1: We see things differently. Literally.
“Our differences of perception are rooted deep in the hidden kingdom of the unconscious mind and we’re generally not aware how profound those differences are until we ask,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
Imagine we are part of a group considering climbing up a mountain.
A single mountain stands in front of us.
Yet, “different members of the group are literally seeing different mountains, depending on how fit or unfit we are,” David observes.
Psychologist Dennis Proffitt researches perception. “For example, he has done extensive research on a curious phenomenon,” David writes. “People generally vastly overestimate how steep hills are, even in places like San Francisco, where the hills are, in fact, pretty steep.”
Dennis conducted an experiment at the University of Virginia in which he asked groups of students to estimate how steep various hills were on campus. For a hill with a 5 percent grade, the typical participant would estimate a 20 percent grade.
Then, suddenly, one particular day, the students got much better at estimating the grades of the hills.
What was happening and why? The researchers wanted to know.
Turns out “the latest batch of questionnaires had been filled out by members of UVA’s women’s varsity soccer team,” David writes. “The hills didn’t look so steep because these were extremely fit Division 1 athletes who would have relatively little trouble walking up them.”
In other words, How we see a situation depends on who we are and what we are capable of doing.
“Since [Dennis]first discovered this phenomenon, he and other researchers have found it again and again,” David shares. “People with heavy backpacks see steeper hills than people without backpacks because it is harder for people with backpacks to walk up them.
“People who have just consumed energy drinks see less steep hills than people who have not. People who have listened to sad music (Mahler’s Adagietto) see steeper hills than people who have listened to happy music. Overweight people see distances as longer than people who are not overweight.”
2: Why? “We project our individual mental experience into the world, and thereby mistake our mental experience to be the physical world, oblivious to the shaping of perception by our sensory systems, personal histories, goals, and expectations,” write Dennis and co-author Drake Baer in their book Perception.
Their conclusion? “We perceive the world, not as it is but as it is for us,” Dennis and Drake write.
When author David Brooks taught at Yale University, his students saw a different campus than the other residents of New Haven, Connecticut.
“My students had the capacity to take classes and use their ID badges to get into the buildings, so the campus looked to them like a collection of diverse buildings, each with its own purpose and possibilities,” he notes.
“Meanwhile, the folks from town did not have the capacity to take classes or get inside most of the buildings, so the place looked more like an imposing and monolithic fortress. I would often see the neighborhood folks hanging around the New Haven Green, but I would almost never see them hanging around campus, even though it’s just across the street.”
3: Which is why hard conversations are, well, hard.
We “can never fully understand a person whose life experience is very different from our own,” David observes. “I will never know what it is like to be Black, to be a woman, to be Gen Z, to be born with a disability, to be a working-class man, to be a new immigrant or a person from any of a myriad of other life experiences.”
Yes, there are “mysterious depths to each person,” David writes. “There are vast differences between different cultures, before which we need to stand with respect and awe.”
Still, David believes that we can work on our “capacity to see and hear others.” We can learn how to get a sense of the other person’s perspective.
In any hard conversation, the question to ask is: “How do you see this?”
When we ask this question sincerely and listen attentively, David writes, “I have found that it is quite possible to turn distrust into trust, to build mutual respect.”
He shares: “Like every writer, I am often the recipient of furious, insulting emails. Like every writer, I have found that if you respond to such emails in a way that is respectful and curious, the other person’s tone almost always changes—immediately and radically. Suddenly, they are civil, kinder, and more human. Everybody wants to be heard.
“Most people are willing to make an extra effort to be kind, considerate, and forgiving when you give them the chance. Most people long to heal the divides that plague our society.
“At the foundation of all conversation lies one elemental reality: We all share a vast range of common struggles, common experiences, and common joys. Even in the midst of civil strife and hard conversations, I try to return to the great humanistic declaration made by the Roman dramatist Terence: ‘I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.'”
Indeed.
More tomorrow.
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Action: Ask: “How do you see this?” in a conversation today and listen attentively.
Reflection: What do I think will happen? What actually happens?
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