What are they thinking? Part 2: Speaking the same language

Last week, I wrote about the importance trying to understand the reasoning used by people who do things that seem inexplicable within our own reasoning schemes. I used two examples, one of a scholar struggling to communicate with her advisor, the other of the Democratic bewilderment at the behavior of GOP voters (who supposedly vote against their own best interests). That previous post wasn’t necessarily focused in reaching some point, but I suppose that I might summarize it as follows: people’s decisions are made with respect to their own sets of reasons; the fact that some decision seems unreasonable to you, implies that you do not understand the reasoning that guided the decision. Advisors want their students to graduate, and people vote for what they perceive to be their own best interests. Assuming anything else is silly.

People are sometimes wrong about their beliefs, and people sometimes draw bad conclusions from good evidence. I’m not denying that people make mistakes.  In the case of the scholar who can’t get her advisor to approve her work, I think the advisor is making a mistake. But my thinking that it is a mistake doesn’t change what the advisor believes. In the case of GOP voters, it may be that they would benefit in some ways from voting for non-GOP candidates, but that doesn’t mean that they weigh the costs and benefits of their decisions in the same way that you would.

The question of this post is on how to communicate with people who are seeing the world radically differently, and, if possible, to convince such people to consider seeing the world more as you do.  For both the scholar trying to convince her advisor, and for the politician trying to convince a potential voter, the issue is how does one sway the ideas so that the other will do as desired?
I have framed this in terms of Democrats trying convince Republicans because I don’t hear the Republicans saying “why do they vote against their best interests,” but the same dynamic is surely applicable--every single person has some desire to get others to act in ways that serve their own personal interests. I want people to act in ways that serve my interests, and you want people to act in ways that serve your interests—in a way, that’s exactly what “interests” are: the things that we want to happen.  When person A sees person B do something that A feels is not in his/her bet interest, A is motivated to get B to do otherwise.  Democrats want to get people who didn’t vote Democratic in the past to vote Democratic in the future. Republicans want to get people who didn’t vote Republican to vote Republican in the future.  And, of course, every scholar wants to convince their readers to accept their work.

The first step in getting people to see things your way is to make sure that you speak their language, and I mean “language” in a general sense to mean not only the large-scale language that determines their vocabulary and sentence structure (e.g., English vs. French), but also the more personal intellectual structures that shape their ideas. If, for example, a scholar has a deep reliance on the idea of “objective truth”, that belief will shape the language that they use and how they interpret language, too: such a scholar might not be able to hear or absorb ideas and language shaped by the assumption that there is no objective truth. Or a profoundly religious person might see the world through a lens of religious belief that makes little or no sense to a less religious person, and that difference in perspective may mean that each person views the ideas of the other as incoherent or wrong-headed.

Understanding the underlying logical structures that people are using creates an opportunity to begin to work with people and to begin to shape their reasoning.  The problem with speaking someone else’s language is that it will only make sense if you accept some of their underlying reasoning—and that can be uncomfortable.  But, if you can keep in mind that your effort is to communicate, then you can begin to build the necessary communicative bridges that will help you reach the person who understands the world very differently.

So, to summarize: 1. Remember that people are reasoning with respect to their own sets of ideas; assuming that they are incoherent or working against their best interests doesn’t provide insight into the reasoning that is guiding their decisions. 2. Understanding their reasoning, allows you to begin to speak their language, and unless you speak their language, they probably won’t understand you—and if they don’t understand you, you’re not going to have success convincing them that your work is good.

What are they thinking?

What I’m thinking about is two separate issues that have at least one point of intersection.  One of these issues is the struggle of a scholar to get her Ph.D. accepted by her committee.  This scholar does work of exceptionally high quality. I know plenty of people who did worse work and got a Ph.D., including myself. The other issue is the more general political trope common on America’s political left of asking why so many people vote for GOP candidates who propose policies that are clearly to their detriment, at least in some ways.

In both cases, we could ask ourselves: “what are they thinking?”  In the case of my scholar and her committee, she can reasonably ask “what are they thinking?” with respect to her dissertation, when by many standards her work obviously qualifies, and the reception her work receives from many scholars not on her committee confirms this. In the case of the GOP voters, we might ask “what are they thinking?” with respect to those GOP voters who have no health care, who need health care, who can’t afford health care, and who also regularly vote for candidates who are hostile to government action to provide health care for everyone.

Now, “what are they thinking?” can be asked from a point of curiosity—of wanting to know what they are thinking?  But it can also be asked from a more settled position—a position of greater belief in one’s own rightness—as a paraphrase of “how silly they are to think that!”

This post is about the importance of asking that question from the first perspective, not the second.  I don’t mean to say that you should not believe your own opinions—if you think someone is doing something silly or wrong, you may very well be right.  People do all sorts of silly things.  And if you’re just sitting back watching, thinking what they do is silly works just fine.  But if you’re involved—if you have some need to interact with or convince these people—as the scholar needs to convince her committee, and the political left wants to convince people to vote for candidates who align with the left—then that second version of the question is not going to help you get what you need.

