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Welcome back to our monthly series that summarizes, expands, and riffs on each of the seven habits laid out in <\/em>The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People<\/a> by Stephen Covey.<\/em><\/p>\n Last time, we discussed the first of what Stephen Covey calls the \u201cpublic habits\u201d — Habit 4: Think Win\/Win<\/a>. The gist of that habit is to seek to allow everyone involved in a conflict or negotiation to feel as if they\u2019ve \u201cwon.\u201d This requires balancing consideration for the needs of others, with the assertiveness<\/a> to stand up for your own. For Covey, this combination of consideration and assertiveness is what gives rise to maturity.<\/p>\n Habit 5 — \u201cSeek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood\u201d — helps us develop the consideration side of the equation.<\/p>\n We humans are actually pretty dang good at this habit — at grasping what\u2019s going on in the minds of others. In fact, our ability to process a host of obvious and subtle cues in order to attribute mental states (like thoughts, feelings, and beliefs) to others, and thus predict and explain what they are thinking, is one of the things that separates us from other animals. Cognitive scientists call this ability \u201ctheory of mind\u201d because when we interact with others, it\u2019s impossible for us to know exactly<\/em> what they\u2019re thinking\/feeling\/perceiving, so that we have to construct a theory<\/em> of what\u2019s going through their heads. Without theory of mind, social interaction would be awkward, clumsy, and nearly impossible.<\/p>\n Think about all the instances in your daily life in which you have to construct a theory on what\u2019s going through the mind of someone else. You do so when you ask your wife how her day was and she exasperatedly says \u201cFine.\u201d You guess that her day actually wasn\u2019t fine, and so respond by saying: \u201cIt sounds like you had a rough day. Tell me what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n You use your theory of mind when you make a sales pitch to a potential client. You watch how they react to certain talking points, and postulate as to what\u2019s holding them back from pulling the trigger.<\/p>\n Theory of mind is what allows humans to cooperate so effectively that we\u2019ve become the dominate species on Earth and have even stepped foot on the moon. Take that chimpanzees!<\/p>\n So if we\u2019re pretty good at understanding others, why did Covey think it was necessary to devote an entire habit to the subject?<\/p>\n Well, while we\u2019ve been endowed with a fairly deft ability to understand the minds of our fellow human beings, that ability is still subject to some innate biases that sometimes muddle our perception. And when there\u2019s a failure of understanding, a whole host of problems pop-up: couples argue and bicker, children feel estranged from parents, toxic cultures develop inside companies, and countries go to war. <\/p>\n So while we\u2019re generally good at understanding others, we can\u2019t take that ability for granted. We have to be mindful of the ways our theory of mind can go astray.<\/p>\n Social psychologist Nick Epley has spent his career trying to figure out why we misunderstand others. He highlighted his research in a reader-friendly book entitled Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want<\/em><\/a>. (I interviewed Juliana Schroeder, one of Nick\u2019s research assistants, on the podcast a few years ago. Take a listen if you haven\u2019t already.<\/a> It\u2019s a good rundown of his findings.)<\/p>\n According to Nick, our mistakes about what others are thinking \u201ccome from the two most basic questions that underlie any social interaction. First, does \u2018it\u2019 have a mind? And second, what state is that mind in?\u201d<\/p>\n As to the first question, you\u2019re probably thinking \u201cWhen would I ever think that someone else I\u2019m interacting with doesn\u2019t have a mind?\u201d According to Nick\u2019s research, however, you engage in a form of this thinking quite a bit. He calls this failure to fully recognize the human mind of another \u201cdehumanization.\u201d The most extreme form of dehumanization, of course, would be genocide. Instead of seeing victims as fellow human beings, the executioners see them as dirty animals or pests that need exterminating.<\/p>\n While the vast majority of us will never take part in mass genocide, we all fall prey to dehumanizing others in more subtle, everyday ways. The most common way we do this is by assuming others\u2019 minds are less sophisticated than our own. For example, Nick\u2019s research has shown that affluent people tend to think that poor people lack self-control, free will, and initiative. On the flipside, poor people have a tendency to believe that rich people are unfeeling, callous, money-grubbing robots. In both cases, each group assumes the minds of the other group aren\u2019t as human as theirs.