I have an amateur interest in psychology – in particular cognitive psychology – and understanding the way we ‘work’.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Of course it is one thing to know the theory and quite another to put it into practice!<\/p>\n
Those who know me will know that I often utilise the concept of a\u00a0mental model<\/strong>\u00a0or\u00a0\u00a0weltanschauung\u00a0<\/strong>to try to express my own take on this.\u00a0 Briefly, I would sum this up by saying that each of us creates a number of models of\u00a0how we perceive the world to work<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0and use these to make sense of what is happening and to base our decision making on.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I also go along with the view that in using these models we create stories to explain things that fit in with the models.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Particularly when we are trying to explain the behaviour\/reactions of others.<\/p>\n Not only will we often not choose the likely story we will not even be aware of the possibility that it exists!!<\/p>\n I often sit in business meetings where this happens over and over again.\u00a0 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!<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Clearly there would be little coherent discussion going on – perhaps lots of miming – pointing and acting.\u00a0 None of them would come out of that meeting having any doubt that they could not understand the others.<\/p>\n They were clearly speaking different languages.\u00a0 Switch focus to a business meeting with someone from accounts, a board member, a software engineer and a salesman from a supplier.\u00a0 Unlike in the first meeting, here all four are speaking english – however it is very likely that they are not speaking the same language.\u00a0 Unfortunately, unlike the first meeting\u00a0they do not know that<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 They work on the basis that they do understand and huge mistakes can be made.<\/p>\n The difficulty here can be clearly illustrated using just two people, never mind a typical meeting with six, eight or more.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Mr A is intent on selling a brand new software testing tool to Mr B.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Mr A sends Mr B an email suggesting that they might have a meeting to discuss this new tool.<\/p>\n 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.<\/em><\/p>\n After some days there has been no reply to the email.\u00a0 So what does Mr A think at this point?\u00a0 Well, he has to try to “Put himself in Mr B’s shoes” and figure out why there has been no reply.\u00a0 He reckons that Mr B is still unhappy about the difficulties with the previous deal and is holding it against him –\u00a0 he believes that is why he hasn’t replied and acts accordingly – sending another email attempting to ‘smooth over’ the previous difficulties.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Mr A’s actions though are predicated on a particular expectation.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 This is similar to what I suggested in the\u00a0previous post<\/a> where I suggested that there are greater differences between the people you know well than in those who are ‘just’ acquaintances.<\/p>\n 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!!\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n So we get misunderstandings similar to Mr A and Mr B above where people actually impose an explanation for behaviour that does not correspond to reality.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 However, an awareness of our natural instincts to impose what we\u00a0think\u00a0<\/strong>are someone else’s worldviews is a good start.<\/p>\n This idea of mental models is most certainly something that I will ponder more on in future posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have an amateur interest in psychology – in particular cognitive psychology – and understanding the way we ‘work’.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Of course … Continue reading “Understanding Others”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[79,119],"class_list":["post-518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ignorance","tag-cognition","tag-worldview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":519,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions\/519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemsthink.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}