We often speak of “getting inside someone else’s head.” When we talk this way, we usually mean that we wish to understand things as others do so that we can grasp what otherwise might seem like utterly incomprehensible behavior. If we could get inside the heads of our boss, our significant other, or that bloviating political candidate on TV then we just might be able to know what they are up to and why.
Source: Frits Ahlefeldt / Wikimedia Commons
Of course, the problem is that we’re all stuck inside our own heads. We therefore can never fully get inside someone else’s experience. Psychologists have long been aware that people are only in touch with their own subjectivity, but nonetheless it is common to assume that if we work hard enough we can overcome this predicament and figure out what’s really going on with other people.
However, the late radical constructivist psychologist Ernst von Glasersfeld said that we can never get outside our own subjective isolation. Why? Because we are cognitively closed systems. As such, information never gets in or out. Rather, the outside world simply triggers reactions inside us, the way a drop in the air temperature might initiate shivering. These internalized reactions certainly help us navigate the world, but that is not the same as having direct knowledge of the world outside our skin.
Further, the ways we construct our internalized understandings are highly dependent on how we are physiologically built. For instance, we have eyes that are sensitive to only certain wavelengths of light; thus, what triggers them to build an internalized visual representation of what we see is limited by the kinds of external stimulation they are capable of responding to. This is why your cat can see things in the dark that you can’t! Cat eyes allow them to build different internalized understandings than human eyes. Neither reproduces the world verbatim.
When looking at the world through a radical constructivist lens, you can never get inside other people’s heads because all you ever really know is what you experience in connection with what is going on around you. So even when you think you’ve gotten inside someone else’s head, you actually haven’t. We’re all forever stuck in our own heads, yet we operate with the belief that we aren’t.
Of course, just because we can’t directly experience what someone else experiences doesn’t mean we can’t meaningfully interact with others. As a case in point, we tend to assume that other people have the same active meaning-making processes that we do. That is, we assume that they (like us) build their own internal understandings. When they act in ways that seem like their internal understandings are the same as ours, we suppose that they understand things just as we do. We don’t ever know for sure, but if they act in ways that fit with our own understandings, then we can coordinate our actions with them based on our assumption that they grasp the world “correctly”--or at least similarly to us!
Trouble starts when others act in ways that violate our predictions about them. Because we feel like we can't get "in their heads," we conclude that they are wrong and even possibly crazy. After all, if they saw things properly or were in their "right minds," then they’d be more in sync with us, wouldn’t they? The error here, obviously, is assuming that our own experiences match the world as it is—and that there are no other ways of meaningfully making sense of things that differ from our own.
In the end, perhaps “getting inside others’ heads” simply means aspiring to generate workable understandings of their particular understandings--despite the impossibility of ever completely fulfilling the task. In so doing, we potentially come to appreciate as best we can others' ways of living while moving away from the tendency to judge what we don't immediately understand.
from Psychology Today - Relationships http://ift.tt/1TXrgLb
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