The story so far:
The truth about truth is that human beings are incredibly lousy at apprehending the truth. Most of the disappointments and frustrations at work – indeed, any place – are due to such misapprehensions. There are at least three common types of misapprehensions. The first is mistaking inference for the truth, the second, your common garden-variety misunderstanding.
This post is about the third.
Misapprehension 3: Justification
Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, discusses in a New York Times article another kind of misapprehension, one that involves a very common justification.
When he was a boy, Gilbert’s family would drive to New York on their annual holiday. At some point in the trip, his brother and he would get bored with reading comics and they’d start fighting. One would punch the other on the arm, the other would punch him back, and so on. His mother would chastise them, and he and his brother “would start to plead our cases.”
“But he hit me first,” one of us would say …
In pleading this way, Gilbert says, he and his brother were following a very common pattern. In most human societies,
being hit first provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden.
A punch thrown second is viewed as legally and morally different from a punch thrown first. Hence, “participants in every one of the globe’s intractable conflicts … offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.”
Yet there’s a problem, Gilbert says, because “people count differently”.
People think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before [and] … other people’s actions as the causes of what came later.
He cites research from the University of Texas illustrating the effect. In a mock conversation, pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. Volunteer A was to make an opening statement, B was to respond to A, A to respond to B, and so on. At the end the volunteers were shown various statements and asked to “recall what had been said just before and just after.”
The results showed an “intriguing asymmetry.” Volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner’s statements. Gilbert says, while it seems a “grossly self-serving pattern of remembering”, it’s actually
the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own. Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others …[thus] our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves, but the opposite will be true of other people’s reasons and punches …
So is born the escalation of mutual harm, another example of the misapprehension of truth. What is the truth here? It’s the situation shorn of the “illusion” that others are responsible for my actions and the “belief” my actions are justifiable responses to theirs.
The truth is A and B punched.
***
Being lousy at apprehending the truth doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In the three examples, the truth might have been under a mound of baggage, a little stifled and crumpled to be sure, but it was always discoverable.
And there’s something else to consider. Even if the truth is too plain to be discovered at a particular time, the mere fact of recognising our failure to apprehend it would make a difference. For if we got how poor we are at apprehending the truth, our lives would be easier.
We might begin perceiving our bosses not as monstrous, but human-sized; as human beings trying, and often failing, like the rest of us.
We might give up the insistence we are right, and entertain the possibility we actually don’t know.
As Daniel Gilbert says, we might learn to trust.
Until we learn to stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others – and to start trusting others themselves – there will continue to be tears and recriminations in the [back of the car].
***
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