<\/p>\n Other research has shown that while business managers say they work for intrinsic motivations like improving the lives of their customers, these same managers often assume their employees are solely working for the money. Employees on the other hand, often think their managers are heartless taskmasters. Again, you\u2019ve got one group assuming that the other isn\u2019t as human.<\/p>\n Our current political climate is partly the result of members of different political parties dehumanizing each other. People subconsciously assume that those on the opposite side of the aisle are stupid, immoral, and out of touch with reality.<\/p>\n Or take driving. As George Carlin famously mused, \u201cHave you ever noticed that everyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?\u201d In both instances, you assume you\u2019re the rational human, while everyone else on the road is a mindless dolt or an inconsiderate jagweed. And the funny thing is, those jagweeds are probably thinking the same thing about you.<\/p>\n Why do we do this? Our brains are just wired to react this way when we think that someone seems different from us — either physically or psychologically. The part of our brain that lights up when we engage in theory of mind — called the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) — lights up particularly strongly when we’re \u201creading\u201d the mind of someone close to us (again, either physically or psychologically). Conversely, the more literally or metaphorically distant someone seems, the less the MPFC engages, which results in us thinking that person is less than fully human. When a boss interacts with an employee or an employee interacts with a boss, they recognize a difference between themselves, so both will tend to dehumanize the other, ever so slightly.<\/p>\n Our tendency to dehumanize others who aren\u2019t \u201cclose\u201d to us contributes to the dismal state of online discourse. When you tweet at someone, they\u2019re likely hundreds or thousands of miles away from you; you can\u2019t look them in the eyes or read their facial expressions. Instead of a human, they\u2019re just some online avatar. So you don\u2019t think twice about telling them how despicable they are.<\/p>\n Failing to see the full humanity of someone would obviously get in the way of understanding them; if you begin the interaction assuming there\u2019s no mind there to understand (or that it\u2019s quite impoverished compared to yours), you\u2019ll just blow them off entirely.<\/p>\n How to Overcome the Tendency to Dehumanize<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Overcoming our natural tendency to \u201cother\u201d others is pretty straightforward. Instead of focusing on what makes you different from them, focus on what you have in common. As soon as you start seeing the similarities between you and another person, your MPFC will begin lighting up more, and you\u2019ll find yourself increasingly understanding them as fellow human beings.<\/p>\n The thing that really lights up our MPFC is when we\u2019re in close physical proximity to others and interact with them in face-to-face conversations; doing a physical activity together helps build interpersonal cohesion as well.<\/p>\n So if you\u2019re a boss and you catch yourself thinking your employee is just doing enough work to get paid, remind yourself that he likely got into this field for the same reason you did and has an interest in it outside a paycheck. To really light up that MPFC, go have lunch together, or play a round of golf.<\/p>\n Or when you\u2019re out driving in rush-hour traffic, and you catch yourself thinking you\u2019re surrounded by idiots and maniacs, practice your humanizing ability by reminding yourself that your fellow drivers are probably trying to get home to their families — just like you are. You\u2019d want others to cut you some slack, so cut them some slack too.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re tired of the rancor of online discourse, spend less time in digital space interacting with avatars, and more time in \u201cmeat space,\u201d interacting with other minds, the cogs of which you can see working in real time.<\/p>\n On a related note, don\u2019t have serious arguments with your significant other over text message — the distance created by this abstract form of communication will gin up the animosity.<\/p>\nWhy We Fail to Understand Others & How to Rectify These Mistakes<\/u><\/h3>\n
I Have a Rational, Human Mind, But That Idiot Doesn\u2019t<\/h3>\n