Did You Know?
by Pamelagrace Beatty
No, You Didn’t.
You just thought you did. Sometimes we assume we know what’s going on in a situation. We think we know someone well enough to interpret their behavior or know how they feel about something and we don’t. What’s detrimental is we act on our assumptions, and the action we take isn’t wrong because we didn’t know what was actually going on. So, the answer is…wait for it…don’t make assumptions. But we do.
There is a helpful communication model called the “Ladder of Inference”. It was developed by Chris Argyris, former professor at Harvard Business School, in 1970. It became better known after being used in Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline. Argyris collaborated as a writer.
This model describes how we observe something, make assumptions about what we observed and then act on those assumptions…usually without checking our assumptions nor getting feedback or additional data before acting. The problem with all that can be, that we are acting on faulty data…our assumptions. Some say the assumptions we make are 100% wrong. I personally have found mine to be 70% wrong but that’s low because we are mostly unconscious of what assumptions we make and how many. My assumptions may be 100% incorrect or close.
Test Them.
An easy test on how often our assumptions are incorrect is to notice when we are making one. Then check with that person and ask if your assumption about something they did or said is right. What you will learn may surprise you. You, 1) will learn how often you are dead wrong and 2) you may learn more about that person than you knew before…usually this always happens.
With today’s tendency to text as a communication process it is even easier to make incorrect assumptions and it appears that people are more inclined to make assumptions and even less inclined to check them. That is why so often the intention of the texts are misunderstood. For example, an ex-boyfriend of mine made what sounded to me like a self-deprecating remark in a text. I sent back an “LOL” and agreed with his label of himself. To this day, I don’t know why he said it to me in a text, but he did NOT mean to be funny nor did he feel that the comment he made about himself was true. He was angry that I not only laughed but agreed with the negative description he sent of himself. It was a difficult one to come back from.
Another example with this same guy is that he wouldn’t take me out to dinner. I assumed he was either too cheap or didn’t like going out. Fortunately, I gently probed and found he was paying a lot of child support and had limited money to spend on entertainment. I also discovered that he felt that when he took a woman out, he should always take her to a very nice place. Although, I love going out to eat in high end restaurants, I also love little hole-in-the-wall restaurants with kitschy atmosphere and good food. And, I totally understood having a spending plan and was willing to negotiate and/or collaborate around that. Checking my assumptions and asking him about what he didn’t like to go, added time to our relationship.
Goes Right By Us.
One of the dicey things about making assumptions is we are frequently unconscious of doing so. We make them in a flash and keep going. And we accept them as truth in that moment. They easily create havoc for our communications with and thoughts of other people. Some of these assumptions show up as stereotypes and prejudices. We may have a picture of how a certain group acts and we paint every member of that group with the same brush. Or we may have had an experience with someone that we didn’t like, and we paint the whole of them with that one experience. This can happen in the workplace and in our private lives. When it happens at the job, the cost can be lack of promotions, lost pay opportunities, lost development opportunities with new projects and more. It happens in schools with children, especially children of color frequently. For the children who are painted with the “Difficult to manage” brush, that can follow them throughout their school experience and ends up serving as a self-fulling prophecy where the children live up to or down to the expectations of the teachers. There was a study done years ago that showed the disinclination of teachers to believe that a child labeled as bad, difficult or not very bright could be anything else. This is known as the Pygmalion Effect. It is still operating in schools and pretty much everywhere else.
Back to the Ladder of Inference.
Here is a breakdown of how it works:
- Observation – information is observed from the real world
- Selecting facts – made based on convictions and prior experiences
- Interpreting facts -Facts are given personal meaning
- Assumptions – made based on meaning you give to your observations
- Conclusions – drawn based on your beliefs
- Beliefs – conclusions based on interpreted facts and past assumptions
- Actions – taken based on prior beliefs and conclusions
Once we go up the Ladder of Inference, it is very hard to come down. How we can mitigate the damage we do by going up, is to ask questions along the way. If we ask before we get to the last rung, #7 where we act, we have the possibility of stopping ourselves from doing something that creates more problems than it solves. Once we act on those assumptions, it is very hard to fix the damage done, assuming that we actually realize we were wrong. That is why looking back and analyzing behavior, especially when the outcome was not good, can help prevent going up that ladder, or making that same mistake again.
One last thing to remember; like the teachers in the Pygmalion Effect, where they refused to change their perceptions of the children they thought were not very bright, even though these children were now showing signs of being smart after all, we sometimes look at data about a situation and deny its relevance as well. “A tiger can’t change its stripes.” We don’t allow for change in a person or the situation. Yet, people can and do change. We all get new information and have different experiences every day. Some of this can cause us to make a different decision about how we are acting or what we believe. If that happens in your world, check your assumptions. This could make a major difference in your relationship with that person or those people. Making assumptions and acting on them causes unnecessary pain, and unfair actions. Checking those assumptions can increase problem solving ability, improve relationships and generate more peace in your life. So, start checking the validity of your assumptions now and let me know what happens!
