E is for E.S.P.

[the_siobhan]

I used to date somebody who was really big on the concept of taking a stand. He believed very strongly that most people are apathetic or cowardly when it came to confronting anything wrong or unjust, that the world would be a better place if more people were willing to call out bad behaviour when they saw it.

I had the experience of growing up in the era when cops wouldn't press charges in cases of "domestics" and when teachers and doctors refused to get involved even when I flat-out told them what was going on in my house. So this kind of commitment to getting involved pushes a great big button for me. But after a while I started to come to the conclusion that in his eagerness to take some kind of decisive action, he didn't appear to be all that interested in making sure he knew what the best action was to take. He just wanted to be doing something, and once he had made his mind up any new information was deemed to be making excuses. I was frequently confused by his conviction that he could pick out the guilty parties in a dispute where (in my mind) he really didn't seem to be in a position to know what had really happened. When he started making pronouncements about events that I had witnessed and he hadn't I finally decided he was full of shit, and that was the end of my emotional investment in his desire to take a stand on the side of righteousness.

I bring him up because he was an extreme example, and because, well, extreme or not he's an example of something that I see all the time. People seem to want a conclusion, any conclusion. When the OJ trial was going on people would occasionally ask me whether or not I thought he was guilty. I would respond that I didn't know, I hadn't been following the case. "But what do you think?" they would persist. They seemed baffled at the idea that I could honestly have no opinion. I, for my part, was baffled that seemed to want me to have an opinion based on... air or something.

I am probably especially conscious of this kind of thing. One of the ways in which I carry around my damage is that I am extremely over-sensitive to feeling like I have been convicted without benefit of trial. I can't count the number of relationships (friendships and otherwise) that have ended because somebody decided they already knew What I Did - and for bonus points Why I Did It - without deigning to ask me about it first. As soon as I feel like I'm being called upon to justify somebody else's versions of my actions, I pretty much immediately lose all interest in having the discussion at all and that's not really conducive to working things out.

So when I see people taking sides on a issue - any issue - the first thing I want to know is what they are basing their conclusions on. And a lot of the times the answer is information sources that I honestly don't know how to evaluate. What it looks like from my perspective is that people are putting a lot of faith in third- or forth-hand reports - whereas I tend to assume that even people who were there don't necessarily have the whole story. Or that people are making the emotional decision to believe person X over person Y because they simply like person X better - whereas I tend to assume that even the best of people screw up and make mistakes and misunderstand things and make errors in judgment.

It's possible that I am hyper-critical of information. I do happen to believe that most people usually try to tell the truth. I just don't believe that people unfailingly know what the truth is. If you've ever read Stranger in a Strange Land there's a passage where somebody asks a character in the story what colour a house is. She responds, "It's painted white on this side." That's me.

And this disconnect happens often enough that I've actually started to wonder if there is some additional information going around that I just don't have the skills to access. I mean, the whole time I was growing up I kept running afoul of all the unwritten rules that nobody ever explained but that everybody else seemed to understand through some kind of osmosis. It took me many years of watching people to figure out just how much information is transmitted non-verbally. Maybe this is another one of those cases where I'm missing something that is so obvious to other people that they can't even articulate where they got it - it just becomes yet another thing that "everybody knows".

Or maybe people just have ESP.

Comments

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting, and linking in with some thinking I'm doing at the moment. Because I am/was a scientist, and I'm very much in with the "this side of that house is white" mentality, but one of the things that's putting me off about science is the lack of people skills and nuance around me. So I'm wondering if people who are less able to read bodylanguage etc are more likely to not make other assumptions. Because it does occur to me that when I jump to unwarranted conclusions, they are often snap judgements based on something about their behaviour or tone of voice or something (and sometimes those snap judgements are right on the mone.)

Anyway, before I encountered SiaSL, I learnt a joke about an astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician, who are on a train heading up to a conference in the highlands of Scotland. They've never been to Scotland before. They look out the window and see a sheep. The astronomer says "Ah, Scottish sheep are black". The physicist says "That's an overgeneralisation, typical of your field. All we know is that this Scottish sheep is black". The mathematician says "I'm amazed at the assumptions you can get away with your fields. All we know is that this side of this sheep is black."

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Do you still consider them snap judgements if they are based on things like tone of voice or something? 'Cause I'd still count that as information, even if it's harder to track where the info is coming from.

One of the things I use to make judgements is past patterns of behaviour. In fact, I probably rely on that more than anything.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

The stuff I'm talking about feels like snap judgements. I assume it's based on body language and such like, because the most dramatic effects have been people I've known online, where I suddenly have a different sense of them within a few hours of meeting them in person. But I can't point to evidence, I just have this feeling.

In the most dramatic example, I warned a close friend about her friendship with a person I'd just met in the flesh a few hours earlier (telling my friend I couldn't prove it, it was gut feeling). Over the next three months, the person proceeded to do exactly the kind of thing to my friend I was afraid they were capable of.

Because it doesn't match my usual way of knowing things all that closely, I tend to be careful with this stuff. But in fact it usually is quite valuable information even if I can't explain it, so I do tend to rely on it, even before I have evidence it's true.

So anyway, given my experience, it's not hard to imagine people who mostly gain knowledge through "just knowing but they can't explain", and particularly if it is the major way, or works well for them in some contexts, relying on it in other situations where it might not be a good idea.