I have been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, Talking to Strangers. The book, like other books from Gladwell, give us an insight into realizing what we thought we fully understood, we actually may not had.
In Talking to Strangers, Gladwell goes over several recent news reports and discusses how they became so. One particular such discussion is around the now-confirmed and sentenced sexual abuse perpetrated by US Gymnastics’ Larry Nassar.
Nassar was the organization’s doctor and for a long time there had been allegations of misconduct. The first such accusation was in the late 90s. It took another 20 years before Nassar was found guilty. So Gladwell raises the question of how a person such as Nassar could have gotten away with it for so long. The facts, as Gladwell explains them, are pretty alarming. Little girls would often complain to people of authority, parents included, about feeling uncomfortable with Nassar when he performed a particular procedure in which he would insert his fingers into their privates and “message” their pelvic floor in order to relieve pain. The procedure, it seems, was real, as real as going to an OB/GYN and getting examined. But Nasser performed the procedure for his benefit.
If you are a parent and you are reading this, you’ll be quick to retort this would never happen to one of your kids. Right? Of course, that is because you are reading this out of context. Your context, as you are reading this, is as an outsider. The parents who had to rationalize this and worse, the kids that had to endure it, were in different context. In their context, they had two options when presented with evidence of Nassar’s misconduct (at the very least); 1) Who would do this? This is an actual procedure. If this was bad in any way, someone would have spoken up. And 2) I have been letting my kid around a sexual predator, what type of a parent am I?
In that context, which do you think most parents chose? Easy, #1. As Gladwell puts it, when doubt creeps in, our brain goes to two ends of the spectrum; most likely scenario and most improbable. In our every-day lives, we experience the former. In general, people are good. We therefore conclude and augment our life-experience, with those experiences. The bad experiences are too few and far between. And while they make it into our toolbox of life-experience, we tend to only pull them out when all else fails. And this is our default to truth, to our truth.
As an example, take how your life has changed throughout the years. When you were young, you did crazy things (at least things and older person would think as being crazy). Things like dancing at a store, or swinging off trees, skipping to school, anything that kids do. Why don’t you do those things now? Yes, part of it may be physical, but a larger part I bet is because of your default to your truth, your life-experiences. As you have grown and matured, life has taught you those actions are childish or inappropriate. Your truth, as related to those actions, is they are not to be done. But to a younger you, or current kid, the truth was different.
When we are faced with questions, we default to our truth. And to make it worse, we often mix up our life-experiences with our self-view of proper behavior. “Would I do that?”. In Talking to Strangers, Gladwell notes two parents that “should have known better“. The father and mother of two gymnasts. After all what father would let his daughter be molested in front of him, right? Well, that’s exactly what happened. Nasser performed the pelvic floor procedure to the father’s daughter, while the father was in the room. The young girl felt uncomfortable enough to bring up to the father on their drive from the visit and what did the father do? He defaulted to his truth. He rationalized it and even encouraged his daughter to return to Nassar several more times. What was the alternative? The alternative, in this father’s mind, was that he had just exposed his daughter to a child molester and that simply was too far fetched. Impossible. Who would do that? The mother Gladwell noted was a doctor herself. Like the other father, she was present during the molestation and to make things worse, she noticed Nassar having an erection. What did she do? Did she confront Nassar and take her daughter out of the room screaming? No. Just like the father, she rationalized it and even felt sorry for him. She said “That’s weird. That’s really weird. Poor guy.”
As people, we are constantly presented with information. Too much information. The only way to deal with this barrage of data is to default to our truth. To default to our life experiences. The alternative is too far-fetched. The alternative is too expensive in terms of mental resources. Most importantly, it requires us to have a different set of experiences than everybody else’s. While we cannot change our experiences, we can be aware of our biased thinking and try to make an effort to think-twice when something seems at odds.
