“Surety brings ruin.” Greek maxim
“When the music changes, so does the dance.” Nigerian proverb
Our contextual mind
Why would some of us hear the word “yanny” and others hear the word “laurel” when listening to the same soundtrack? Why would a team looking to hire the best candidate let things like the day of interviewing or the alphabetical position of a candidate’s name affect their decision?…
Our brain is by evolutionary design highly adaptive and malleable (trippy, you might say). Wired to think in context, the brain is constantly making and remaking judgment calls based on past experience as well as new information coming in. This ability to apply prior knowledge to new circumstances allows us to make better situational decisions, but since our brain is fallible and our experience as well as our access to information have limits, our judgment can sometimes be wrong, landing us in trouble.
For a deep-dive into faulty judgments made by our brains, see Self > Mind Hacking > Cognitive Biases.
Contexts in terms of feeling, perspective, approach, level of problem-solving, knowledge, and time
If context is so influential in our judgment, we have to ask: what is context exactly? Our interpretation of events can actually be affected by a number of things: our present feelings, perspectives, the approaches we choose to achieve goals, the level at which we choose to solve a problem, our knowledge in a particular subject matter, and, ultimately, our core values and purpose (see more in Life > Life Perspectives > Core Values & Motivation). What’s more, these contexts are not static; they change all the time.
Let’s go through these different types of context one by one.
Feeling
When you go grocery shopping, have you ever bought junk food because you are hungry? When you are tired or sick, has your willpower to exercise plummeted while your desire for comfort food and mindless entertainment surged? Have you noticed yourself seeking more supernatural guidance such as fortune-telling during down days? These are examples of how our momentary feelings may affect our decision-making. Actively managing our moods prevents us from being misled by our fickle emotions. For example, I try to make sure that my stomach is full before going grocery shopping. When I have low energy or feeling down, I opt for doing simple or less urgent tasks, which saves me from doing complex or important tasks poorly or succumbing to the temptation of slacking, and allows me to make incremental progress while waiting for better times to come.
Perspective
Shakespeare says in Hamlet: “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Indeed, people with different perspectives evaluate the same situation from different angles based on different concerns. Take a generalization for example: a liberal person might value freedom more than stability while a conservative person might value security over individual rights. Their contrasting value judgments may lead them to prioritize different issues in a society.
Social Enterprise Consultant Isaac Jeffries reminds us that “the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea… When you understand the principles behind conflicting ideas, you can pick and choose different elements and have them work in harmony. [For example, you] don’t have to agree with everything that your preferred political party believes.”
For more about perspectives, see Life > Method: Storytelling and Groups > Group Conflicts.
Approach
Even when people have the exact same priority for a problem, the method we deem useful to solve this problem may differ. For instance, one might choose a more diplomatic approach by working with others, while another might want to use brute force to get others to comply. We will discuss this tension in approaches in Groups > Game Theory and possible solutions in Groups > Collaboration.
Level of problem-solving
Our perspectives and approaches are also informed by how quickly and how deeply we want to solve a problem. If you are hungry but you have very little time for lunch, you might go for a “quick fix”, grabbing whatever is convenient nearby. If you are trying to improve your health in general, on the other hand, you might spend more time figuring out what kind of diet is the healthiest for your specific body type. In advertising, they say that if you want something quick and cheap, you can’t have it good; if you want something quick and good, you can’t have it cheap; and if you want something cheap and good, you can’t have it quick. This demonstrates that there is a trade-off relationship between speed, depth and cost in problem-solving. Furthermore, the higher the level you try to solve a problem, the more abstract the solution would be. Using the same example as before, the answer to grabbing something quick to eat for lunch is very tangible and simple: a sandwich, bento or falafel. The answer to a healthy diet, by comparison, is more abstract and complex: you’d need to learn about nutrition, calories, how the body uses energy, etc.. in order to tailor-make a diet for yourself. The higher level of abstraction you go, the further you are from fixing the problem quickly and simply, but the more fundamentally you’ll potentially solve that problem (see World > Method: Long-Term Systems Thinking). To be an effective problem-solver, we need to get used to traversing different level of problem-solving with others who are solving the same problems at different levels, through various angles and approaches. For more, see Life > Method: Achieving Goals and Groups > Method: Collaboration. To tackle challenges in the 21st century, we need high level problem-solving that eventually will lead to paradigm shifts. See more in World — Rise to Challenges.
Knowledge system
There is no doubt that experience and knowledge elevate our game in decision-making and problem-solving. To illustrate this point, I’d like to share this snarky comment Nicolas Tesla said of his one-time boss and long-time rival Thomas Edison: “If [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … Just a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.” What Tesla meant here was that Edison was very diligent, but lacked effective methodology to find answers to his questions efficiently. This is also the drawback of many self-help click-baits — “10 ways to XXX”, “8 tips to YYY”, “12 rules to ZZZ” — they might be good advice individually, but devoid of the context regarding how these tidbits fit into the whole system of efficiency, health, lifestyle, etc., they are really not that useful in solving specific problems in specific contexts. That’s why when we are taught a subject in school, we are instructed in the subject matter’s background, principles, facts, taxonomy, as well as solutions in particular situations. In order to provide a knowledge system for problem-solving in our time, 21st Century Personhood also attempts to provide a structure around critical 21st-century ideas by grouping them into Self, Life, Groups and World and highlighting the ideas’ inter-connections.
