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Chapter 1
The foundation
Perception, empathy and managing conflict
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Chapter 1
The foundation
Perception, empathy and managing conflict
Have you ever heard yourself saying āI completely understandā or āI know exactly how you feelā? You know, the type of conversation when someone is confiding in you and you want to show that you are listening and empathise with their situation?
Well, hereās the thing, even if you have found yourself in a similar situation to someone else, you will never know exactly how they feel and you will never completely understand. You canāt possibly, because there is only perception, and each personās reality will always be different from everyone elseās. The complexity of being a human being is quite extraordinary, and each one of us is unique.
This makes it very difficult to understand why people do what they do. And if we donāt understand that, how on earth can we respond appropriately and constructively? Equally, do you know how people perceive you? You think you are assertive, but they think you are a bully. You think you are inspiring, but they think you are boring. Do you keep people awake or do you sedate them?
I have a colleague, Steve Houghton-Burnett, who was fascinated by the power of perception when he was leading major change programmes in corporate organisations and the public sector. He noticed that, regardless of the messages being delivered, it was the perception of the people on the receiving end that would mean the difference between a successful project and a failed one.
This chapter is the foundation for you to become an even more influential person than you are now. If you understand exactly how faulty both our perception and memory truly are, you will be in a much better place to understand others and communicate better. It will also help you notice unconscious signals from others so that you can change your behaviour for better results.
Let us begin by discussing that our personal reality is actually an illusion.
Two women are pregnant with babies due at exactly the same time. They lovingly call their expectant babies Bump and Wriggler. Both foetuses develop taste buds and begin sampling different flavours as they swallow amniotic fluid in the womb. One mother loves eating cooking apples. Bump tastes the sour taste. After a while the mother starts eating chocolate. Bump tastes the sweetness of the chocolate and shudders because he was used to the sour taste of cooking apples. He doesnāt care for the new sweet taste very much. On the other hand, Wrigglerās mother loves chocolate, so Wriggler is used to tasting sweet. Wrigglerās mother tries some of her friendās cooking apple. Wriggler shudders at the sour taste of the cooking apple. Wriggler doesnāt care for this new sour taste very much.
The women share a bowl of olives. Bump and Wriggler react to the salty taste differently because of their experiences so far. Perception is born way before they are. Gradually, while still in the womb, they are introduced to more sensations, layer upon layer, with each new experience being evaluated dependent upon the mix of experiences before. A massively complex pyramid of perceptions has begun.
You may be thinking, āOh no! Bump is going to live a life without chocolate.ā Never fear, nothing is set in stone.
You see, it all begins very early in pregnancy when taste buds start to develop where the tongue will grow. Even in the first trimester, neurons will have connected with these developing taste buds. But in order to taste, the baby needs taste pores, which develop on the surface of the tongue during the second trimester. It is around this time that the baby will be swallowing amniotic fluid and it will be able to taste five basic flavours ā sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami, which is described in Japan as a pleasant savoury taste. Of course, the intensity of the taste will not be as strong as the motherās sense of taste, because she will be using other senses to evaluate full flavours by using smell, texture, the context of eating and drinking and so on.
Therefore, once we are born and growing, all our senses will contribute to the physical manifestation of taste, which is how we develop a more sophisticated palate.
So there is hope for Bump yet, because it is highly likely that his limited taste in food will expand depending on what he becomes exposed to. Nevertheless, you can see how this infinite mathematical equation begins, and it continues throughout our lives. It builds exponentially to a calculation that is way beyond our capabilities to imagine. No wonder our perceptions are unique to only us.
Perception is an individual dynamic.
If you would like to read more about early development of human flavour preferences read the work of Mennella and Beauchamp (1996).
There is more to consider about our perceived reality. Our unique perceptions are encoded in our memory. This in itself creates more ambiguity. For instance, American neuroscientist Christof Koch has shown that what we tend to see is just the gist of a place or event, especially when we are not giving something our full attention (Koch, 2004). To recall that memory, we have to fill in the gaps based on our previous experiences and perceptions. In psychology this is known as scripts and schemas. Clearly this is not a perfect system.
We only see the āgistā and fill in the rest.
An example of this comes from the original research of Herman von Helmholtz, a major contributor to physics, physiology and psychology. He developed a theory of visual perception that proposed that, because of the inadequate information provided by the senses, perception cannot be directly derived from the stimulus input alone: to derive meaning, a constructive process is needed to mediate between our sensory information and our conscious perception of the external world (from our store of learnt information). He hypothesised that in order to construct percepts, one draws on āunconscious inferencesā; for instance, our expectations or experiences tell us that a house has four walls, therefore we see a house even when only one wall is in view (von Helmholtz, cited in Gordon, 1989).
And there is more. To add to the complexities of perception, we may confuse anotherās experience with our own. For instance, children adopt a memory of a sibling as if it were their own. This is not wilful, itās normal.
We confuse othersā experiences with our own.
And there is even more. When we recall an event, we inadvertently leave something out or even add a little more information. Memories of past experiences are known as episodic or autobiographical memories and are susceptible to variation at point of recall because our sense of self, who we are at that moment, is constantly changing. Therefore, recalling a memory is dependent upon our environment at the moment of recall. Again this is not wilfully trying to manipulate the so-called ātruthā, but it does lead to distorted memories.
Each time we recall a memory we change it slightly.
Memory is a vast topic, but these simple observations serve to demonstrate that our new experiences are perceived according to our massive equation of past perceptions and put in the mix of remembered experiences. So our perceptions are rendered as even more unique. We cannot say they are wrong because we have no way of knowing what is right. Reality is purely an individual dynamic.
Memory is not to be relied upon.
Why is this important in business? Itās actually important to everyone, both inside and outside of business life. So often we do not hear or see accurately what someone is trying to communicate, because we get the gist and fill in the gaps according to our own experience and perception so far. This new perception of the convers...
