A quote attributed to author Anais Nin declares, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”
The truth of these words is apparent in the following anecdotes, which I invite you to consider.
Anecdote 1
When my son was tested for a coveted spot in a private prekindergarten, he was asked, ”What color is a banana?”
”White,” he answered.
”A banana isn’t white!” he was told.
Fortunately, my son was not intimidated. He replied: ”Yes, it is. The peel is yellow, but the banana is white.”
He was accepted.
Anecdote 2:
When people say there’s no real difference between the way men and women in public life approach the issues, I am reminded of a pop quiz my seventh-grade biology teacher thought up, which I flunked. The quiz was simple: match the parts of the human body to the parts of a car. So the lungs were matched with the carburetor, the spark plugs were the nervous system, joints were like shock absorbers – or something. I am sure I still have it wrong.
The point is that almost all of the 13-year-old boys in the class aced the test and the girls – even ones who knew the functions of the human body cold – failed. Most of us had never looked under the hood of a car. We had a different reference for understanding the material, which the teacher (male, of course) never considered.
The first anecdote, originally part of a letter to the editor of the New York Times, appeared in “What is this question about?”, a post by Arnold Zwicky on the popular linguistics blog, Language Log. Zwicky was discussing the role that meaning plays in developing educational tests for children.
Boston Globe editorial page editor Renee Loth recounted the second one in an opinion piece on gender and politics.
The anecdotes may differ as to the events that each describes but the moral is the same.
In the first anecdote, the adult posing the question assumed that the child understood that “banana” signified “unpeeled and ripe but not overly ripe banana”. It was the question that was wrong, not the child’s answer. The question also rested upon a cultural assumption: that children taking such tests are familiar with yellow bananas. Children from other cultures may be familiar with bananas of a different hue. As Zwicky points out,
Note that there are red and purple varieties of banana, and that naturally ripened yellow bananas go from green to greenish yellow to brownish yellow (not a “good” yellow) as they ripen. The bananas of commerce in the U.S. are almost all yellow varieties; in fact, they are almost all artificially ripened Cavendish bananas. The ripening process produces vivid yellow bananas. So unless a child taking the test is accustomed to eating red bananas — say, in a Central American neighborhood — the child will give the expected answer, “yellow”.
In the second anecdote, the test-giver assumed that every student in his biology class shared his frame of reference and that the analogy of the car would be readily accessible to all. In that instance, gender played a significant role in the test scores that resulted. But in other situations, the car analogy would be just as incomprehensible regardless of gender but as a matter of economics and class – for example, among students whose parents don’t own a car or in schools located in neighborhoods where public transit not personal motor vehicles is the primary mode of transportation.
Each of these anecdotes reminds us that who we are shapes how we see the world. We are susceptible to influences of which we are often unaware, affecting our perception and our ability to judge. Until they are pointed out to us, our biases remain hidden from us, like the fruit concealed within the peel.
Just be careful not to slip on them.
Cafe Mediate is the latest brainchild of mediation marketing and conflict resolution expert Tammy Lenski, who publishes two popular blogs, Conflict Zen and Making Mediation Your Day Job. Cafe Mediate (motto: “where conversation not caffeine is the stimulant”), a new monthly podcast series, will feature lively discussion among ADR professionals about topics relevant to practitioners, from the pragmatic to the provocative.
The inaugural session just aired. This transatlantic conversation brought together me, Tammy, and international business mediator Amanda Bucklow, who is based in England and blogs at the top-drawer Mediation Times, to talk about an issue of great interest to conflict resolution professionals: value billing.
Listen in to the podcast at “Value-based fees in the mediation and ADR world“. If you use an RSS reader (for further instructions, see this video Tammy helpfully created), you can subscribe to alerts at CafeMediate’s main page.
Thanks to Tammy for inviting me to join in and to the extraordinary Amanda as well – I enjoyed the conversation and am already looking forward to the next one.
A century ago, Dean Roscoe Pound famously exhorted the legal profession to transform its institutions of justice and adjust its principles “to the human conditions they are to govern”, “putting the human factor in the central place”.
I read those words in law school but failed to appreciate their meaning – until I began to work with clients as a lawyer. A teacher wrongly accused of sexual assault by a pupil. A physician discriminated against because of race and gender, then subjected to retaliation and threats of violence. Parents who lost their only child because of a driver’s recklessness. These were the human faces of the law. No longer capitalized Law with imposing marble columns, law became human, substantially more than case book and statute, precedent and logic.
I thought of Pound’s words and remembered the faces of these long-ago clients when I read a letter in this week’s Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly from an attorney reflecting on the human element in the practice of law.
He described an experience in a family law class while he was still a student:
On the first day of class, [the professor] chose me to play the role of the lawyer advising a women in distress who was seeking legal advice about divorce….[The professor] played the role of the distressed woman client.
