Anthropomorphism

And then suddenly my mood improves. A few small things on the outside certainly helped (e.g. I got back my grades for my first two courses at uni and both are markedly better than expected, with both being above the cum laude threshold), but they can only be seen as catalysts. All in all, it is the inside that has changed; as it always seems to be. My downward moods (I hesitate to use the word depression) seem to truly be chemical imbalances. Often only the smallest things have turned against me when suddenly I end up feeling truly despondent.

That’s the thing I’m discovering more and more as I get into the Social Psychology literature, despite our beliefs that we are logical, rational, straight thinking, internally consistent and honest with ourselves the truth of the matter is that we’re none of those things. In fact, it is quite spectacular that we manage to function as we do at all. The more I learn, the more amazed I am that society actually works and stunned that we’re not more surprised (or interested) at how it actually does just seem to tick along.

But that’s the anthropomorphism in us; our inability to see beyond our own humanity and our belief that since we work this way, well obviously everything must work this way. Of course this is just an absolutely huge (and incorrect) assumption, but since 99.9% of us engage in it, we’re never really confronted with this assumption. In fact, it is incredibly difficult for us not to engage in this activity. It’s a bit like trying to imagining the world in five dimensions. We’re so used to four that we just can’t seem to shift our perception and that while M theory (one of the more promising theories of ‘everything’ in physics; a derivative of string theory) doesn’t just require five dimensions but somewhere in the order of 13.

But let’s get a bit closer to earth. What the hell am I talking about? Well, let me give you an example. In 1990 a Psychologist called Elizabeth Newton did an interesting experiment in which she got two people together and asked one to tap (on a table top) a popular song to the other person; but first she asked the tapper to predict how likely it was that the other person would guess the song the tapper was going to tap. The tapper’s, on average, thought it was about 50% likely that the other person would get the song they were going to tap out. In truth, the chance turned out to be around 3%. Yes, that’s right, not 30%, but 3%. One in 30 songs was correctly recognised, when the tapper believed about one in two songs would be correctly recognised. It gets even worse, when the listener was made aware of what song the other person was going to tap out and then was asked, afterwards, how much chance an uninformed listener would have of correctly guessing the song they also thought it would be about 50%

In other words, we are completely inept at ignoring what we already know. We reason from our own perspective and find it neigh on impossible to do otherwise. We are human and it colours our perspective, reasoning and belief system in every possible way.

And most of us don’t even know it.