A Druid Thurible

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. – Rumi

We don’t see things are they are, we see them as we are.

Anais Nin

I read an article today about the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. I find his theories regarding the ‘conjunctive fallacy’ really interesting. Kahneman started his life as a psychologist observing soldiers performing team exercises in the Israeli army. These exercises were supposedly designed to judge which individuals would make good leaders. Men were judged on their performance on the day and the ones deemed to be appropriate officer material were put forward for training. What Kahneman discovered was that the data gathered by the observers did not often match up to the evidence of the chosen men’s behaviour and performance over the following months of training –  i.e that the judgements made on that particular day were not necessarily true. Despite the evidence, this method of observing and choosing candidates continued and did so because the notion that a person who shows leadership ability at that moment of observation is therefore a ‘leader’ is a persuasive but strangely irrational assumption.

Oliver Burkeman, who wrote the article in the Guardian about Kahneman’s new Book Thinking, Fast and Slow, described this subjective process, masquerading as a rational one, as our judgement being ‘warped by the persuasive combination of plausible details. We are much better storytellers than we are logicians.’ He gives a good example of this; people are asked about a nephew’s girlfriend; she is described to them as someone who is artistic and poetic; with this limited information they are also asked if she is more likely to be studying Chinese Literature or Business Studies. Most people answer ‘Chinese Literature’ although statistically there will be a greater number of business studies students, so more probably she will be one of those. The majority of us ignore the probability for the answer that ‘feels’ right: she’s artistic and poetic and those qualities, based on our own assumptions, would be associated more with a student studying Chinese Literature. Our answer might appear to be logical but it is not.

Kahneman writes,

Subjective confidence in a judgement is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgement is correct…declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

He calls these slips in perception cognitive illusions and we are all guilty of them. This interests me a great deal for two reasons. The first is that I have been applying for jobs where I too have taken part in team observation, exercises as subject to problematic evaluation as the ones that Kahneman’s studies encountered and yet still used to decide if a candidate is right for a job. The second because these ideas also speak a great deal of how our own judgements of each other can be so woefully skewed, despite our own sense of certainty.

Burkeman ends his article with some sound advice:

If we can’t hope to correct such biases in any lasting way, we can perhaps seek to cultivate some humility about the limits of our mental powers. Being the puppet of subtle psychological influences we cannot even recognise is annoying. But at least we can try to remember that that’s what’s likely to be happening. Well, it’s a start.

I am endlessly fascinated by the differences in emotional response that a situation can draw from people. Why is it that a specific set of circumstances can stir such a maelstrom in one individual but make little impact on another? I suspect it is because no one event in our lives happens in a vacuum; to use email terminology, our lives have ‘threads’, histories that continue to feed our present for good or bad.

I tend to think there is a difference between reacting and responding. For me, when we react, it is often from a place that goes beyond thinking; it is often ‘knee jerk’, an emotional response that is linking in with past experience – quite often of a painful kind – colouring our perception and shaping our current actions. In short, we are not just dealing with events in the present but bringing in a whole host of past baggage, viewing the situation through an accumulation of old hurts. We often do this without realising; oblivious to how that pile of unrelated stuff has been sewn together in our minds. If a present situation has a similar theme or tone to past hurts, we might immediately and unconsciously link the two; over time, if we continue to link situation after situation, any future experience that triggers this thread can be crippling and we react with the unthinking visciousness of a wounded animal – we lash out; we fight our corner; we attack because that place, over years, has become such a vulnerable one for us.

However, when we respond we become conscious of what drives that reaction. Responding suggests a relationship between us and our environment at the moment something happens, we are not just being driven by an established, internalised pattern but looking outward and taking the situation on it’s own terms. Responding requires us to examine and question our own reactions; it asks that we be open to the ambiguity and complexity of an event; be open to the possiblilty that our own view is one of many.

Reaction is rigid and inflexible; has a need to be ‘right’ in order to feel safe, that it might serve to protect and cope with those deeply vulnerable feelings that have accumulated over the years. Response is flexible and yeilding; willing to see the part we play in a situation; able to see multiple viewpoints and therefore remain open to learning, growing, changing and moving on.

Both of these ways of dealing with life brings their own challenges. Responding means often having to accept what might be difficult for us to acknowledge about ourselves, others and the situations we find ourselves in. Reacting can build yet more hurt, causing us to psychologically stiffen and seize into mental patterns that are emotionally destructive.

When we react we build yet another link in that painful chain that binds us to the past; when we respond, we give ourselves the opportunity to free ourselves from those binds. The world widens and deepens and we can breathe a little easier.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

And rightdoing there is a field

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass

the world is too full to talk about.

Rumi

i like my body when it is with your

body. It is so quite a new thing.

Muscles better and nerves more.

i like your body. i like what it does,

i like its hows. i like to feel the spine

of your body and its bones, and the trembling

-firm-smooth ness and which i will

again and again and again

kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,

i like, slowly stroking the shocking fuzz

of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes

over parting flesh . . . .

And eyes big Love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you quite so new

ee cummings