Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina Page B

hypothesized that perceptual asymmetry lay at the heart of most conflicts. They further suggested that bridging this asymmetry would assist in most conflict resolutions. They were right. Their key observation was this: People view their own behaviors as originating from amendable, situational constraints, but they view other people’s behaviors as originating from inherent, immutable personality traits. The classic example is the job candidate who arrives late for an interview. The candidate ascribes his tardiness to situations beyond his control (being caught in traffic). The interviewer ascribes his tardiness to personal irresponsibility (not taking traffic into account). One invokes a situational constraint to explain being late. The other invokes an insult.
    Nisbett and colleagues have been cataloguing these asymmetries for decades. Nisbett found that people tend to have inflated views
of themselves and their futures. They think they’re more likely than they actually are to become wealthy, have a brighter occupational future, and are somehow less likely to contract infectious diseases (one reason illnesses like cancer can be so emotionally devastating is that people never think it will happen to them, only to the “other guy”). People overestimate how much they can learn about others from short encounters. When fighting, people believe they are perfectly unbiased, informed, and objective, while simultaneously thinking their opponents are hopelessly prejudiced, clueless, and subjective.
    These asymmetries originate from a phenomenon well established in the cognitive neurosciences. Any human behavior has many moving parts, roughly divisible into background and foreground elements. Background components involve our evolutionary history, genetic makeup, and fetal environment. Foreground components involve acute hormones, prior experiences, and immediate environmental triggers. Alone in our skulls, we have privileged access to both sets of components, providing detailed knowledge of our psychological interiors, motivations, and intentions. Formally called introspection, we know what we intend to mean or to communicate on a minute-to-minute basis. The problem is, nobody else does. Other people can’t read our minds. The only information others have about our interior states and our motives is what our words say and how our faces and bodies appear. This is formally called extrospection.
    We are amazingly blind about the limits of extrospective information. We know when our actions fail to match our inner thoughts and feelings, but we sometimes forget that this knowledge is not available to others. The disparity can leave us bewildered, surprised at how we come across to other people. As poet Robert Burns wrote, “Oh that God the gift would give us / to see ourselves as others see us.”
    Introspective knowledge clashing with extrospective information is the Big Bang of most human conflicts. It has been directly observed between people trying to give directions to a lost soul and between
warring nations trying to negotiate a peace agreement. It forms the basis of most breakdowns in communication, including conflicts in marriage.
Would you win an empathy contest?
    If asymmetry lies at the heart of most struggles, it follows that more symmetry would produce less hostility. Hard to believe that a 4-year-old boy in a cheesy empathy contest could illustrate this insight to be essentially correct. But he did. The late author Leo Buscaglia tells of being asked to judge a contest to find the most caring child. The boy who won related a story about his elderly next-door neighbor.
    The man had just lost his wife of many decades. The 4-year-old heard him sobbing in his backyard and decided to investigate. Crawling onto the neighbor’s lap, the boy just sat there while the man grieved. It was strangely comforting to the gentleman. The boy’s mom later asked her son what he had said to the neighbor. “Nothing, the little guy said.