Anonymous Evaluations Team FAQ

@EvelyneRose, thank you so much for this informative post, Evelyne! I hope all who read it will now have a much better understanding of AE and how the project works 🙂

@EvelyneRose

Hi Evelyne! Thank you for this post and it certainly is going to be beneficial to us all. I had a question and maybe it relates to this but also relative to all chats. So, @GlenM did come out with a forum post explaining that they would be adding "spirituality" as one of the "lived experiences" to click on and add to ones profile page in an effort to help others. While I thought that was a nice thing to do, even at that time, my comments were on that very post, well, this sounds nice but get ready for it everyone because this could end up getting a listener into trouble and under the category of "imposing beliefs and views". I hoped for the best, and still did add "spirituality" to my lived experiences only in the event that a member would want to speak to me based on that. Just trying to be helpful.

So, I had a chat, someone came to me and wanted to speak about spirituality. Okay, I figured I would do my best. The member was under the impression that spirtuality meant if I believe in ghosts or not. I do not think this was the intention of Glen. Well, I guess these things happen, a chat is a chat and so I did my best. They asked me a direct question, do I believe in ghosts? I explained what I thought the lived experiences meant, but did finally share my thought process and views about it in an effort to be helpful since Glen asked us to list it if we felt comfortable providing support in that way.

So, I recieved an email saying I did get a negative review and it was based on sharing religion and sharing spiritual beliefs. I was asked to list it, I did so, I showed up for the chat. But it did not work out so well. After that, I immediately took "spirituality" off of my lived experiences as I did think all along this would be a slippery slope for any listener to navigate. I truly do try to be most careful, not impose beliefs or opinions about anything at all. I have even held strong in a chat in regard to hatred of someone that would fit the mold of "me" or my family members. They had no idea that the exact type of person that they had complete and utter hatred of, based on their feelings was me, the exact type of person that was helping them and supporting them. Now that one for me was a true victory and a huge mile stone for me as listener. Yes, I can do this with out imposing my beliefs! I understand that people grow up in certain households and beliefs are imposed upon them and adopted or they had a couple of bad experiences with someone that kind of "fit the mold".

Wondering if maybe the Eval team should maybe shy away from any topic related to "spirituality" even if listed on the listeners profile page as that could qualify as "Imposing beliefs and views"?

Again, many thanks for the great post!

@SparkyGizmo I cannot find any forum post by @GlenM explaining what you describe.

I can only find one that says:

Right now you can search listeners by the following fields: keywords; sort by cheers, availability, and other metrics; listeners by age; listeners and therapists; country (189 countries); language (140 languages); gender; and topic (42 topics)…

…we will soon be adding the ability for members to search for listeners by belief system. Listeners will need to proactively choose a belief system in order to be found by members seeking support in these domains. The default will be to have none listed for each listener. The community guideline of not imposing a particular belief system on another person will be more important that ever before; this is solely for people to have the option of finding support from people that share similar beliefs.

That never happened, as far as I know.

I agree that listing "spirituality" as a lived experience is a slippery slope. I commented in that thread:

If we formally encourage listeners to indicate their beliefs in their profiles, by implication that legitimizes bringing the listener's beliefs into chats, and in turn that implies it is no longer valid to report a listener for imposing beliefs.

But because the change never happened, I don't think my comment applies.

My feeling is that it's risky for a listener to share details of any lived experience, because a member might disagree and give a negative review.

But I also feel it was wrong for someone to accept a negative review against you simply because you answered a direct question. This kind of error can easily be prevented in future if 7 Cups bans screenshots and uses chat transcripts to validate negative reviews. In this case it would have been obvious from the transcript that the member asked you a direct question.

Unfortunately, discussing issues like this in the forum is very unlikely to result in positive change, even when there's an actual proposal that would solve the problem.

Charlie

@RarelyCharlie

I agree with you. And the "spirtuality" button was included after that forum post. I did add it to my profile page and then after that experience, just as you mentioned what could happen and as did I, I then chose to remove it from my lived experiences.

@SparkyGizmo I think this could possibly be a good idea, although like Evelyne stated, I don't think the evaluators are going to try to trick anyone. Let's say they did decide to talk about spirituality in their member chat, they're not going to then flag someone for sharing their beliefs if they asked for it. This is unlike a regular member who, as you've experienced, can take things the wrong way. I think in this case, the only reason an evaluation would flag imposing beliefs, even if the chat was specifically about spirituality, would be if say, the "member"/evaluator was talking about their beliefs, and the listener starts saying they're wrong and they should actually believe this, OR the listener goes on and on about their personal beliefs that are not related to the member's/evaluator's beliefs. This is a true issue that I've experienced as a member, that should certainly be looked for in evaluating listener quality, but I don't think it'd be used as a "trap" to try to catch listeners in that way.

As for regular member chats coming with this issue, I guess that's sort of a different issue, of member-listener misunderstanding :/ I personally did not like the idea of having religious/spiritual views listed, but as Charlie mentioned, I never really saw it implemented. I tend to just go with the flow of whatever the member's views are and take myself out of the equation (belief-wise, anyways)

@TaranWanderer

I agree with you. After my experience, I simply "unclicked the spirituality button" All is good for me now. I have no worries. I was simply asking on the behalf of others. I truly think mine was not a product of the Eval team, just simply a member chat but I do think it could be a conflict of interest if, from the Eval team perspective, well, these are your lived experiences so clearly any of that is fair game to discuss. But as you both have said, allowing religion into it all, well, it can be a breeding ground for sharing of ones self. And so for me, even if it does not apply to me any longer, of course I have concern for all of my team mates here on 7 cups. Whether it be for being evaluated or taking part in any member chat.

I just had a great mock chat with a mentor and it was brilliant. They read what I said here on this forum.They said, I'd like to see a mock chat like that where an opinion is not made. I accepted the challenge, because it can be done. I did it as well as hit all of the points required by 7 cups standards and more. I had no idea what they would say to me but I rose to the occassion but I have to say, it's not going to be easy to do. I even was cognizant of the "ninja on the roof" and I knew what to do and not to do.

Thank you for sharing this informative story

@EvelyneRose Thanks for such a clear informative post. This will be really useful!

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