PLEASE, OVER-ANALYZE

One of the annoying refrains in everyday communication is being told, “You’re over-analyzing.” Or worse, “You need to chill.” Can you imagine Socrates telling Plato he needed to stop over-analyzing? Or Plato similarly admonishing Aristotle he needed to relax?

You can engage in poor analysis beset by weak evidence and reasoning. You can engage in obsessive analysis, where you keep repeating the same thing. You can engage in irrelevant analysis, which is not on point. But you cannot engage in over-analysis. There is no such thing. It’s like being told you’re too logical, to which the appropriate response should be something like, “What amount of being logical—50%, 75%, or 90%—is just right?

It is true you cannot successfully employ a logical model to understand irrational behavior, which, by definition, is illogical. Still, logical analysis can at very least reveal the illogical reasoning underpinning the behavior, even if such analysis cannot explain what brings about that reasoning.

Often, the “over-analyzing” label  is just another way of saying, “Let’s move on; this is becoming tedious.” Even when the analysis offered keeps going deeper and positing more insights, it may fall on deaf ears, your audience less interested in your subject and not nearly as invested in your analysis as you. They have other, more pressing interests. They want to move on.

Other times, your audience may not appreciate analysis that drills deeper, especially if they embrace the worldview that common sense in the form of simple solutions can solve all problems big and small. Probing, in-depth analysis is seen as overkill—unnecessary and wasteful. And if an easy solution is not possible, then “it is what it is,” a hopeless situation that cannot be remediated by any means, logical or otherwise. It is what it is, so stop talking about it.

Your audience’s level of formal education offers some indication of their propensity and appetite for sustained analysis. College students generally experience more readings, lectures, and discussions relating to political, economic, and social/cultural issues than do their non-college counterparts. Higher education, as such, exposes you to more diverse and nuanced points of view. This accounts for two—admittedly debatable—broad generalizations: the college educated tend to focus more on critical thinking and analysis, whereas the non-college educated often place greater emphasis on workability and practicality. The two perspectives, of course, are not mutually exclusive.

But perhaps what is more foretelling of one’s willingness to listen and engage in sustained analysis is a sense of curiosity and a keen desire to always want to know why. When you are curious, you ask questions; you seek answers—answers that often are discovered by critically analyzing the data before you. To some that may come across as over-analyzing, but to others, anything less would be under-analyzing.