Matthew Richter posts daily comments in LinkedIn—well, almost daily. You can follow him and join the conversation by going to http://linkedin.com/in/matthew-richter-0738b84.
For the benefit of our readers, we decide to compile and reprint some of his provocative pieces from the past. Let us know what you think.
This article is about common sense… or the non-common sense of common sense.
Common Sense, Bachelors, and Context
Context has a huge effect on what we consider to be common sense. In fact, context plays such a role on our understanding of what’s around us, we often cannot pull away the layers. We just assume that what is common to us is common for all. A highly troubling factor as we consider BIAS and DISCRIMINATION.
For example, take this thought experiment posed by Terry Winograd, a Stanford computer science professor, and then illustrated so well by Steven Pinker in his book How the Mind Works.
Before reading any further, however, do you know what a bachelor is? Assuming yes, what is the definition? Before going any further, stop and think of it.
Did you stop? Did you do it? Good.
Would you agree that the common definition of a bachelor is an adult human male who has never been married? I hope so. Some might qualify and say simply not married, but for the sake of discussion, let’s include the caveat “never married,” as well. And, I know… few people these days would talk in terms of bachelors (with the exception of the reality TV show), but this thought experiment was first developed in the 1970s. So, go with it.
Anyway, a friend asks you to invite a bunch of bachelors to her upcoming party. So, using our definition as filtering criteria, which of the following are indeed bachelors? And, which of the following would meet the implied request of your friend? Remember... 1970s! The list is exactly as Winograd wrote it back then.
“Arthur has been living happily with Alice for the last five years. They have a two-year-old daughter and have never officially married.
“Bruce was going to be drafted, so he arranged with his friend Barbara to have a justice of the peace marry them so he would be exempt. They have never lived together. He dates a number of women, and plans to have the marriage annulled as soon as he finds someone he wants to marry.
“Charlie is 17 years old. He lives at home with his parents and is in high school.
”David is 17 years old. He left home at 13, started a small business, and is now a successful young entrepreneur leading a playboy’s lifestyle in his penthouse apartment.
“Eli and Edgar are homosexual lovers who have been living together for many years.
”Faisal is allowed by the law of his native Abu Dhabi to have three wives. He currently has two and is interested in meeting another potential fiancée.
“Father Gregory is the bishop of the Catholic cathedral at Groton upon Thames.”**
Before presenting this thought experiment to you, I asked whether you understood what a bachelor is, and I am sure you said yes pretty quickly. You consciously, or unconsciously, assumed the concept of bachelor as a common sense construct. But, if you used the common definition, and I didn’t give you a context such as a party for “bachelors,” you would struggle to decide who to invite. Strictly using the definition alone points to several “bachelors” that would not meet the implicit request of your friend. Still, a couple defined “non-bachelors” do. The Oxford English Dictionary does indeed state that a bachelor is, “A man who is not and has never been married.” That’s it. In order to make make this decision, you need to have more information— contextual information. And, because you do implicitly understand the cultural meanings inherent in your friend’s request, you actually move forward and determine who to invite.
Just like a computer reading code. This was exactly what Winograd was demonstrating. A computer can only make distinctions between concepts and categories of concepts when given a very specific definition. Without enough details, the computer can’t do it. Even computers that learn do so by increasing the number of contexts that can help them qualify what something means struggle to categorize concepts properly without context setting. Your brain needs and does the same thing. You need context in order to make sense of an idea. There is nothing common about what a bachelor is until you have boundaries put around its meaning. The boundaries include, but are not exclusively, cultural, semantic, linguistic, event-based, and more. Definitions, therefore, are starting points, but you must have a setting for them to make that meaning. This is something we rarely consider— especially when we engage others and assume our meaning for a concept is the same for the person across the table. But, their context may be, and often is, different.
The internal rubric you used to categorize the different bachelors listed above can be construed as “common sense.” A “common sense” derived from your specific cultural perspectives and your specific, individual context. How your senses are often really your biases and not so common sense after all. Many biases happen because our context yields one set of assumptions that don’t take into account others. Some of these contextual assumptions drive us toward bigotry and discrimination, misunderstandings and wrong conclusions, and bad decisions and oops moments. For example, for hundreds and hundreds of years, common sense told us the earth was flat, or that the sun revolved around us, women are not equal to men professionally, or that the people once enslaved are still lesser than us today. Today, we have internalized very sticky biases that stem from potentially a millennia of cultural norms. And, more troubling, those cultural norms differ from group to group- causing a myriad of possible misinterpretations and misunderstanding to occur. And, cultural norms are a part of just one contextual set that influences how we make meaning.
On a more practical, day-to-day level, here is how these misunderstanding happened to me. Many months ago I gave a workshop on leadership in France. I used French historical examples to support my premises and argued against some of the negative consequences of capitalism. I was pretty sure I fit in from a geo-political thought position with the people in the room. Nope. Both them, and me, viewed each other from the economic and political frameworks we were born into- even though through formal and informal education we were very knowledgeable about the different paradigms. Language was not an issue, but context and culture led nonetheless to different conclusions and interpretations about what we were all saying. And, more importantly, we were only aware of probably half those differences that came up during the day. Meaning, there were certainly cultural differences, but there were also tons of individual differences between each and every one of us. My strongly American economic paradigms— even left leaning, were still substantially different from the class’ French perspectives. And, my views and their views would be respectively different from our fellow countrymen, as well.
So, how do we minimize the effects of context and culture on our communication with each other? Or our definitions of key concepts as we interact? These may seem banal and trite, but they work...
Know that misunderstanding is more likely to occur than not. Just knowing miscomprehensions can occur will lead you to act to mitigate them.
Ask questions that colors in the picture. Don’t just assume the words are enough. Clarify and confirm. (See— I told you this was simple.)
When the outcomes are potentially significant, hypothesize what they could be and see if the other person is ok with that. In other words, pull the string and dig deeper.
It is essential we ask how our current situations and contexts form our understanding of even the most basic of ideas. Otherwise, we are so likely to have the wrong bachelors show up to the party. 😁😁
** T. Winograd, “Towards a Procedural Understanding of Semantics.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 117-118 (1976), pp. 260-303, at pop. 276f.