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koganbotPiece in the New York Times about smiling ("More to a Smile Than Lips and Teeth" by Carl Zimmer), with this potent passage:
Dr. Niedenthal herself is now testing the predictions of the model with her colleagues. In one study, she and her colleagues are testing the idea that mimicry lets people recognize authentic smiles. They showed pictures of smiling people to a group of students. Some of the smiles were genuine and others were fake. The students could readily tell the difference between them.
Then Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues asked the students to place a pencil between their lips. This simple action engaged muscles that could otherwise produce a smile. Unable to mimic the faces they saw, the students had a much harder time telling which smiles were real and which were fake.
The scientists then ran a variation on the experiment on another group of students. They showed the same faces to the second group, but had them imagine the smiling faces belonged to salesclerks in a shoe store. In some cases the salesclerks had just sold the students a pair of shoes — in which they might well have a genuine smile of satisfaction. In other trials, they imagined that the salesclerks were trying to sell them a pair of shoes — in which case they might be trying to woo the customer with a fake smile.
In reality, the scientists use a combination of real and fake smiles for both groups of salesclerks. When the students were free to mimic the smiles, their judgments were not affected by what the salesclerk was doing.
But if the students put a pencil in their mouth, they could no longer rely on their mimicry. Instead, they tended to believe that the salesclerks who were trying to sell them shoes were faking their smiles — even when their smiles were genuine. Likewise, they tended to say that the salesclerks who had finished the sale were smiling for real, even when they weren't. In other words, they were forced to rely on the circumstances of the smile, rather than the smile itself.
So, to extend this tentative insight about smiling way way way beyond what's justifiable or known, I wonder how much of understanding requires the ability to mimic what you're trying to understand. I don't want to bring in the Dunning–Kruger Effect, since the Dunning–Kruger hypothesis generally leads to snottiness among those who cite it - except that what I find wrong with arguments that try to extend Dunning–Kruger might be instructive. One common extension of Dunning–Kruger is to say that if people are incompetent in some area then they are not likely to have the competence to even know that they're incompetent in that area. What's wrong with this extension is that I can certainly know that I'm incapable of accurately throwing a football 40-yards downfield, even though I can't throw a 40-yard pass accurately and have never even tried. Also, I understand that I don't understand very well what the interior linemen are doing on many football plays, especially running plays. I'd point out that I do know what throwing a pass is, and have a sense of what it would be like to diagram a simple play, and this knowledge provides grounds for assessing my further inability and lack of knowledge.*
But let's say, as a tentatively useful hypothesis, that understanding someone involves the ability to mimic in at least a rudimentary way what that person is doing (and understanding that you've yet to fully understand something can be a stage on the way to understanding):
--This doesn't mean you have to play an instrument or write songs to write well about music. Most music criticism isn't about how to write or play music, it's about how to use music yourself. You don't have to design, build, or repair cars in order to drive them. But driving is a skill itself.
--You can know what it's like for a girl, or a paraplegic, or a redneck, or someone else who you may never be. You can understand by analogy to things you do know, and by imagination and thought experiments etc. And by asking.
--The tentative insight I want here is that, in order to follow an argument, make sense of a reaction, and so forth, I need to be able to reconstruct the argument on my own, as it were, and to correctly imagine steps that would lead to a particular reaction. I think in the normal course people do this automatically and subconsciously and do it right. But also, when people get it wrong, a lot of them don't know how to recover, and many don't know that they've got it wrong. The pencil's between their lips, and they don't realize that this limits their perception.
--I've long been unhappy that rock critics don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. A big hunk of the breakdown is this right here, an inability to take in (to reconstruct) what the other person is saying. I wonder if reconstructing - recovering from misreadings - can itself be a skill that can be modeled and, in effect, internalized, so that one "naturally" starts to reconstruct arguments one has never heard before. Like mimicking facial expressions one has never previously seen.
--It also would be good to know what puts the pencil between someone's lips, what blocks the ability to mimic and reconstruct in some circumstances - and to know how to dislodge the pencil.
*Nonetheless, for all I know I may overestimate may ability to throw passes or to understand at all what's going on with interior linemen (which is what Dunning–Kruger would predict), but so what?
Dr. Niedenthal herself is now testing the predictions of the model with her colleagues. In one study, she and her colleagues are testing the idea that mimicry lets people recognize authentic smiles. They showed pictures of smiling people to a group of students. Some of the smiles were genuine and others were fake. The students could readily tell the difference between them.
Then Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues asked the students to place a pencil between their lips. This simple action engaged muscles that could otherwise produce a smile. Unable to mimic the faces they saw, the students had a much harder time telling which smiles were real and which were fake.
The scientists then ran a variation on the experiment on another group of students. They showed the same faces to the second group, but had them imagine the smiling faces belonged to salesclerks in a shoe store. In some cases the salesclerks had just sold the students a pair of shoes — in which they might well have a genuine smile of satisfaction. In other trials, they imagined that the salesclerks were trying to sell them a pair of shoes — in which case they might be trying to woo the customer with a fake smile.
