There were no scientific examinations done on me, but I am not surprised by some of the things they found in processing the Project data. One point in particular is relevant to the topic of this blog:
The study hypothesized that training in compassion would reduce the intensity of emotions that cause people to pull back from others who are either suffering or doing things that are unappealing. Consistent with this prediction, preliminary analyses show that after viewing scenes of the Iraq war (in which American soldiers bragged about getting psyched up to shoot Iraqis by listening to heavy metal music), followed by images of suffering Iraqis (including children), the retreat group reported significantly less contempt than the control group.Did you catch that? The interesting thing isn't how they reacted to seeing victims -- we'd all expect an improvement in that from compassion training. It's how they responded to the tormentors.
If my own intuition is correct, the idea is that their innate tendency to split the world into good and bad, right and wrong, victim and offender, was suppressed. The situation itself could be seen to be detrimental -- most obviously for the children, but also for the soldiers who are training themselves in sociopathy, thereby setting themselves up for a lifetime of maladjustment or worse. Could the soldiers have taken the "moral high ground" and refused reprehensible orders? Sure, but a tremendous corpus of psychological literature, as well as personal introspection, should make it obvious that taking such a stand in the heat of war is... well... not easy to expect of average male youths of any culture.
Viewed as this more complex scenario, it's once again obvious why compassion isn't something to be reserved for those who we see as downtrodden. Those same victimized children, if raised in the same environment as our offenders, could not be expected to act any differently -- at least not without some sort of specific training.
It is this training I hope to persuade you is crucial to our very humanity.
Look out for posts soon on the Fundamental Attribution Error as well as an invention of mine I call "cheat sheets." This is here as a placeholder to remind me to write about them, as well as a promise so that I don't duck out of doing so.
I think it's very important not to split things into good or bad, and I find this applies often in real life. It happens that someone around me will do something that seems irrational or mean. I am inclined to dislike it and turn away, or even be mean back from wanting to correct the person.
ReplyDeleteFighting that instinct and thinking hard about the event however, more often than not, I find that I can come to additional insights into why the person acted in such a way. It is rarely as simple as "he is mean".
Taking the extra time to really ponder other people's motivations, situations, and ultimately emotions, is something I have learned fairly recently. It's paying off big time for me and others.