At some point, "assume good intent" was removed from the Code of Conduct.
It's a key pillar of the social contract and how we choose to deal with each other. It belongs in the Code of Conduct.
PLEASE add this back.
It's been brought up that I asked for this in the feedback for a previous revision of the CoC as well. Since I was clearly so much more articulate and energetic then - for your consideration.
Or alternatively Presume good intent, as Gilles brought up in the comments.
This was always the most beautiful part of what we've been trying to build here for the past decade or more. It reminded us to always try for a charitable interpretation and not jump to conclusions. It helped us put things in perspective and talk to people instead of just branding them as evil.
Please put it back. This is the single most effective way of ensuring an inclusive environment: assume good faith! It's simple, catchy and a principle we should all live by in our everyday lives.
The world entire, let alone SE, would be a better place if we all remembered to assume good faith. Removing this from the CoC can only make things worse.
Yes, we should put "assume good intentions" back. To give some background, I quote from Gilles's excellent answer about the changes to the policy:
The old “be nice” policy told us to
Be welcoming, be patient, and assume good intentions.
This was an instance of the “assume good faith” guideline that many inclusive communities live by. The new code of conduct tells us to
be patient and welcoming
but “assume good faith” has disappeared. We are increasingly encouraged to take offense, whether offense was meant or not. Today's change additionally tells us
don’t use language that might offend or alienate
You're guilty even if you did not mean any offense. You're guilty even if nobody takes offense! You're guilty if someone might take offense.
Do not be quick to take offense...
–Ecclesiastes 7:9
Also, do not take to heart every word that people say...
–Ecclesiastes 7:21
My interpretation of this ancient advice is that we should assume good intentions. I agree with this advice and agree that it should be added back to the CoC.
I not only want to echo the sentiments of those who want this phrasing restored, but I would also like to elevate Ben Kovitz's comment on a different post:
@KateGregory Properly it should be "Presume good faith", i.e. assume it until demonstrated otherwise. You are quite right that trolls abuse the assumption of good faith—and they should be run out of town precisely because trust and good faith are so essential to community. – Ben Kovitz 9 hours ago
I'd also point out a Lexico post about the differences between assume and presume. I concur with the idea that we should "presume good faith" - I believe it to be true that most people will act in good faith. If you take a random sampling of the world, the probability will be that a person won't be a troll or other malicious actor and therefore we should treat them as such until there is evidence otherwise.
Also, if I was going to put it somewhere, I'd put it right in the "Our Expectations" box:
Presume good faith.
Don't jump to conclusions about other people. Mistakes happen and can often be corrected with reminders.
I couldn't agree more. We need this.
And while we're at it, please also put back friendliness and kindness that have been stripped out of the new CoC. The terms are used and explained in the lower sections, and they should stay in the summary on top. In contrast, nobody really knows what "being inclusive" means, and it's just as unclear as "welcoming". Let's just say
Be kind, friendly and respectful.
Recently I was at a talk where the speaker, who was confident and funny, made a tiny little aside, just a few words long, that suggested, well let's say it was members of a particular profession or people who used a particular programming language or people who lived in a particular place, were somehow less than "us". It was nothing big, nothing to object to, the talk went on.
Then a few sentences later, the same comment, but this time a little bigger, a little more detailed, embroidered, harder to miss. A recurring joke, but now with more sting. Someone DMed me "those kinds of jokes are not ok." While I was agreeing with the DM, an even stronger version of the joke, really obvious and cringey now. And finally a fourth time before the talk was over. Complaints were made.
I've talked with a lot of people since about why I didn't do something at the first joke. Put up my hand and say "I don't think we need that, do we?" But you see, the first joke was really mild. If you correct someone when they've done something really mild, you're a snowflake who is just looking for offense and can't you just assume people mean well? If you let it go, for some people that is all they were going to say and that's an end to it. But for some people, they are emboldened - they hear the laughter, everything is going well, so they turn it up a little. And if you step in now you're still going to have people tell you that you're too sensitive. If you leave it until they say something that is clearly outrageous and upsetting, well now people are fine with you taking action but the people who would be hurt by it have been hurt. You didn't protect them.
Which brings me to this whole assume or presume good faith thing. It is one strategy a community can use when setting up codes of conduct and similar rules. It's important in an international community like ours to understand that some people may be working in their second (or 5th) language, may live in a place with different attitudes to gender and to inclusiveness, may be operating under constraints we don't know about. That's true. It doesn't mean it's ok for them to do things against the CoC though. It just means they should be corrected rather than punished. For example, a post that misgenders someone should be edited -- whether it did so knowingly or not. You can't leave it uncorrected just because the poster didn't mean to offend, didn't know any better, doesn't have pronouns like that in their first language, or even doesn't believe that someone's gender is what they say it is. (And note, comments are only editable by moderators, or the OP for 5 minutes, and typically it is comments that mention one user to another: "Did you try Kate's suggestion? He's usually right" sort of thing.) When a CoC violation can just be edited out, that's what should happen. Any issue of intent is irrelevant.