If you need to communicate with people, and you want to get them to cooperate with you, there is great value in sincerely and openly asking “what are you thinking?” And there is great danger in the second version: “how could anyone be so silly as to think that?”

In the case of the scholar, it’s a little hard to dismiss her committee as silly, but taking them seriously is not quite enough to convince them that they should be on board with a project. It’s necessary to find out and understand what they are thinking so that you can create the necessary communicative bridges that will help them understand what you’re thinking.  (As I write that, it occurs to me that if you’re thinking “what are they thinking?” about someone, they may well be thinking the same thing as you are—certainly the political right speaks of the political left as foolish/immoral/etc., which are flavors of “how could anyone be so silly to think that?”)

To communicate, and to persuade people to accept your way of thinking, you need to present to them ideas that make sense to them—and that means understanding what they think, so that you can suit your communication to their ideas.

If, for example, the scholar of my example wants her committee to accept her work she needs to convince them of its value (and the fact that other people find it valuable doesn’t help with that), and that means understanding what they value and framing your work with respect to ideas that they are already using.  And then figuring out how to make some conceptual bridge to the ideas that you are using.

This can be particularly difficult if the ideas that you are using are radically different from the ideas that they are using. For the scholar, part of her struggle is getting her committee to accept her research methodology.  In thinking about her situation, I was thinking about Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and his idea that different scientific paradigms are “incommensurable”—that is to say that there is no absolute, objective standard by which all paradigms can be measured—what makes sense in one paradigm doesn’t make sense in others. In the scholar’s case, one of the crucial structures of her research doesn’t really play any role in the research paradigms used by her committee—the question, then, is how to bring this structure into her dissertation in a way that her committee accepts it. Ultimately, I think that the route is through understanding and focusing on what the committee wants. Yes, it may be true that what they want doesn’t make sense from the scholar’s paradigm, but focusing on that difference in view doesn’t suggest a good strategy for moving forward. What does, is to look at what the committee thinks is important, and then use that to create as much common ground as possible—then, once the common ground has been created, it becomes easier to start to make a bridge to her own work—how can she frame her choices in terms of questions that the committee thinks important? How can the ideas that are important to the committee be used to explain the choices she made that led her work to diverge from their expected paradigm?

There’s another dynamic that can play a role, too: if you think “how can they be so silly to think that?" about someone with whom you interact, you’re likely to antagonize them.  Recently, while reading articles that brought up the “voting against their own interest” idea, I have been flashing back to a popular song from my youth: The Suicidal Tendencies’ Institutionalized.  The song relates interactions between child and parents, and near the end, the parents say “We’ve decided it’s in your best interest that…” And the song narrator cries “My best interest? How do you know what my best interest is?” Knowing what is in someone’s best interests is complicated—in the song, maybe the parents really do know their child’s interests, or maybe the parents are wrong. Regardless of what the song narrator’s best interests really are—whether the parents are right or the child—we can certainly say that most people, like the child in the song, will resent having someone else tell them what their best interests are. And that is especially true if they think that the other person/people doesn’t/don’t understand them.  Politicians are not going to win voters by saying “I know what you want better than you do.” Politicians are more likely to win voters by saying “your interests are valuable; here’s my plan to address them.” Or, if possible, to shift people fro one set of ideas to another: “your interests are valuable, but here’s something else that might be valuable to you, too.”  This second is what the scholar needs to do with her committee, certainly: she needs her dissertation to be able to say “here’s something you care about; I want to work on that problem because it’s something we both care about; But I am going to take a very different approach, so please give me a moment to explain why I’m taking this approach, even though it may not make sense to you at first glance.” If she can convince her committee that the problem she is working on is a problem that they care about, and get them to focus on that problem, then that focus on the problem can serve as the conceptual landmark that helps the committee orient themselves with respect to the unfamiliar ideas that the scholar needs them to accept in order to accept her thesis.

This is not the most focused post ever—there is more to be said than I want to write now—but I’ve already gone well over one thousand words, which is generally my target for blog posts, so I’m going to call it a wrap.

Cultural appropriation and appropriate responses

The APA Manual discusses bias in writing and suggests, basically, that if anyone is offended, the writing should be considered offensive, and change is worth considering. I’d like to take this premise as the basic starting point for this discussion: if someone is offended, it is worth considering doing something different.  If someone feels hurt, that feeling should be taken very seriously.

At the same time, however, not all hurts are the same.  And losing sight of that, means sucking important nuance out of any possible dialogue that might move toward redress of hurts.

It is the loss of nuance in the debate that worries me. If serious ills are conflated with minor ills, it makes it harder to generate community action to address (and redress) the serious ills.

The recent case of Keziah Daum’s prom dress brought this question to mind, but I had already been thinking about those issues due to several previous situations that sparked cultural appropriation debates.

