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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: 2011-01-27 04:03 am (UTC)I'm not sure that people tend to do this correctly when it comes to finding a particular argument in a complex text. The communication breakdown potential is high online (and more generally in what I'd call "conscious correspondence, which might include fanzines or emailing or writing letters) because it's an awkward combination of high-level reading comprehension and conversational back-and-forth. It's hard to both fully comprehend and also get the basic gist of a complex text (a music review or an essay, say) in the way that you can get the "gist" of what someone is asking you to respond intuitively to it (I don't need my wife to ask me directly to do the dishes -- she could say "I need to wash the lettuce" and I'd get the point intuitively).
I find that I write a precis easily because boiling text down into a series of arguments is something I do well when I'm paying attention (my own weakness is in skimming things over to find points that I want to validate, ignoring the bulk of a text for my pet sentence, as I may be doing in this very post!). But I've noticed in classes in which students need to summarize that even relatively readable pieces -- New York Times articles, say -- don't survive this process very well. Students are in fact much more likely to evaluate and make abstractions from the simplest of texts, fundamentally missing the point of summarizing. So they completely miss the basic reading comprehension part for a variety of reasons.
This isn't something that would happen in the course of normal conversation, even about a particular point in the article. Once that point has been boiled down to a more conversational (simpler) question, there might be a fruitful conversation about an idea. But ask the students to summarize that idea and it's much harder for them. In online communication we're constantly doing both -- summarizing and evaluating -- and I think that the former is almost always the source of dead ends.
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Date: 2011-01-27 04:05 am (UTC)