But of course not all CoC violations are honest mistakes. The Internet is full of people wringing their hands about decent, honest, hard working folk who accidentally offend a snowflake and suffer terrible retribution. I care far more about decent, honest, hardworking folks who wanted to understand their error message, but they instead got a dose of exclusion, othering, or unwanted religious advice. We're so busy pretending that it's fine to be cruel to people as long as you didn't do it on purpose or didn't know any better, that we forget what happens to people who read this stuff. Where is the good intent for them? We're having giant debates all over meta where apparently it's now cool to explain how your religion says you can't recognize trans people as who they are because that would mean God made a mistake. Why are we doing that? How is that making the internet better?
And then there are the trolls. Trolls love places that tell us all to assume or presume good faith and intent. They love riding the very edge of appearing polite while actually being cruel as can be. They're "just asking". They imply that people's pain is nonexistent or unimportant or both. They demand proof over and over. They keep saying things like "don't you want to learn from people who disagree with you?" and "surely we're all here to grow and learn" and "but you have to respect my beliefs if you want me to respect your beliefs" and all kinds of polite and reasonable sounding things. Sandwiched in with "but we all know women just don't like programming the way men do" or "you can't force me to say God is wrong" or "marriage should only be between a man and a woman" or just misgendering someone on purpose to be mean.
It sounds great, let’s assume the best of people and not be quick to take offense. Let's give people a break and look past their words to what they said and all work together to understand this error message. It sounds great. But in practice it means that people who feel hurt and excluded, who feel that every day someone tells them they don't belong in their profession, are told to "suck it up" and "look past that" because surely the person didn't mean to offend you. Well, who cares? They did. Do something about it. Edit the "mistake" or the deliberate cruelty away, show the person "you do belong here and we won't let people talk to you like that." Stand up for people who are being hurt instead of for people who are hurting, whether accidentally or on purpose. (You don't have to punish those who are hurting people; just stop leaving their stuff there because they didn't know any better.) Quit defending offensive material because it was probably done in good faith.
Here's an article that goes into more detail on why assuming good intent can actually work against inclusion. Some quotes I found relevant:
people telling you to ‘assume good intent’ sounds like they’re really telling you to shut up. That your feelings about getting stomped on all the time don’t matter. That no matter how sore your foot is, how much money you’ve spent replacing ruined shoes, how many times you’ve limped on broken toes, you still have a responsibility to worry about the feelings of the people who are hurting you.
...
Addressing incidents as if they’re simple conflicts between the parties involved sets up a false equivalence between dealing with discrimination and dealing with the momentary discomfort of being told you hurt someone.
...
Telling people to ‘assume good intent’ is telling them that no matter how badly they hurt, they still need to smile and be nice so the person who hurt them won’t feel blamed.
This creates a double standard. Alicia must assume good intent from Fred, even if he stepped on her foot because he was helping himself to her personal space in a way he would never do to another man. But when Alicia reacts out of shock, anger, and pain, the ‘assume good intent’ rule allows Fred to cast that as something Alicia has done at him, rather than seeing it as a very normal human response to being hurt.
It is a good article and if you haven't been actively working on inclusion issues recently, it's possible you will learn a great deal from reading it. It is very difficult for people who are not constantly being poked, prodded, corrected, neglected, and pushed aside to understand what life is like for those who are. Like all kinds of privilege, setting it aside to empathize with those who have had specific hardships is difficult. I think it's worth doing. As long as we keep saying "he didn't mean it" and wringing our hands about poor innocent people who didn't mean to offend, and hypothetically what if someone got banned for an honest mistake, we are ignoring the people who really got hurt (again) and who left and who also were innocent, but apparently should just suck it up and not complain (or be super super polite and gentle when complaining, making sure to protect and care for the poor innocent user who has just hurt them, on purpose or not) then we are continuing to enable people to be poked, prodded, corrected, neglected, and pushed aside and what's more, we're saying we don't really mind as long as it's not deliberate, malicious, and repeated. I don't want to say that.
It doesn't belong there because it doesn't (currently) apply. Unfortunately.
A CoC covers all interaction on the sites, including interactions between the company and the users. Good faith is currently not assumed by either side in communications between the company and the community*.
Because the CoC is imposed by the company to the community, requiring that users presume good faith - or else! - would probably be received rather badly.
