with my work and a broad range of people just generally to see how they would interpret the message without added context or cues.

What followed went far beyond commentary. It became a real-time field study in how people read, react, and reveal themselves when faced with ambiguity, emotion, and meaning all tangled together.

And it led to the realization of something I hadn’t yet named.  That the skill often missing in these moments isn’t just emotional intelligence.  It’s something I am now calling Interpretive Presence™.

 

What the Responses Revealed

The post had a reach of 6,361 with 7,166 views (some viewed it multiple times), it was shared 100 times, 33 people clicked the link to read the attached article (I’m assuming out of curiosity), 2294 reacted (you know, a heart, laughing face, or angry face) and there were 218 comments. The majority didn’t engage.

But, among those who did, a number of distinct patterns emerged:

• Many jumped to conclusions—quickly assuming my personal beliefs based solely on the Tesla reference. This is what happens when identity signals (like a headline or image) trigger a snap judgment. It bypasses curiosity and goes straight to categorization: “You must be one of them.”
• Some projected meaning that wasn’t there— assigning motive, intent, or political affiliation that I never stated or even addressed in the post. The post was about a broader trend of reactive public behavior. I did not mention politics, but the primary article was a hot political topic at the moment.
• A number collapsed context and content and ignored the core question altogether.  They didn’t separate the image of the shared article from the topic conveyed in my post and completely missed that it was an invitation to reflect on human behavior.  Instead, they defaulted to their grievances about politics.
• Quite a few were sarcastic, openly mocked others and even displayed outright hostility—not only toward me as the author but also to political figures, those that commented with whom they disagreed, and those that blamed this behavior on everything from the lack of good parenting to generalizing behavior based solely on political party preference.

These patterns weren’t surprising—as someone who studies behavior, I understand emotional triggers. But what struck me was how quickly people moved from stimulus to reaction without realizing that they had completely bypassed the actual content and context of the post. Did they even read the post—or were they just reacting to the article shared? That’s certainly a possibility. But it got even more interesting.

I didn’t engage much, but I did respond to a few commenters to clarify that the post wasn’t about politics to gauge reaction. In most cases, it didn’t matter. Even after I explained my intent and pointed out that I had included multiple stories—not just the Tesla one—many people doubled down. A few outright told me I was wrong, that the post was “obviously political.” A friend even challenged me directly, saying that if I was researching vandalism (which I wasn’t), I should’ve used an example that wasn’t political in nature. I asked one poster that was particularly engaged and enraged this question:

“If your next door neighbor, who happened to vote differently than you, had their Tesla vandalized while you were standing in your driveway witnessing it, what would you do?”

His reply?  Go back into his house.

Wow.

Anyway, I noticed that once a meaning was assigned by the reader—especially one charged with identity or ideology—even clarification was dismissed as dishonest or manipulative. It was apparent from some that my few clarifications were not seen as truth-telling and that I simply must have another motive.

And that’s where my exploration took a turn.

 

Beyond Reactivity: The Moment Before the Emotion

What I saw in the comments wasn’t just emotional intensity—it was interpretive auto-pilot, a deeply human pattern. People employed automatic mental shortcuts that skipped over engagement and went straight to assumption. The image, the headline, and the cultural charge of the topic triggered a reflexive leap: a projection of belief, intention, or identity onto me and onto the post itself.

Psychologists have names for this—cognitive heuristics, confirmation bias, naïve realism—all wired into us to help us make sense of the world quickly. But in moments like this, they don’t help. They distort. The more charged the topic, the more tightly we cling to our first impression—often without realizing it’s just that: an impression. The more aware we become of these internal defaults, the more choice we gain in how we interpret. I’ll explore that more in Part 2, but for now, this was the realization that shifted everything for me.

Knowing this, what fascinated me even more was how some were unaware that they weren’t responding to the post itself, but to the version of it their mind had already constructed. In that moment, the meaning they assigned became the truth. That’s what’s so often missing—not just emotional regulation, but conscious recognition that meaning is formed in real time. Most people don’t realize it’s happening. They aren’t aware of the lens through which they are looking.  And once their interpretation takes shape, it solidifies, judgment locks in, and reaction feels not only justified—but obvious. From a Modern Consciousness® perspective, this is the moment that matters most: the space where awareness of our meaning-making gives us the power to choose a different response. As Viktor Frankle said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

From a Modern Consciousness® perspective, this is the moment that matters most: the space where awareness of our meaning-making gives us the power to choose a different response. And that’s what led me to name this Interpretive Presence™.

 

What Is Interpretive Presence™? 

Interpretive Presence™ (noun)
/ˈin-tər-prə-tiv ˈpre-zᵊns/

1. The capacity to consciously witness your own meaning-making process as it unfolds in real time.
2. The practice of recognizing that the mind is not merely receiving input—but actively filtering, shaping, and assigning meaning based on identity, bias, emotion, or past experience.
3. A state of heightened awareness in which one sees the lens through which interpretation is occurring—before it solidifies into judgment or reaction.

Intepretive Presence™ isn’t about suppressing emotion or staying neutral. It’s about staying awake to how your interpretation is forming—and present enough to question whether the meaning you’re assigning is actually what’s there.

In this way, the concept goes beyond traditional emotional intelligence—not by rejecting it, but by extending it. While emotional intelligence includes the ability to recognize, regulate, and respond to emotion, Interpretive Presence™ draws our attention to the layer just beneath that: the moment where meaning is being constructed. It’s about witnessing what we think we’re seeing—before it calcifies into interpretation, and before that interpretation drives our reaction.

It’s the space Viktor Frankl described—between stimulus and response—but with a spotlight on the interpretive lens that shapes how we even perceive the stimulus in the first place.

 

This Is Just the Beginning

In a culture overflowing with emotionally charged signals—headlines, tweets, identity markers—it’s no longer enough to “stay calm” or “be civil.” We have to develop awareness to see how we’re interpreting situations in real time. That’s what Interpretive Presence™ invites us into.

In Part 2, I’ll explore how this skill can be cultivated, how it differs from mindfulness or emotional regulation, and what it looks like to apply Interpretive Presence™ in the messiness of real life—in conversations, relationships, and public discourse.

But for now, I’ll leave you with this:

 

What if the most powerful form of self-regulation isn’t what you do with your emotion—but what you do with your interpretation?