The theory of the other

Research is not about helping us to develop theories. To the contrary, research is a way of preventing our minds from generating too many theories too quickly. Our brains are just pattern-seeking machines, and they will find patterns where there are none. For example, billions of people on this planet believe that you can catch cold by being cold, which it is simply untrue. But everyone has the experience of catching a draft, and then coming down with a sore throat – we remember it, because our culture reinforces this opinion. However we completely forget hundreds of times when it was just as cold, but no influenza followed. It is the same with premonitions – we all forget those that did not materialize, but remember the one in the life-time that did, by chance. Scientists learn to check their hunches and hypotheses against evidence; in other words, they learned to rain in their own minds, rather than release them.

This works in relationships, too. We develop theories about each other. Each person we know eventually becomes represented in our mind as a set of assumptions about him or her. She is helpless, he is careless, that one is funny, and this one is clever. Once those mental images are formed, they self-reinforce. We tend to forget and suppress facts that undermine the theory, and notice what supports it. Once we have developed a theory of someone, the natural flow of facts will support it.

Sometimes the theory of the other is formed on the basis of one event. For example, someone was late for your first meeting, and it was so memorable that you’re unable to shake the negative impression even if the same person was early 100 other times. The human mind is not designed to deal with statistics; it is incapable of treating different events as identical in some respect.

When the evidence becomes overwhelming, we cannot ignore it any longer, and the mind will revise the theory with what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” However, when we become angry and frustrated about something else, those safety mechanisms stop working. The negative theories tend to become self-sustaining and unmoving. In a group situation, people tend to appoint someone to be the problem, and then reinforce their theories each other. Just like with the flu – repeating the same thing tends to make the observer’s bias stronger. This simple mechanism feeds most of organizational conflicts.

How do we avoid turning each other into theories? It appears to be important to not over-interpret, or to keep our theory-making capacities in check. In qualitative research, one of the first rules is to avoid over-interpreting. We learn to suspend judgment and let more unfiltered evidence to come in. It is very important to recognize that every person is an unfinished story, not reducible to whatever little we know about him or her. Let us celebrate our ignorance, limit our imagination, and forget what we have learned.