I jumped right in with both feet. I asked how she was doing. Well, you couldn’t have scripted a better blunder to demonstrate her point, and she let me know it right in front of my 100 or so classmates – a moment that is burned into my consciousness and I fear always will be.
The [professor’s] point was that, as lawyers, we are providing a service – a legal service. We are not counselors, comforters or friends. What the client needs at that moment from us is a clear dividing line, something she can rely on in a world turned upside down: clear, precise, level-headed guidance.
Many years after this incident, learning that a client was suffering a recurrence of cancer gave this lawyer a fresh opportunity to reassess his professor’s advice, concluding that “things aren’t quite as simple in life as she would have had us believe”.
I realized at that moment that sometimes our clients need us not to be lawyers; they need us to be human beings.
I can only imagine what this law professor might have thought of practices such as collaborative law or mediation – methods of resolving disputes that very much put “the human factor in the central place”.
It’s hard to believe that a commonplace act of civility could have provoked such punishment – public humiliation in front of an entire law school class – an experience the letter writer has plainly never forgotten. Where in the Rules of Professional Conduct does it say that you must abandon your humanity in exchange for the Esq. that adorns the end of your name?
What an extraordinary lesson to impart to students: that professionalism and compassion are somehow mutually exclusive.
There is something irresistible about game theory. A branch of mathematics devoted to understanding social interaction and decision making, it holds relevance – and fascination – for students and practitioners of negotiation and dispute resolution. Economist Kenneth Boulding once described game theory as
…an intellectual X ray. It reveals the skeletal structure of those social systems where decisions interact, and it reveals, therefore, the essential structure of both conflict and collaboration.
I particularly enjoy examples of game theory drawn from ordinary daily life, and have collected its depictions in popular culture. Some favorites of mine include
- Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football considered in a post from Minding Your Decisions, a blog about game theory and personal finance
- Various sites for playing the famous Prisoners’ Dilemma
- Game theory analysis of the toilet seat problem: up or down?: a scholarly article
- Nash equilibrium, the all-American pastime and base-stealing
- Numerous instances of “Rock, Paper, Scissors”, a game often used as a decision-making tool, including a Simpsons episode involving Bart and Lisa (Lisa: “Poor predictable Bart. Always takes ‘rock’. Bart: “Good ol’ ‘rock’. Nothin’ beats that!”); and the decision of a federal judge ordering two feuding lawyers to play the game to settle their dispute over the location of a deposition. (Speaking of the Simpsons and game theory, here’s a find: “Simpsons Decision-Making“, a PowerPoint presentation by a Georgia Tech professor of industrial and systems engineering.)
More examples of game theory in popular culture can be found at GameTheory.net, which offers interactive materials and games for game theory enthusiasts. There’s also a terrific collection of game theory video clips on YouTube (with thanks to the blog Grey Matters).
If you’d like to learn more about game theory from an expert who knows how to demystify it even for the mathematically challenged, get yourself a copy of Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life, by Len Fisher (who, incidentally, received the Ig Nobel Prize for his studies on the proper way to dunk a biscuit in a cup of tea). It’s an entertaining and highly informative read with plenty of real-life examples of game theory in action.
Welcome to December’s installment of my ongoing series, Fallacious Argument of the Month.
Driving in my car on my way to a meeting on Friday, I happened to catch a popular NPR news analysis program, On Point. Host Tom Ashbrook was talking with political commentator and Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter on his newly published book, Judaism: A Way of Being.
Gelernter, a proponent of Zionism, provoked strong responses from some callers who disputed his conclusions and offered spirited counterarguments. Toward the end of the program, one Jewish caller criticized Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, pointing to her experiences traveling in Israel and the gulf she perceived there between biblical values and practice. Instead of responding to the issues she raised, Gelernter dismissed her with the epithet invoked all too often in debates over Israel. He condemned her as a self-loathing Jew, sneering that “the most vicious haters of the Jewish community are Jews themselves”.
In this on-air interview Gelernter committed perhaps one of the most common of fallacies: the argumentum ad hominem, which is an attack on the speaker, rather than on the substance of the speaker’s statements, for the purpose of discrediting the speaker and undermining the speaker’s arguments. The ad hominem takes many forms; in this case Gelernter used the technique known as “poisoning the well“. To poison the well, you present negative information about your opponent to damage his credibility in the eyes of your audience. (Incidentally, earning Fallacious Argument bonus points, Gelernter also utilized the false analogy, comparing the caller’s criticisms of Israel to blood libel and Nazism.)
Highly explosive, the ad hominem inflames passions and prejudices. When it detonates, it leaves a scarred chasm that cannot be bridged, making speakers and audience members into bitter partisans, with discourse and civility collateral damage. When the shouting at last dies down, all that’s left to smolder in the rubble is ill will.