The solution is to build a CoC in collaboration with the community, then both sides would immediately be on board with a "good faith" clause. If that isn't an option, the company will have to lead by example and first apply the good faith policy to itself before it can demand it from others.
*The community presumes bad intent on the part of SE, mainly (but not exclusively) due to the whole Monica thing. And SE presumes bad intent on the part of the community, as can be seen for example by Sara's tweet where she thanks highly respected and deeply invested power users for leaving in protest of SE's questionable actions.
There is something similar in the Code of Conduct right now, and I'm surprised nobody brought it up here (emphasis in original, presumably because the CoC's drafters consider it important enough to highlight):
We take your reports seriously. Those who don’t follow the Code of Conduct in good faith may face repercussions deemed appropriate by our moderation team. This is how moderators generally handle misconduct:
To me, this is better than the prior "assume good intentions" guideline, because it shifts the focus to enforcement rather than a duty of the the entire community. It's in the spirit of Kate Gregory's excellent answer to this question: everyone doesn't need to assume good intentions all the time, and we can take simple actions to correct CoC issues (editing, flagging, comments, etc...) without a whole digression into determining intent first. It keeps the focus on the content, not the users. It doesn't, as one proposal suggests, require we have "enough evidence to suggest that someone may be a bad actor" before flagging something; we just flag when we see a problem. And nobody can use it as a shield to argue that violations should be left up because they were made with good intent.
The point of the policy is that the entire community doesn't need to try to understand someone's intent; we can just get on with the content and leave the question of sorting out a user's intent to the moderators.
But when it comes to actual enforcement actions like warnings and suspensions, the code tells moderators to apply them to those not following the CoC in good faith. Which is also important: people acting in good faith have the leeway to make mistakes and be forgetful, as we all do, without facing repercussions. And moderators, as opposed to the entire community, are in the best position to make the decisions about what is and isn't good faith; they have tools that can help them and those are the difficult decisions we elected them to handle.
Note: if your response to this is some variation of "but they didn't follow that with Monica," then I don't have enough information to truly know whether you're right or wrong, but I do know that your complaint is with the awful process they followed and not the text of the CoC itself, which is the question here.
It's a key pillar of the social contract and how we choose to deal with each other. It belongs in the Code of Conduct.
No, it does not. Be kind and respectful is sufficient.
First let's look at this from a "management techniques" point of view. When you define your career or project goals, you learn to follow the SMART criteria. M in there means: measurable. Now, nobody looking at your content can assess whether you "assumed good intentions" when you interact with another user. A moderator can look at your content, and try to neutrally judge whether your words were kind, or at least respectful. He has no idea what you thought about the other user when you wrote your text. So that rule helps nobody who is asked to enforce the rules and practices of the CoC.
And beyond that, also on the "social best practices" point of view: not useful. Seriously.
When you study the zillions of books about self-healing, spirituality, ... there are two things that you will find in any good book:
Meaning: as soon you start labeling people's intention (based on their content), you are potentially going down the wrong rabbit hole. It doesn't help you to label things "good" or "bad". The only thing that makes sense: to observe the feelings that you come up within yourself, to then determine for example "I find that other person hurtful or ignorant, so I better stop wasting my time here".
Which leads to the second bullet point: there is no point in speculating about others. The only person on this planet you can really know about: that is you. Making assumptions what others meant or felt is sometimes inevitable, but it shouldn't be your standard practice guiding theme!
Sure, when your job includes "explaining human behavior", then it can be necessary to make assumptions, in order to get "arguments". But that isn't what we folks are doing here!
Long story short: don't speculate about other people's intention. If they are "unclear", ask for clarification. If you find the conversation to be exhausting, say why, and consider ending it.
The comments are correct insofar assume good intentions is just a shortcut for "don't assume much, but assume people come in good faith, and are, in general, nice folks, ...". The problem with that: it requires interpretation. People going "what it actually means is ...". Which for me, is again: not a positive thing.
The CoC should be as precise as possible. And I don't see how assume good intentions really helps with that.
Intent is not the only factor when considering bad behavior. Effect is just as important. If my behavior causes the effect of creating an unwelcoming environment, that effect is felt regardless of whether or not my intention was good. Many communities use this sort of "intent or effect" language in their codes of conduct all the time for good reason.
One essay that I end up coming back to again and again is WP:SPADE. Multiple communities I'm involved in are having this exact discussion, so that's kind of why.
Good faith is often used by bad actors as a shield. I'm not behaving badly and how dare you accuse me of that because you should be assuming good faith. I'm not being disrespectful to people, I'm merely Asking Questions.
At the end of the day, the rule of thumb I use is as follows: assume good faith, but know when you're being bullshitted.
