"KNOW YOUR SELF AND UNDERSTAND THE OTHERS"

How we perceive the world around us and act is influenced by our values, attitudes and believes, societal norms, and our personality. Besides other factors as is our position in the certain situation (are we teacher or student, or manager or technician…), physical a genetic predispositions and so on.

Basically we act based on our interpretation of the world around us (our rational and emotional response) rather than in reaction to the world itself.

If the way we perceive the world around us and our decisions is influenced by factors that we are not aware of, how could we make conscious and responsible decisions? So to understand our selves and others is important as we want to be free about the choices we make so that our decisions are directed towards fulfilling our basic human needs as to have joyful and fulfilling life (for more explanation see Emphatic communication below).

Responsible decision is, as we would define it, a decision that is based on relevant information available (evidence based or information informed decision) and decision that leads to fulfilment of our needs (see below). By decision we (in the context of this Methodology) understand actually any “decision” that is behind that we do something: act, interpret data or respond to a situation in certain way (externally and internally). In this sense the “decision” does not have to be fully or at all rational. As rationality is only one component for our decision making and if we would limit term “decision” only to rational decision making than we would have no decision at the end actually fulfilling such a definition.

Unconscious aspects are also influencing our perception of information and thus directly distorting the way we would collect evidence to support our decisions or understand an issue or topic concerned. In Module 1 we stressed out that we are all prone to manipulation techniques conceded with disinformation and fake-news and that these techniques are effective when we lack awareness of ourselves our values and the social norms we are exposed to.

Perception (from Latin perceptio 'gathering, receiving') is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment.[1]

Our perception can be distorted in many ways. That basically means that “what we see does not have to be what we see”. There are many aspects that influence our perception (our experience, personality, being human, our believes and values and other…).

[1] Definition from Schacter, Daniel (2011). Psychology. Worth Publishers. ISBN 9781429237192 (taken from Wikipedia.org).

In Module 1 we have also seen that different actors have different motivations influenced by the same factors as are influencing our own behavior (we mean principle factors not how are these manifested in reality). To understand these motivations and underling factors will help us to navigate between different opinions and data sources when collecting evidence and making sense of information. For this reason in this Module we will examine factors that influence our (and anyone else’s) approaches to information and decision making and also underline our biases towards the subject matter.

We kindly invite you to allow yourself to openness and will to explore and possibly also to challenge “your own truths”.

…Let´s get inspired…

How we deal with any issue is influenced consciously or unconsciously by many factors based on our predispositions and experience. These factors are forming ones values, believes and attitudes. We also act in a specific environment with certain norms and societal structures.

As there could be countless debates what influences what and what is considered under each term we do not want and need for our purposes go into details and academic debate. We will set basic usable framework and also provide a practical tools that can be used in real communication situations (see below).

Norms are accepted standards or ways of being or doing things shared by members of a social group as standards of behavior. Norm is concrete, specifying certain things that have to be done (or omitted). Norms refer to and are (sometimes seemingly) justified by underlying values. Norms refers to behavior and attitudes which are considered as “normal”.

But it is important to also notice that everyone perceive the norms differently and these perceptions may or may not reflect what most others actually do or expect. And we also have a choice if we will act „accordingly“ to those perceived norms. Norms do not represent some standalone rules how we all behave but are an individually perceived framework in which we act as an individual.

What can be and often is a problematic for communication and understanding is when issues (people, ideas, action etc.) are judged trough lenses of a norm as a means of truth, right and wrong. Without acknowledging that the norm is habitual custom. And as such does not have and apriority “goodness” in it (even we might see it that way). We are not saying that the norms are not important for the society to function. But let be open to assess if the norms we are setting up are really serving us well.

Values can be understand in different way (we can say on different levels). Some (and also generally used) define values as “what we find important in life”, or “what we care about“. This definition might (by our opinion) well serve an organization such as private company which can define its core “values”.  But on the personal level such a definition is quite misleading as it points out more to desires or “artefacts” representing status in society or even objects (I can care about objects). As such we cannot agree that something (mentioned when you browse the internet) as “wealth” or „foundation of a strong marriage“ should be seen as anyone’s value. We would rather call this as desires.

X        Desires are not values As such we cannot agree that something (as often mentioned when you browse the internet) as “wealth” or „foundation of a strong marriage“ should be seen as anyone’s value. We would rather call this a desires.

How to define values then? Lets first ask what is behind the above mentioned “desires”:

·         Behind desire for wealth we could see many different need for different people such as: security, survival, comfort, dignity, freedom and choice, consideration, respect etc.

·         Behind the desire for „foundation of a strong marriage“ we could see many different need for different people such as: emotional safety, stability, security, respect, harmony, reciprocity, support, trust, comfort etc.

