Understanding Others
I have an amateur interest in psychology - in particular cognitive psychology - and understanding the way we 'work'. This is, of course, not unrelated to the problem faced by anyone having to design/produce/specify any system that is to be used by others - so it is very relevant to my day-to-day existence. Of course it is one thing to know the theory and quite another to put it into practice!
...
Those who know me will know that I often utilise the concept of a mental model or weltanschauung to try to express my own take on this. Briefly, I would sum this up by saying that each of us creates a number of models of how we perceive the world to work and use these to make sense of what is happening and to base our decision making on.
This is not a unique way of looking at it and I claim no credit for the idea - it simply is what fits for me.
I also go along with the view that in using these models we create stories to explain things that fit in with the models. This may require (at least) a stretching of credibility at times, but my experience is that we are more likely to believe the unlikely explanation that fits our model than the more likely one that does not. Particularly when we are trying to explain the behaviour/reactions of others.
Not only will we often not choose the likely story we will not even be aware of the possibility that it exists!!
I often sit in business meetings where this happens over and over again. One person will say something and another will respond - they will both talk about completely different things but happily agree (or violently disagree!!!) with each other without realising that!
It was well illustrated by the story I heard of a room in which there was someone from the UK, someone from China, someone from Brazil and someone from India. Prior to this meeting (if you can suspend your disbelief for a moment!) none of these people had left their own locality and had no knowledge of any language except their own.
Clearly there would be little coherent discussion going on - perhaps lots of miming - pointing and acting. None of them would come out of that meeting having any doubt that they could not understand the others.
They were clearly speaking different languages. Switch focus to a business meeting with someone from accounts, a board member, a software engineer and a salesman from a supplier. Unlike in the first meeting, here all four are speaking english - however it is very likely that they are not speaking the same language. Unfortunately, unlike the first meeting they do not know that. They work on the basis that they do understand and huge mistakes can be made.
The difficulty here can be clearly illustrated using just two people, never mind a typical meeting with six, eight or more.
Mr A and Mr B have known each other for a long time, however, they only know each other at a superficial level and have not met for several months. Mr A is intent on selling a brand new software testing tool to Mr B. The last time they met they had parted on slightly strained terms because the previous tool had turned out to be less effective than they both had hoped and there had been some rather acrimonious meetings to sort out the problem.
Mr A sends Mr B an email suggesting that they might have a meeting to discuss this new tool.
Now - we could create a complicated scenario at this point, but in order to illustrate the extent of the problems that we could face I want to keep the scenario very simple.
After some days there has been no reply to the email. So what does Mr A think at this point? Well, he has to try to "Put himself in Mr B's shoes" and figure out why there has been no reply. He reckons that Mr B is still unhappy about the difficulties with the previous deal and is holding it against him - he believes that is why he hasn't replied and acts accordingly - sending another email attempting to 'smooth over' the previous difficulties.
So - why did Mr B not reply - well actually there are all sorts of possible reasons - he has been on leave; the email was deleted as suspected spam; he has changed his job and no longer works there; and so on. Mr A's actions though are predicated on a particular expectation.
This does not only happen through 'impersonal' contact such as email it also happens very often face to face and - perhaps surprisingly - it probably happens more between people who know each other reasonably well than it would between strangers. This is similar to what I suggested in the previous post where I suggested that there are greater differences between the people you know well than in those who are 'just' acquantances.
Here again, from those you know well you are more likely to 'assume' a particular reaction (which will often be correct if you really do know the other person) and between members of a family this is a way of limiting any disagreements - you know what will upset the others, so you don't do it!! Unfortunately, no matter how well we know someone, there is always a huge area of 'unknown' (perhaps unknowable) that we almost take for granted that we do know.
So we get misunderstandings similar to Mr A and Mr B above where people actually impose an explanation for behaviour that does not correpond to reality. I can certainly look back on many incidents in my own life where I have acted based on this sort of misplaced confidence in my understanding of other people - and I think I can also see where others have superimposed an intention on some of my behaviours that I was actually innocent of.
Is it possible to seek out someone else's mental models - probably not, since there are (in my view) many and not all will be relevant to you or to the situation in hand. However, an awareness of our natural instincts to impose what we think are someone else's worldviews is a good start.
This idea of mental models is most certainly something that I will ponder more on in future posts.