In reality, the scientists use a combination of real and fake smiles for both groups of salesclerks. When the students were free to mimic the smiles, their judgments were not affected by what the salesclerk was doing.
But if the students put a pencil in their mouth, they could no longer rely on their mimicry. Instead, they tended to believe that the salesclerks who were trying to sell them shoes were faking their smiles — even when their smiles were genuine. Likewise, they tended to say that the salesclerks who had finished the sale were smiling for real, even when they weren't. In other words, they were forced to rely on the circumstances of the smile, rather than the smile itself.
So, to extend this tentative insight about smiling way way way beyond what's justifiable or known, I wonder how much of understanding requires the ability to mimic what you're trying to understand. I don't want to bring in the Dunning–Kruger Effect, since the Dunning–Kruger hypothesis generally leads to snottiness among those who cite it - except that what I find wrong with arguments that try to extend Dunning–Kruger might be instructive. One common extension of Dunning–Kruger is to say that if people are incompetent in some area then they are not likely to have the competence to even know that they're incompetent in that area. What's wrong with this extension is that I can certainly know that I'm incapable of accurately throwing a football 40-yards downfield, even though I can't throw a 40-yard pass accurately and have never even tried. Also, I understand that I don't understand very well what the interior linemen are doing on many football plays, especially running plays. I'd point out that I do know what throwing a pass is, and have a sense of what it would be like to diagram a simple play, and this knowledge provides grounds for assessing my further inability and lack of knowledge.*
But let's say, as a tentatively useful hypothesis, that understanding someone involves the ability to mimic in at least a rudimentary way what that person is doing (and understanding that you've yet to fully understand something can be a stage on the way to understanding):
--This doesn't mean you have to play an instrument or write songs to write well about music. Most music criticism isn't about how to write or play music, it's about how to use music yourself. You don't have to design, build, or repair cars in order to drive them. But driving is a skill itself.
--You can know what it's like for a girl, or a paraplegic, or a redneck, or someone else who you may never be. You can understand by analogy to things you do know, and by imagination and thought experiments etc. And by asking.
--The tentative insight I want here is that, in order to follow an argument, make sense of a reaction, and so forth, I need to be able to reconstruct the argument on my own, as it were, and to correctly imagine steps that would lead to a particular reaction. I think in the normal course people do this automatically and subconsciously and do it right. But also, when people get it wrong, a lot of them don't know how to recover, and many don't know that they've got it wrong. The pencil's between their lips, and they don't realize that this limits their perception.
--I've long been unhappy that rock critics don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. A big hunk of the breakdown is this right here, an inability to take in (to reconstruct) what the other person is saying. I wonder if reconstructing - recovering from misreadings - can itself be a skill that can be modeled and, in effect, internalized, so that one "naturally" starts to reconstruct arguments one has never heard before. Like mimicking facial expressions one has never previously seen.
--It also would be good to know what puts the pencil between someone's lips, what blocks the ability to mimic and reconstruct in some circumstances - and to know how to dislodge the pencil.
*Nonetheless, for all I know I may overestimate may ability to throw passes or to understand at all what's going on with interior linemen (which is what Dunning–Kruger would predict), but so what?
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Date: 2011-01-26 11:47 pm (UTC)There may be some overlap between the physical blocking of unconscious mimicry and something like a "poor model" for conscious mimicry. Teachers who don't model activities and thought processes well aren't doing their students any favors. But I also imagine that the kind of very conscious training -- in both intellectual discourse and physical tasks -- required for both of your other examples (which really are a combination of reading comprehension and thoughtful abstraction on the one hand and coordination and muscle training on the other) are categorically different from the unconscious ways we "just know" when a smile is fake. Being a good thinker and good conversationalist -- like being a good writer -- requires good models and lots of practice. It isn't just something that you can do reasonably well until someone sticks a pencil in your mouth; though if there are elements of intellectual conversations that are unconscious it would be interesting to know what they are and what might improve them.
(To take a stab at this -- I would say one thing that you should consider as an intellectual model yourself is that the more information you present to someone in one go, the less easy it is for others to take that information and do something with it. I think the unconscious feeling of being overwhelmed with text, regardless of its merit, can be a pencil in the mouth. But this is the answer to a different question, which is "how can Frank model intellectual conversations better for people who don't really know how to begin in one." I'm not sure if that's really the question you're asking here, though it's a question that interests me. This is different from "how can the people who already COULD sustain an intellectual conversation be better drawn into a long-term one.")
no subject
Date: 2011-01-26 11:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-27 06:15 am (UTC)the post -- but what I mean is it's a very specific part of a lesson that *precedes* students doing it on their own. This us also sometimes referred to as "scaffolding" though I think that term is used in too many different ways.