We can see that the term “values” can be quite tricky. Basically we can say that something has value for us (it is desirable and wort to invest our effort – time, money… -  to achieve it). Like this we could say that our car has value for us, but this is arguably not what we are looking for here (as we would call this as desire)… We can go little further and for example say that “education has a value for us”. In this case we would also rather look up for the motivations as these might differ person to person (for one it could be means to gain better prospect for job, for other it is for desire to have knowledge).

In this way we would (on its essence) propose to understand values as basic human needs. The purpose is to find the underlying cause or circumstance that makes us truly feeling fulfilled (happy) as human being. In this regard the values (our true needs) could serve as the best guiding principle for our life (for more explanation see the chapter Empathetic communication below).

So usually when we talk about values we refer to something that represents or express the “real” undermining need. As we can say “he most value his family”, or “position in job” etc. The language is used in certain way and that how it is. But to deepen our understanding it is good to understand that these “values” are “just” representing and expressing our needs in the particular societal and cultural context.

Believes is by Cambridge English Dictionary defined as “to think that something is true, correct, or real”. We would add without evidence. This is true meaning of the word “believe”: Believe is something that I do not (or cannot) actually know if it is true or not. Believing is actually formulation and setting up assumptions that cannot be (or are not in principle) subject of further investigation – cannot be further challenged and discussed.

Commonly the word “believe” is also used in a situations like: “I believe this person/expert” or I could even say: “I believe that the sun will rise again tomorrow” (as I cannot be sure or actually prove it because it did not happen yet). But for these circumstances we would rather use a term such as “trust” as we do not actually base this statements just purely based on “believe” without any evidence or experience. I can trust someone because I know him and he already has proved to be reliable or I know that all the knowledge we have about the solar system is giving chance limiting close to 100 % that the sun will rise tomorrow even I cannot prove it yet.

We do not want to be nitpicking about the words and it is probably common/normal to use term “believe” in above situations. But we should understand the real meaning and difference between “believe” (without any evidence or experience) and “trust or judgment” based on some evidence or experience that can support such judgement. Difference is that with “believe” there is no point to ask about robustness of the evidence, because it is just believe. So even we use/hear the term “believe” we should be able to recognize weather it is an opinion or judgement possibly prone to examine the robustness of the evidence or pure believe. 

Attitude is our tendency to evaluate some symbol, object, or aspect of our world in a favorable or unfavorable manner. Attitude may be defined as a feeling or disposition to favor or be against objects, persons, and situations.  It also can be defined as a state of mind or feeling with regard to some matter. But there are many definitions of term attitude and the term attitude is also commonly used relatively loosely for collection of one’s opinions, prejudices, and sentiments,

Important is that we can be consciously aware of our own attitude or the attitude (towards something) might be unconscious, but still, affecting our behaviors.

Motivation the mix of factors as above mentioned values, norms, attitudes, personality (see below) and also our experience and current situation are influencing our motivation to do what we do and how we do it. Motivation is concrete desire to act to fulfill a certain goal or objective. Motivation is concrete manifestation of our personality, values, norms and attitudes in reality. In this sense the motivation is closely connected to our desires to have or achieve something (see above). “I am motivated to do something because I want to ´achieve´* something”. The motivation can be conscious (I am aware what I want to achieve) or unconscious (I do not have established or articulated goal). 

*Achieving something does not have to be material in nature or serving achieving certain goal (achievement). As for example someone is motivated to go running for the pure enjoyment of doing it and not necessarily to win a race or run marathon under 3 hours. But still we can see the motivation is coming from desire to ´achieve´ the pleasure (get in to the state of pleasure or feeling good after the run). So in this case the motivation might even be unconscious.

Habits are also quite important preconditions for our behavior, how we do things. Habits are what we do because we are used to do it. In the sense “we do what we do”. It is something we tent to do regularly. Habits can be quite strong and hard to get rid of. There is lot of motivation books how to change and set the “right” habits to serve you well. On one hand we can see that habits can help us in life. But on the other hand as our goal is to act responsibly (to benefit ourselves) we should also see that habits are actually denying to choose and act from free will. If we do everything based on habits we would be like automatic machine. Let’s ask ourselves if we want to be an automatic machine or human being with a choice to act.

World view could be defined as a comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world especially from a specific standpoint [1] (point of view). It is how we or society perceive, conceptualize and understands the world around us and our place in it. It is connected to our understanding and knowledge, interpretation of phenomena we engage with and the norms and values. It is formed in rather iterative process where it is not possible to say for example if the norms are base for the world view or the world view is a base for setting up the norms. As one is influencing the other in both ways. Based on their world view people tent to make decisions what’s right and wrong, what should be done and what not and make moralistic judgments (see also below Empathetic communication). Specific and especially strong (and unconscious) world view is often times the case for biased perception and decision making.

[1] Taken from: www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/worldview