"They should have known"

Some charges aren't about malice. They're about a failure of care. They didn't mean it, but they should have known it would land badly. A thoughtful person would have remembered. A considerate person would have noticed I'd started speaking. So the charge shifts from "they meant it" to "they didn't care enough to avoid it", which feels more reasonable and is mostly the same charge.

The trouble is that "should have known" assumes people can tell how their acts land, and they mostly can't. You saw in chapter 5 that senders of emails have almost no idea how their tone reads. The same is true of interruptions, of forgotten dates, of short replies. From the inside a slip is invisible. The colleague didn't experience talking over you. They experienced saying their thing. The friend didn't experience ignoring your message. They experienced a day. An earlier book in this series, They can't read your mind, is about the mirror of this, the habit of expecting people to notice what you haven't said. This is the same fact from the other end. People are bad at guessing what lands, and they're bad at it in both directions. They don't notice what they've done to you, and you don't notice what you've done to them.

So the standard "a thoughtful person would have known" is a standard nobody meets, including you. And notice what it does. It converts an accident into a character verdict, thoughtless, inconsiderate, careless, which is exactly the correspondence bias from chapter 3 wearing a more reasonable coat. The act still fully explains itself by the situation. All that's changed is that you've found a way to blame them for the situation.

If an act genuinely needed avoiding, if the forgotten thing mattered, if the interruption cost you something, the remedy isn't a verdict on their character. It's telling them, once, in a way that lets them know for next time, which chapter 19 is about. People who don't know what lands can be told. People who've been silently judged thoughtless can't do anything at all.