Time
As if feelings, perspectives, approaches, level of problem-solving and knowledge are not enough to complicate matters, all of these also evolve with time. In a TEDx talk ▶️, professional speaker Paul Rulkens shared this story: “In 1942, Albert Einstein was teaching at Oxford University, and one day, he just gave an exam of physics to his senior class of physics students. He was walking on the campus with his assistant, and all of a sudden, the assistant looked at Albert Einstein and said, ‘Dr. Einstein, this exam which you just gave to the senior class of physics students, isn’t that exactly the same exam you gave to exactly the same class one year ago?’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Albert Einstein, ‘it’s exactly the same.’ ‘But Dr. Einstein, how could you possibly do that?’, the assistant said. ‘Well,’ said Einstein, ‘the answers have changed.’ The answers have changed,” Rulkens comments. What is true for 1942 is even more true for today. We live in a world where the questions might be the same, but the answers have changed. In other words, what has got you here, will no longer get you there. And if you want to have results that you’ve never had before, well, you need to start doing things you’ve never done before.”
During the writing of this project, I have made updates to Maslow’s “hierarchy” of needs, Dunbar’s number, the pandemic’s impact, and many more… but I am sure other things will change in time. The key thus is to keep learning, a topic we will cover in the next segment: Self > Method: Iterative Learning.
Context & changes used against you, despite your better self
The tragic version of Einstein’s “the answers have changed” story is the boiling frog fable: to kill a frog with the frog’s cooperation, all one has to do is to put it in lukewarm water and slowly increase the temperature — the frog would find the water agreeable to begin with and not detect danger despite being slowly cooked to death.
While the boiling frog story teaches us that being unaware of our environment can get us killed, in extreme cases, changing contexts can manipulate us into hurting others. The Stanford prison experiment might be the most famous example to illustrate this point, but its methodology has been called into question. Let’s instead examine a similar Milgram experiment. Conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, the experiment “measured the willingness of study participants… to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a ‘learner’. These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real. The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly.” The experimenter gradually changes the context bit by bit, from helping someone learn with a little jolt to nearly killing a “learner” at the experimenter’s bidding. However, the subjects have already bought into the role and many fail to pull out although they are effectively committing a crime.
While the Milgram experiment was designed to show obedience to authority (more in Groups > Group Conflicts > Moral Foundations and Groups > Group Conflicts > Bullying), it also demonstrates how given the right context, people can go against their own principles and do things that they would normally consider unconscionable. A few notable social contexts made this experiment a “success”: first, “[o]bedience was the highest when the person giving the orders was nearby and was perceived as an authority figure, especially when they are from a prestigious institution.” Compliance is also high when the victim is depersonalized or placed in a distance, or if the experiment subjects don’t see anyone else disobeying.
You may say: I’d never be the person who tortures other people, no matter what situation I find myself in. Well, perhaps so, but you may not be so confident after you factor in our empathy gap, which shows that we are bad at estimating our judgment and reaction to situations until we are experiencing them. As journalist Shankar Vedantam puts it, “the people we are now can be very different from the people we might become”, to the point that we can become “strangers to ourselves”. For more about empathy gap, see Self > Mind Hacking > Cognitive Biases.
Using America’s Abu Ghraib trials as an example, psychologist Philip Zimbardo reflects on the origins of evil ▶️: “The power is in the system. The system creates the situation that corrupts the individuals, and the system is the legal, political, economic, cultural background… If you want to change a person, change the situation. And to change it, you’ve got to know where the power is, in the system… it’s a dynamic interplay. What do the people bring into the situation? What does the situation bring out of them? And what is the system that creates and maintains that situation?”
This explains how something as horrific as Holocaust becomes a reality: a fucked-up interplay of system, situation, and people.
Q&A
Q: Are you proposing moral relativism?
A: Actually, quite the opposite. No matter how context matters and things change, we should be careful not to betray our own values and purpose. That was how the Milgram experiment went wrong — the subjects followed changing contexts and ignored their own morals. See more in Life > Motivations, Values & Purpose.
Q: How may we apply “Context Matters & Things Change” to the divisive, democracy-destroying politics of our time?
A: One of the biggest problems of our time is that as individuals we assume that when we are right (in some contexts), others with different views must be wrong. Progressives think conservatives are bigots and conservatives regard progressives immoral. Those who feel safe assume the hawkish are warmongers and those who don’t feel safe consider those who do are meek pacifists. The fact is, no one has the whole truth. The solution is not binary, yes or no, true or false, my side or your side. Therefore, we should not only strive to be factual but also be whole using systems thinking. We will discuss how in Groups > Method: Collaboration > Group Deliberation, World > 21st Century Challenges > Identity-based Infighting and World > D3: Deliberative Direct Democracy.
Call to action
To avoid creating tragedy after the answer has changed or being used by bullies in changing contexts, it is crucial to first be aware of the contexts we are operating in, including feelings, perspectives, approaches, levels of problem-solving and time, then question and test our judgment, before we act (more in Self > Method: Iterative Learning). We also need to have solid, foundational knowledge about ourselves (see Self > Human Basic, Body Hacking, and Mind Hacking), our biases (see Self > Mind Hacking > Cognitive Biases), common life strategies (Life), how we behave in groups (Groups), and what to do when we face challenges or encounter conflicts (World). — Because in the wrong conditions, we are all capable of becoming evil.
As Jay-Z and Beyoncé rap in ’03 Bonnie and Clyde: “She do anything necessary for him, and I do anything necessary for her. So don’t let the necessary occur, yep!”
Do you have any suggestions, doubts, hypothesis or experience for this topic? Please comment below 👇!
