The most basic in human psychology is “Why do we talk?”.

I have always been a shy kid in front of people I don’t know. I have seen my friends talking for hours with their friends, some with their girlfriends. Then I joined Amazon, still struggling to have an informal talk. To undestand why this is happing to me I started looking around and came across this wonderful theory of Transactional analysis by Eric Berne.

Basics of Transactional Analysis

Every person have 3 states in him/her, what we call as ego states. These 3 ego states are Parent, Adult and Child.

  • Parent: Our parents have different reactions to situation. This ego states comprises of all those situation and how our parents reacted to it.
  • Adult: This is considered to be the most stable state. We look at a situation and response accordingly.
  • Child: This ego state comprises of all occurences how our parents taught us or how we responded to those situation when we were very young.

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Eric said that every conversation is a transaction. Suppose I am talking to my friend Vivek. I say “Hi” which let us assume have a value of X. Now since I have given him some sort of value X, I assume that he would also give me something equivalent to it. Now Vivek can say “Hi” back, he can give emotional support in case I am sad or he can choose to ignore. If Vivek chooses to ignore, I will have an emotion anger or sadness based on what ego state I was when I did that transaction and what situation matches that scenario in that particular ego state.



Conflict arises when there is cross transaction. Suppose 2 people, lets call them A and B are talking. A is the boss of B. B had underperformed in previous quarter. A says to B that you should focus on your skills to excel in future. A had said this from parent ego state to the child ego state of B. In this scenario if B replies from adult(most stable and logical state) or child state, there would be no conflict. He can reply as “Yes you are right, I will try to focus more on my skills”. But if B replies from parent ego state then there would be a conflict which can result in anger in person A. We should always try to be in adult ego state to avoid conflict which is very very difficult.

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Different types of conversation

According to Eric there are 6 different ways in which people spend their time in conversation. These are:

  • Withdrawl
  • Ritual
  • Pastime
  • Activities
  • Games
  • Intimacy

You can google to know more about them. Here we will talk about Games only because these are the most imteresting ones.

Games

We will be only talking about conversation of two people. In these types of converstaion one person have a hidden psychological agenda which he may or may not know about. Every games have these 3 neccessary requirements:

  • Con: He/She is the one with the hidden psychological agenda. Agenda can be a anything i.e. emotional imbalance, feeling of superiority, etc.
  • Gimmick: The insecurity of the other person which the con uses to complete his/her agenda.
  • Payoff: This is what the con wins, in some cases both the parties win something from the game.

Lets take a look at one of the games Why don't you?...Yes but..

Why don’t you?.. - Yes but..

Suppose two people are discussiong about a programming problem. Person A asks B that he is not able to solve a problem. This is how the conversation goes:

  • A: I am not able to solve this problem.
  • B: Why dont you ask Amit? He has solved this before.
  • A: Yes but it appears he is too busy.
  • B: Ok, why don’t you try solution X?
  • A: Yes but, I dont have the permission.
  • B: You can try performing Y
  • A: Yes but I dont think it would work.

This would go on and on till B dont have any solution. A here is the con, the gimmick was the inability of B to say that A should try first before giving absurd reasons to not doing it. The payoff is that A believes that the problem is not solvable or he wanted to see B’s inability to solve an issue. Again this might not be a known agenda of A.

There are many other social games which Eric proposed. There are games we play in our day to day life and are not able to see them. I have seen people play many other transactional games as well, will not disclose them here beacuse even I want to have a larger chunk of the transaction we might have in the future.