What You See Is What You Get. But You May Be Blind And Not Know It

Happy New Year (okay, so I’m closer to the Chinese New Year than the Western one, but the sentiments are the same).

How many times have you heard, “Perception is reality?” or that “What you see is what you get?” These statements have profound implications. What I think is there may not be. What I’m sure is not there, may be. I can’t be sure that my view of reality has any reality to it. This includes my view of other people as well as my view of myself.

If one of your resolutions is to have better relationships in 2012, consider that conflicts exist because we don’t see what other people plainly see or, conversely, we see what other people are sure isn’t there.

I submit the following as evidence:

You may have heard of the experiment in which six people, three wearing white shirts and three wearing black, are videotaped for one-minute tossing a basketball back and forth. Later, a group of people watch a recording of this action and are instructed to count the number of tosses made by people in the white shirts.

Afterwards, the observers are asked two questions:

1.      1. How many tosses were made by the white team and

2.       2. Did you see the gorilla?

Say what?

In fact, after 35 seconds of the one-minute recording have passed, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the circle of players, thumps his/her chest for nine seconds and then leaves.

100% of the observers correctly counted the number of passes. 50% of the people did not see the gorilla.

Another famous experiment is one in which Stanford University psychologist David Rosenhan had eight volunteers go to psychiatric hospitals on the east and west coasts and claim to be hearing voices for a brief period of time (by that definition, we all should be admitted. If you doubt it, just stop reading and listen to your internal monologue including the monologue that asks “What voice?”). All eight were admitted to the hospitals. One was diagnosed as manic-depressive while seven were diagnosed as schizophrenic. They ended up staying in the hospitals for an average of nineteen days (the range was from seven to fifty-two days).

Nurses generally reported that these patients seemed perfectly fine, but none of the hospital psychiatrists or staff agreed. All were eventually released with a diagnosis of schizophrenia “in remission”

When the results of the experiment were released, Rosenhan was contacted by a psychiatric hospital to explain that they would never be fooled as others had been. Rosenhan told these hospital administrators that, over the next three months, he would send them fake patients to see if they would be caught.

Three months later, 193 patients had been admitted by the hospital. 41 were classified as imposters.

In fact, Rosenhan had not sent a single fake patient to the hospital.

You may ask, “So what? How does this help me in my life?”

Simple. When a conflict festers, we of course believe we are right and “they” are wrong. Belief in the “rightness” of our position is the basis for all conflict.

If you have any interest at all in resolving those conflicts, you should at least consider that the gorilla that the other person is insisting is in the room pounding it’s chest just might be there but you are so focused on being right that you just don’t see it. Perhaps you’re not seeing that you really don’t listen, that your point of view is not the truth but only a point of view or that your opinion is not a fact.

So for this year and beyond, in order to improve our relationships, we all must be skeptical of our own certainties about ourselves and other people.