Are you gaslighting me? The role of affective habits in epistemic friction

One of the most insidious consequences of continuous exposure to gaslighting is that agents develop an expectation of further emotional manipulation. Repeated exposure to demeaning and humiliating behavior can make agents prone to interpret any epistemic challenge as a potential instance of gaslighting. Embedded in physiological and affective habits, this expectation become an integral way of interpreting social interactions and other people’s intentions. The concept of gaslighting was originally coined to alleviate a form of hermeneutic injustice, but some applications of the concept paradoxically come to perpetuate exactly this kind of injustice. When agents perceive gaslighting in epistemically ambiguous situations, they foreclose the possibility of benefiting from productive forms of epistemic frictions.