 Psychologically Speaking
with Stewart Hase
Signs of the Times
A few days ago I was leaning on my car waiting for my wife who was visiting a relative.
It was a nice sunny day and I was generally gazing about when I saw about 40 yards away a little boy, about four years of age running in front of his mother, as little boys are want to do quite naturally. She was pushing a pushchair holding a smaller child. The four year old stopped at the edge of the road as he should have done and spying me looking over his way, he gave me a cheery smile and waved. I waved back and smiled, and he waved again.
The mother grabbed the child by the arm and told him in a very stern voice not to speak to strangers. How can a four year old discriminate between a friendly face and a monster in disguise? Of course this is why monsters are so successful.
Of course the mother was quite right in her message. He should be told not to speak to strangers who might lure him away and assault him. And I suppose I should not have encouraged him by responding to his spontaneous happiness. It could have been an encounter that would have left me feeling cheerful inside. Two happy strangers responding to each other. Instead I was left standing in the sun feeling extremely sad.
That event also got me thinking about how sad it is that as adults we don't seem to learn to discriminate very well either. We take things so much on face value without really looking deeply into them to see the monsters hidden within. Our prejudices and fears make us jump to ill-considered conclusions fundamental to fundamentalism, bigotry, racism, homophobia and sexism, for example.
More often than not we fail to see the goodness that might reside beneath the surface too. In short, humans have this dreadful psychological habit of taking a short cut to opinion making.
It has been a long held belief of mine that one of our least useful human traits is that we can think something and therefore it is - it becomes real, a fact.
The other problem we have is that we have all sorts of biases towards things that affect our judgment, perception and memory.
We learn these 'schemas' and they are very powerful if left unchallenged. An interesting experiment on this was conducted using soccer players who were shown a tackle in the penalty box. Defenders who made judgements about the tackle tended to say that it was not a penalty while attackers thought that it was a penalty. In fact they made these judgements no matter whether the tackle was illegal or not.
So effectively discriminating between good and bad is not easy for either four-year-olds or adults, but it can be very important to get it right. Given the increasingly global environment we live in it's going to take considerable wisdom on the part of all of us to start looking just a little harder at what's real as opposed to what's imagined.
There is certainly plenty going on at the moment locally and internationally to encourage us.
From a psychological point of view it's the 'getting of wisdom'.
|
