“What we have here is a failure to communicate.” said the nasty prison warden in Cool Hand Luke – so true it seems. Why do we talk past each other so much?  Why do dialogues so quickly become duelling monologues, debate turn into debunk, speech into screech? 

Books such as Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow‘ are filled with impressive experimental verifications that we often do not reason well; that our thinking is hobbled by an array of cognitive biases and that we are prone to making lazy intuitive judgments that we do not trouble to verify using easily available statistics. 

Anecdotes About Overestimating One's Knowledge

Then, to deflate us further, psychologists Dunning and Kruger come along and demonstrate compellingly that we all think we know much more than we do actually know.  And just when we are wondering how we manage to stumble through life with a modicum of perceptual success at all,  research surfaces on our fatal attraction to stories. We all love stories, we need stories in order to create everything from our own self-concept, to our picture of the world we live in. However stories are anecdotes and anecdotes do very little to substantiate the truth of anything because an anecdote may not be true, may not be representative, and at best, is only one instance of something. Stories alas, do much less to validate an assertion or theory than we think they do.

A Comic About a Failure to Communicate

Is there any hope that we can cut through this formidable collection of snares and tangles and find the civility, rationality and may I add, the humility that we seem to have lost in all this cacophony both inside us and around us?  Are we all condemned irrevocably to be bad arguers most of the time, overly-emotional, and with a poor grasp of what constitutes good evidence in support of an opinion? 

Et tu, Brute?

Perhaps you think that none of this describes you personally? You yourself are a fair-minded soul and an excellent listener. Well, I have a simple litmus test.  Cast your mind back as far as you can and recall issues that you have discussed with friends and colleagues in the office or over the dinner table. Then, ask yourself if you ever left any of those discussions saying something like the following to yourself,

“Interesting! I hadn’t considered that aspect. Perhaps, I know less about this subject than I thought I did. They may be right! I will ponder the possibility.”  

Given the complexity of the social and political issues we wrestle with all the time, and given that all of us bring different perspectives and different bundles of experience and knowledge to our shared communications, this parting thought should actually occur fairly often. Why am I convinced that it doesn’t happen very often at all? The answer of course is that any opinion that arises out of a long and deeply held conviction is profoundly difficult to change.  However, it must be said:

Deeply held convictions and the opinions they generate can be wrong, can fail to reflect the weight of evidence that supports a true belief.

Question Marks

Admitting Our Problem is the First Step

If we can’t accept the above assertion, then there is nowhere to go from here. I think there is somewhere to go, some modest things we can do. A mass society, even a fairly open democratic one, will never simulate a Socratic Garden of Eden; but, to be more aware of bad habits that cloud our thinking is the first step in any effort to improve our dialogues with one another.

The End of the Beginning

This is the first in a series of new articles that are to be about Ourselves.  This subject is particularly dear to my heart and, in this era of magical thinking, worth careful attention and open dialogue.