Cultural appropriation can be a serious problem. Many people have really suffered from it. For example, historically, the US music industry was a cultural appropriation machine that stole millions from African American musicians. White people got rich on music drawn from African Americans, while the African Americans who first made the music got little or nothing. It was a large-scale issue. 

At the same time, again, not all hurts are equal. The class of “micro-aggressions” explicitly marks the limited nature of those hurts.  This is not to say that micro-aggressions ought to be ignored, but again, this invites the question of degree of hurt and appropriate responses to that hurt. If micro-aggressions were equivalent to outright aggression, then no one would create the term “micro-aggression” to describe them.

Are all cases of cultural appropriation equal? Clearly not. Some cases of cultural appropriation affect the flow of millions of dollars, and directly impact the lives of many. Other cases? Well, what about the case of Keziah Daum and the response thereto?

Let us give full respect to the feelings and lives of those who were hurt by her decision to wear that dress, pose in the way she did, and post that image. Let us also retain nuance in the conversation by understanding the degree of injury and other potential ill effects of Daum’s choice to wear the dress and to post the now-infamous images, and the question of what is an appropriate response.

Let us suppose that you are browsing, you come across Daum’s post, and you are hurt. What hurts have you suffered from that image? Emotional hurts are significant and real, so we’ll count them. Are there other injuries from that image? Specific injuries from those posts or from Daum’s actions that led to the posts?

Let’s put aside a more general critique of Daum and society: perhaps she is more generally culpable, and unquestionably larger society has committed bad acts of cultural appropriation, but nonetheless, this image is a single act. Do we want to condemn this one act as if it embodied a who person’s life? What specific injury does the image do?  Asking whether Daum is guilty of other things is not entirely at issue. Now one might think, on seeing the image, that Daum needs to be educated—an idea with merit (of course, I’m generally biased toward education)—but that is a separate question from the question of what the image does.

So what is an appropriate response to the image? If that image is hurtful, should it be spread as far and wide as possible? That seems like it would only hurt more people.  And if the image is spread with the idea of censuring Daum (assuming that she needs censure) will that censure help promote the idea of cultural sensitivity and help prevent cultural appropriation?

Until this event Daum was hardly well known, now she has become a flashpoint of cultural conflict.  If no one had decided to spread the image as a display of cultural appropriation, Daum would have remained in shadows. Does making an example of her help the fight against cultural appropriation?

I don’t want to make light of the hurt that anyone might have suffered through Daum’s choice of dress, use at prom, and images posted on public forums.  But personally, I don’t think turning Daum’s dress into an issue of import helps eliminate cultural appropriation.  Cultural appropriation should be eliminated, but I don’t think the way to go about it is to lose sight of the nuance in the discourse.  Some hurts are too small to warrant a reaction. The potential hurts of Daum’s act seem small, and that makes the complaint a weaker issue to use in any public discourse that attempts to educate people about the ills of cultural appropriation.

About a year ago, a burrito shop in Portland, Oregon similarly became a “cultural appropriation” flashpoint, and that case was one in which the response seemed grossly out of proportion.  This little burrito shop run by two women was open on weekends. Let’s say they were basically stealing—how much were they stealing? The cost of dozens of burritos? That’s a bad thing. But what about Taco Bell? Is it owned and managed by Mexicans or is it cultural appropriation on a massive scale? The wave of public sentiment against that little burrito shop didn’t transform into a wave of public censure of Taco Bell. Is that an appropriate set of responses?  

If we want to convince people that cultural appropriation is a real problem that we should work to fix, it would be effective, I think, to try to focus on more serious instances—and that means instances where a lot of money is changing hands, or where people are suffering serious immediate injuries. By focusing on cases with smaller impact—a weekend burrito shop or a high school student wearing a prom dress—it makes it easier for complaints about the real problem to be brushed off as just another example of a non-problem imagined by some fevered liberal.  

This is about rhetoric and debate and how to shift public opinion on the large scale. Many people—the same people would would think in terms of “fevered liberals”—view the idea of cultural appropriation as ridiculous. These are the people whose opinions it would be most valuable to change—what discourse is going to reach them and educate them and get them to be more sensitive to the real problem of cultural appropriation?  Complaining about Daum might be very effective in reaching people who already believe that cultural appropriation is a problem, but is it effective in reaching people who don’t take cultural appropriation seriously?

In rhetoric and debate, it is, of course, very effective to fix upon an example that sparks a strong emotion.  But when the emotions generated are anger and resentment, it makes it harder for people to work together. And when emotions run high, it’s easy to lose the important nuance.

We don’t want to lose nuance in this debate (or in any debate, if we can help it), because that loss of nuance makes it harder to address and ameliorate the difficult and significant problems that face us—“us” the community of scholars, “us” the people of the US, and “us” the people of the world.

Cooperation won’t grow out of disrespecting the opposite side of the argument. Cooperation grows out of seeing the opposite side of the argument as real humans despite their faults.